Item 2. Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.
FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS
The following discussion should be read in conjunction with the accompanying financial statements and notes thereto included within this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. In addition to historical information, the information in this discussion contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the "Exchange Act"). These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding the Company's capital needs, business strategy and expectations. Any statements contained herein that are not statements of historical facts may be deemed to be forward-looking statements.
In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as "may", "will", "should", "expect", "plan", "intend", "anticipate", "believe", estimate", "predict", "potential" or "continue", the negative of such terms or other comparable terminology. Actual events or results may differ materially. In evaluating these statements, you should consider various factors described in this Quarterly Report, including the risk factors under "Item 1A. Risk Factors." of part II, and, from time to time, in other reports the Company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These factors may cause the Company's actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statement. The Company disclaims any obligation to publicly update these statements or disclose any difference between its actual results and those reflected in these statements. Such information constitutes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
OVERVIEW AND CORPORATE BACKGROUND
Destiny Media Technologies Inc. was incorporated in August 1998 under the laws of the State of Colorado and the corporate jurisdiction was changed to Nevada effective October 8, 2014. We carry out our business operations through our wholly owned subsidiary, Destiny Software Productions Inc., a British Columbia company that was incorporated in 1992, MPE Distribution, Inc. a Nevada company that was incorporated in 2007 and Sonox Digital Inc. incorporated under the Canada Business Corporations Act in 2012. The "Company", "Destiny Media", "Destiny", "we" or "us" refers to the consolidated activities of all four companies.
Our principal executive office is located at Suite 1110, 885 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6C 3E8. Our telephone number is (604) 609-7736 and our facsimile number is (604) 609-0611.
Our common stock trades on TSX Venture Exchange in Canada under the symbol "DSY", on the OTCQB U.S. ("OTCQB") under the symbol "DSNY", and on various German exchanges (Frankfurt, Berlin, Stuttgart and Xetra) under the symbol DME, WKN 935 410.
Our corporate website is located at http://www.dsny.com.
OUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Destiny develops and markets software as a service (SaaS) solutions that solve critical digital distribution and promotion problems for businesses in the music industry. The core of our business is Play MPE®. Play MPE® is a service for promoting and securely distributing broadcast quality audio, video, images, promotional information and other digital content through the internet. The system is currently used by the recording industry for transferring pre-release broadcast quality music, radio shows, and music videos to trusted recipients such as radio stations, media reviewers, VIP's, DJ's, film and TV personnel, sports stadiums and retailers. Music is protected by Play MPE®'s patented proprietary watermarking system which provides watermarks unique to each recipient.
Destiny is currently developing additional functionality and services that are expected to increase the services to existing platform users and therefore expand Play MPE®'s addressable market, or act as catalysts to the Company's sales activities. As well, the Company is investing into research and development on incremental product offerings expected to add addressable market opportunities.
Play MPE®
The Company's core business is the Play MPE® platform. Play MPE® is a two-sided B2B marketplace that enables music labels and artists to distribute promotional content and musical assets on the one side, and for music broadcasting professionals, music curators and music reviewers to discover, download, broadcast and review the music, on the other. Play MPE® provides a software-based tool to assist record labels and artists in marketing their music. Record labels and artists are Play MPE®'s customers and pay for submission into the system. Recipients are provided no charge access to review music. When adding music to the Play MPE® system, record labels are targeting specific industry recipients who review and broadcast their music. With this marketing effort, record labels are targeting an increase in their revenue directly through on-air broadcast royalties, streaming royalties and synchronization revenue (revenue when the reproduction of a song is coordinated with video advertisements, television, or film), and indirect increases in revenue through growing song and artists' popularity (for example concert ticket sales etc.).
Customers range from small independent artists, to the world's largest record labels; (the "Major Record Labels") (Universal Music Group ("Universal"), Warner Music Group "Warner" and Sony Music Entertainment "Sony"). Customers choose Play MPE® for its powerful set of tools, ease of use and its effectiveness in achieving the record label's promotional objectives. Recipients enjoy easy access to desirable music in high quality audio files.
