ASX:IOV - Episode 4 - What if Series - ION & The Premier League

What If Series - Episode 4

ION Video & The English Premier League

We have received a significant number of questions from shareholders about how ION's patents work in practice, and how they apply to the kinds of organisations we are in discussions with.

We want to address those questions directly. As we have indicated in previous announcements, ION is currently engaged in preliminary discussions with a number of organisations. We will continue to provide updates on those discussions in accordance with our ASX continuous disclosure obligations as material developments occur.

In Episode 4 of our What If? series, we illustrate in detail how ION's patented infrastructure would apply if the two companies were to work together.

These use cases are prepared by ION's commercial team based on ION's own internal modelling and analysis. They are indicative in nature and intended to illustrate the potential application of our technology. They do not represent any current or agreed commercial arrangement.

Episode 4 is The English Premier League.

Why The Premier League

The English Premier League is the most watched, most commercially valuable football league in the world. It generates over 1.5 million hours of raw match, training and ancillary footage every season across 20 clubs, 380 matches and hundreds of global broadcast feeds. It distributes content across 212 broadcast territories and produces over 500 highlight packages every matchday.

Today, virtually all of that footage is locked inside static rendered files, duplicated, siloed and inaccessible to the intelligent systems that could unlock its full value. Every highlight reel requires a render. Every territory requires a new file. Every format variant multiplies the cost.

ION Video's Virtual Video infrastructure transforms this paradigm. By virtualising video at the atomic level of the media stream, making every frame addressable and every sample programmable, ION converts the Premier League's vast content library from a storage liability into a programmable asset.

The Core Problem ION Solves

Video experiences become instructions rather than files. ION assembles media dynamically through reference mapping, not rendering. Content never leaves the rights holder's infrastructure. Only instructions travel.

ION removes the constraint that has governed video distribution for over 50 years. Every personalised experience requires a brand new file. Every new file multiplies storage, compute and delivery cost. At the Premier League's scale, across 212 territories and 380 matches per season, that multiplication defines the limit of what is commercially viable.

ION removes that constraint entirely.

How ION Works, Three Steps

Step 1: Virtualisation. ION reads a rendered video file and produces a lightweight Virtual Video File, a reference map containing the precise internal structure of every moment at the sample level. The master media asset stays in place. What moves is the reference map, not the content.
Step 2: AI Identifies What Matters. An AI system identifies which moments are relevant for a given viewer, advertiser or context. ION provides the structured data layer these systems need to operate precisely at the moment level.
Step 3: ION Assembles and Delivers. ION assembles the identified moments as a virtual programme unique to each viewer and delivers it in real time. No new file is created. No rendering takes place. If one million fans each want a different highlight reel from the same matchday, ION produces one million unique virtual assemblies from a single source, without rendering, without duplication, without lag.

Watch Finbar explain how ION's technology works and why it matters for the future of AI-driven video content.

The Five Use Cases

Use Case 1: Fan Engagement, Prompt-to-Play

Every Premier League fan has experienced this moment: a stunning goal is scored, and within seconds millions of people are searching for it. But today's infrastructure forces them through a painful chain of social media clips that get taken down, highlight packages that won't appear for hours, or subscription paywalls guarding static files never designed to respond to real-time demand.

When a fan says "Show me every Salah goal from outside the box this season," there is no system on earth that can answer with instant, legitimate, licensable video. ION's Virtual Video architecture eliminates this gap. Every frame in the Premier League's content library is atomically addressable and semantically indexed. An AI agent receives a natural language prompt and resolves it to a set of frame-level references in milliseconds, without rendering a single new file. The fan receives seamless, broadcast-quality playback within seconds. No new file was created. No editor was involved. No content left the server.

Key value drivers:

Transforms passive fans into active participants who explore the archive on their own terms.
Creates an entirely new content surface, personalised, on-demand and infinite in variation, without any additional production cost.
Every dynamically assembled experience is a licensable, trackable, monetisable event.
Eliminates the incentive for piracy by making the legitimate experience faster, richer and more personal than any illegal clip.
Positions the Premier League as the first sports property in the world to offer AI-native fan engagement at scale.

Use Case 2: Coaching and Performance, Tactical Intelligence Engine

Premier League performance analysis teams currently operate in a world of manual clip tagging. Analysts spend hours after each match cutting, labelling and organising footage. Cross-referencing patterns across multiple matches, let alone multiple seasons, requires enormous human effort and is rarely done comprehensively.

ION's virtual video process indexes every frame of training and match footage. In combination with an LLM that has deep contextual understanding, formations, player positions, ball trajectory, phase of play, the two become a dynamic real-time video assembly platform. A coaching team can issue natural language queries against the entire multi-season video archive and receive dynamically assembled video responses in seconds. Every query returns broadcast-quality video sequences assembled from frame-level references across hundreds of matches.

Key value drivers:

Reduces match preparation time from days to minutes, giving coaches more time to work with players rather than screens.
Enables pattern recognition across multi-season datasets that would be impossible with manual tagging.
Creates a compounding tactical advantage: the longer a club uses the system, the deeper and more queryable its intelligence layer becomes.
Allows real-time half-time analysis, a coach can query first-half footage during the interval and present assembled sequences to players within minutes.
Gives academy and youth development teams access to the same calibre of video intelligence previously reserved for first-team analysts.

