Proactive: Hello, I'm joined by Robin Abeyesinhe. He's managing director of TCAT, a subsidiary of One Media iP Group PLC (AIM:OMIP). Robin, you've announced an extension to the free trial period of your TCAT Protect app. So a 14-day free trial, followed by six months of free access to the Bronze plan. Remind us what the TCAT Protect app does, please.
Robin Abeyesinhe: Yes, it's a tool for effectively managing and seeing where your content is available online around the world, and more importantly, perhaps to see whether there's any potentially infringing content that's out there. And you can drill down and take a look at what those potentially infringing tracks are, where they're being played, and if there's a need for you to take action.
Proactive: So you've extended a 14-day free trial and also access to the Bronze plan. Explain what the Bronze plan offers.
Robin Abeyesinhe: As you can imagine, TCAT is a small business, and we could have the most brilliant piece of software product that's out there in the world. And by the way, you know, we do believe we have a brilliant piece of software, but no one knows about it and it becomes much harder to monetize. So we've got two initiatives running in parallel. The first is a social media and a PR campaign, which is aimed at getting the product out there to the wider market because arguably the biggest players in the market know about the product, but not necessarily the wider market, such as solo artist bands and indie labels and so forth. So we want to get the message out there, and drive traffic to the website.
And then at that stage, the second initiative kicks in, which is what we've launched today, which is increasing our seven-day trial to 14 days. So it's on the Gold plan, which effectively means that you've got all the functionality that's available on the website, and you can put up two tracks of music and see what that brings up. Now, at the end of the 14 days, and obviously, it's really important to say people are very reluctant to put their credit card information in. And we don't ask for any credit card information at this stage. It is genuinely free. On day 15, we switch that plan over to a Bronze plan. Yes, it's got slightly less functionality, but there is an awful lot of information that's still available for you. But you also have the added benefit of being able to add another eight tracks so you can have ten tracks of music up there, and you can take a view on hopefully. And that's for another six months. So you've got plenty of time, and hopefully, you will then want to move up to the Silver and Gold plans in due course.
Proactive: Robin, can you expand on your social media strategy and PR campaign and how you're going about engaging with musicians and record labels?
Robin Abeyesinhe: This is a really important point for us, Steven, because as I said, we are not that well known. So we're at the start of the social media campaign. We have engaged an agency who are going to do the traditional things that social media planners do. And we've also got the traditional PR, so it is at the early stages. It is in development, and no doubt it will change as time goes on and we will react. You know, we can be quite quick to react to changing circumstances.
Proactive: And we've discussed this before, that this is a unique product. So you obviously will have a first mover advantage in the space. Can you just expand a little bit on how it does actually go about protecting those music rights?
Robin Abeyesinhe: Well, we can only, based on the information that you, the subscriber, has given us, we can fingerprint your rights that you put into the system within 24 to 48 hours. We then report back to you on the matches that we find across all the legitimate DSPs around the world by territory as to where your track is available. And we use a risk score, as we mentioned before, from low, medium to high, to enable you to take a look at the potentially infringing tracks. Unfortunately, we don't have access to your licensing database, so we cannot definitively tell you whether it's an infringing track, but we can give you a lot of information that will enable you to fit the final piece into that jigsaw and decide whether you want to issue a takedown notice. And if you don't know how to do that, as we said earlier, the website gives you a lot of information about how to physically go about doing that.
Proactive: And last time you spoke, Robin, you said that the market is valued at over $30 billion, and that a third of that content is being exploited illegally. So this is a step in the right direction.
Robin Abeyesinhe: We believe so, definitely. But we need people to come in and try the product and see the benefits of using TCAT Protect.