Play MPE® CASTER (Distribution software)
Play MPE®'s Caster is a full-service distribution management system that includes a complete set of operational functions that provide all necessary software tools to enable labels to manage global marketing campaigns. Broadly, these components include administration functions and distribution functions. Administration functions allow management of labels and sub-labels, management of the assets (audio files, video files, and associated cover art, artist information) that are distributed, and management of client-side users and user permissions (roles with selectable capabilities). Distribution management functions offer powerful contacts management capabilities, release creation, distribution announcements and distribution scheduling, digital rights management by release and by recipient, and release replication and its associated scheduling and digital rights management components.
This full suite of tools within Play MPE® was developed for the music industry and in close collaboration with Universal to cater the functions to its global marketing workflow. Many clients do not use the full suite of tools. However, this full set of tools is critical to Universal's global promotional campaign workflow and the core reason Play MPE® distributes internationally for Universal.
Caster is available in English, Spanish, German, Japanese and French.
Play MPE® is a permissions-only access system such that only recipients designated or targeted to receive content obtain access to that content. Record labels can use Play MPE®'s contacts management system to administer recipient lists. Contacts management offers several features that facilitate efficient updates and maintenance actions that are critically important where users maintain a large recipient database, across multiple users, and multiple recipient lists. Absent these features, list maintenance becomes overly cumbersome, inefficient and leads to inaccuracies. The functionality within the contacts management system is critically important to both distribution hubs at Universal and the Play MPE® operations team to efficiently maintain accurate and active recipient lists.
Within Play MPE®'s contacts management platform, the Company's operations team offers for sale carefully curated and actively maintained recipient lists with more than 14,000 music curators around the world. These lists include complete lists in 12 countries, and lists under construction in an additional 38. These selectable lists eliminate the need for our clients to maintain current recipient contact information. These lists offer significant value to all customers, but are necessary for smaller independent labels and artists who do not have the resources to maintain current contacts. Without these curators lists, many sales would not be possible. As active lists in new territories are completed, Play MPE® will grow revenue.
In addition to the contacts management functionality, the Play MPE® product and engineering staff are developing new technical processes to facilitate list development and maintenance. With these technical solutions, it is expected that Play MPE® will expand saleable lists and thereby increase revenue.
Play MPE® Player
Music curators enjoy free access to review and download content through an easy-to-use web-based player or mobile player apps (iOS and Android). Web-players are currently available in 15 different languages; English, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, French, Japanese, German, Norwegian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, and Danish.
In developing Play MPE®'s recipient interfaces, the Company's product and engineering teams focus on providing a very positive user experience. Recipients enjoy many features that make it easy to access, collaborate, review, and search for content. Play MPE®'s mobile apps offer off-line listening capabilities, the ability to utilize Google Chromecast and Apple Airplay streaming capabilities, creation of playlists, sorting, flagging and archiving features, and easier to access release metadata. Recipient side satisfaction directly increases activity which directly improves the effectiveness of promotional efforts of record label customers.
Recipients on the Play MPE® platform have a wide variety of personas and include programming directors for internet streaming, satellite or terrestrial radio, retail store broadcasters, sports stadium DJs, clubs, events, music reviews in newspapers or magazines, on-air personalities, music supervisors who program TV, movies, commercials or video games, or "A&R" representatives at larger record labels. Each recipient within the Play MPE® platform has a unique library of music catered and appropriate for that recipient.
Clipstream®
The Company also developed Clipstream® for the online video industry for which it is pursuing strategic alternatives. The Clipstream® Online Video Platform (OVP) is a self-service system, for encoding, hosting and reporting on video playback which can be embedded in third party websites or emails. Playback is currently through the Company's proprietary JavaScript codec engine, which is only available on the internet through the Company. The unique software-based approach to rendering video, has patents claiming initial priority to 2011. This product has incidental revenues and is not supported or marketed.