Use Case 3: Production Optimisation, Zero-Render Workflow

The Premier League's content operation is one of the largest in world sport. Every matchday involves 20 to 32 camera feeds, 212 broadcast territories and over 500 highlight packages. Each of these outputs requires rendering. The same source footage is re-rendered dozens of times for different outputs. Estimated annual rendering compute cost: £10 to 15 million. Average render time per highlight package: 15 to 45 minutes. Storage duplication factor: 4 to 8 times across territories.

ION's Virtual Video architecture replaces file rendering with instruction assembly. Instead of rendering 500 highlight packages per matchday, the system assembles 500 virtual instruction sets at a fraction of the time and cost. Territory-specific packages become trivial. A Japanese and a Brazilian broadcast partner can receive different highlight packages assembled from the same source footage with zero additional rendering.

Key value drivers:

Transforms the economics of content production from linear cost scaling to near-zero marginal cost per output.
Enables real-time content delivery: highlights assembled and distributed during the match itself, not hours after.
Rendering compute reduced by up to 90%. Storage requirements reduced by up to 85%. Estimated annual savings of £8 to 12 million (ION internal estimate).
Frees editorial teams to focus on creative, high-value storytelling rather than mechanical cut-and-render workflows.
Reduces the environmental footprint of the League's media operations by eliminating redundant compute and storage.

Use Case 4: Content Sovereignty, Server-Side Licensing

When the Premier League licenses content to a broadcast partner, a digital platform or a data company, complete rendered files are transferred to the licensee's infrastructure. Once those files leave the Premier League's servers, control is fundamentally diminished. The content can be copied, redistributed, re-edited or leaked. Enforcement becomes reactive, chasing violations after they occur rather than preventing them architecturally.

ION's architecture makes it possible to license content without ever transferring the underlying media data. The content remains on the Premier League's infrastructure at all times. The licensee receives an instruction set, an authorisation to assemble a defined experience. The control layer governs identity verification, rights scope and transaction execution. If a licence expires or is revoked, the instruction set is simply invalidated. No content was ever transferred. Nothing needs to be returned or deleted.

Key value drivers:

Eliminates the structural risk of content leakage by ensuring raw media never leaves the League's infrastructure.
Transforms licensing from a file-transfer model to an access-authorisation model, giving the League granular, real-time control over every use of its content.
Enables new licensing models: time-limited access, query-limited access, territory-scoped access, all enforced architecturally rather than contractually.
Positions the Premier League to license content safely to AI training pipelines, knowing that only authorised instruction-level access is granted, never raw media ingestion.
Creates a future-proof content protection framework that strengthens with every new patent in ION's expanding portfolio.

Use Case 5: Frame-Level Commercialisation, Monetise Every Moment

The Premier League's commercial model for video content operates at a coarse granularity. Licensing deals are structured around packages: full matches, highlight reels, season archives. If a sponsor wants to associate their brand with every goal scored by a specific player, the content must be manually edited, packaged and delivered, a process that makes micro-level monetisation economically impractical.

Because ION makes every frame individually addressable and every moment semantically searchable, the Premier League can commercialise its content at a granularity that has never before been possible, without any editorial intervention. A sponsor purchases the right to associate with every headed goal this season. ION's semantic layer identifies every qualifying moment. Virtual video experiences are assembled automatically. Zero human editing required. Every query against the content library is a metered, billable transaction. The content never leaves the Premier League's servers.

Key value drivers:

Moment-level sponsorship: brands purchase association rights to specific types of moments that are assembled and delivered automatically.
Metered API access: data and analytics companies pay per-query for frame-level content access, creating a utility-style revenue stream.
Personalised fan packages: fans purchase bespoke highlight subscriptions assembled dynamically each matchday.'
Real-time micro-licensing: social media platforms and news outlets license specific moments in real time during matches, with ION's control layer handling authorisation and billing automatically.
AI training licensing: machine learning companies license structured, frame-level access to the content library for model training with full sovereignty and metered billing.
Traditional licensing granularity: Match/Season. ION-enabled granularity: Frame/Moment. Editorial cost per commercial output: zero. Revenue surface expansion: 10 to 50 times potential.

Why This Matters

Across these five use cases, ION's patents address constraints that are embedded in every part of the Premier League's commercial operation. Fan engagement. Performance analysis. Production economics. Content protection. Commercial monetisation. Each represents a significant opportunity. Each is made possible by the same architectural shift: treating video as a programmable instruction set rather than as a file that must be made, stored and sent.

ION holds the only granted patent portfolio in the world covering the virtualisation of video into reference-based containers and the dynamic assembly of those containers at runtime without rendering. The priority date is August 2007. The portfolio has been subject to three independent assessments, each confirming validity and breadth.

Download and read the full use case document covering all five applications of ION's patented infrastructure within The English Premier League.

What Comes Next

We will continue the What If? series with Episode 5 and beyond. Our aim is to give shareholders a progressively clearer picture of the commercial landscape ION's patents address and the scale of the opportunities within it.

Shareholders are reminded that these use cases are illustrative and do not represent any current or agreed commercial arrangement. All financial estimates are based on ION's own internal modelling. ION will update the market in accordance with its ASX continuous disclosure obligations as material developments occur.

We appreciate your continued support and look forward to bringing you Episode 5 shortly.

Yours sincerely,

Anthony Baker
Chief Executive Officer and Director
ION Video Limited (ASX: IOV)

These use cases are prepared by ION's commercial team based on internal modelling and analysis. They are indicative in nature, do not represent independently verified figures, and do not constitute any current or agreed commercial arrangement. Actual results may differ materially. This communication has been prepared in compliance with ASX continuous disclosure obligations.