Unlocking the next generation of digital content creation and distribution, AMPD Ventures is a Canadian publicly company. Among its portfolio are many subsidiaries, including AMPD Technologies and the Departure Lounge.
Joining us today is James Hursthouse, CEO of AMPD and the Departure Lounge. It’s been almost a year since we last spoke I think, how have you been?
TMH: James, could you provide let us know about your background and what your history with the company is?
JH: My background personally, I’ve been in the digital media infrastructure, content technology space now for about 20 years. I actually got my start in the industry back in 2000. I lived in Asia, Japan mainly for around 17 years and so I was very fortunate to have a front row seat for the early days of massively multiplayer online gaming. Which when you think about it, is about thousands of people enjoying experiences together online. Which is in many ways a precursor to what we’re doing at the moment. I was a contributor to this thing called the Metaverse Roadmap as far back, I think it was 2007. So Metaverse for me has been part of my existence for a long time. Something that I’ve always been very interested in and so right now if you look at the next decade of digital content, it’s clear that many people are moving from content that we view through screens into this era of immersive content experiences that we will be inside.
So in many ways, the beginning of my career was with massively multiple online games and everything that we’ve been doing since has sort of been leading towards this current era. A lot of the technologies that we’re using at the moment come from gaming and so my background really sort of spans infrastructure, content and I suppose business development generally in this space. Personal career highlight for me so far, everybody can see my Iron Maiden toys behind me. I was the originator of the Iron Maiden legacy of the Beast Mobile game when I was running my previous game studio called Roadhouse. So, very proud of that. I think it’s a great example actually of how interactive and music can start to blend together. So again, some of those things as we now look at true Crossmedia with both departure lounge and AMPD Technologies and as a group, a lot of what I’ve been doing is sort of been leading towards this current present.
TMH: Recently, the company experienced some corporate restructuring. Can you give us some details around this?
JH: We’re actually still in the process of that analysis as to what kind of restructuring is necessary. I think in previous interviews and in previous news releases we have acknowledged that certainly some parts of the business primarily the AMPD Technologies side of things and just so everybody’s clear, we have AMPD Ventures as the top company, AMPD Technologies doing the cloud and compute solutions and then the Departure Lounge does media production and creative services. So it was particularly the AMPD Technologies side of the business. Earlier in the year we were in the running for two, I think two very significant deals and obviously they could have gone either way. It’s a very difficult market environment at the moment, technology companies aren’t necessarily as thriving as strongly as they have in the past.
I think there was a number of factors but back in the beginning part of the year, a couple of these deals didn’t go the way that we’d hoped they would and as a result of that it maybe shown a bit of a spotlight onto certain parts of the company that had been being developed in a capital intensive way potentially an overextended themselves a little bit but I do want to stress, obviously that the original North Star about how this next generation of digital content will need a new type of cloud and compute solution. So that premise is still as solid as ever but obviously if things don’t always go your way, then sometimes you need to take a good hard look and say, is there a way for us to continue to leverage the value of the investment made in that side of the business to date without necessarily taking the same capital intensive approach given current market environments and other factors.
Ever since I took over the role which has still only been a few weeks now, I think it was the middle of March when I kind of stepped into the CEO role it’s been a balance, right? Looking again at the steps that we need to take in the short term to make sure that we have runway and that the company will continue through and yet at the same time, being fully aware that the premise and the reason why we’re doing this remains as strong as ever. So it’s a balancing act at the moment and the analysis is still ongoing.
TMH: Additionally, you have added a new website that is geared towards being an investor information center. Why was this important to implement?
JH: Well, again I think really it’s about sort of clarity of message. Obviously with AMPD Ventures and AMPD Technologies both sharing the AMPD label we were finding that maybe there was some confusion around which of those entities were which and again, to sort of make it clear, AMPD Ventures is the top company. That’s where shareholders hold their equity including myself and the way that we view the group is that AMPD Ventures as that top holding company can really sort of unlock value across this next decade or whatever it is of digital content but as I’ve mentioned, that era requires sort of different approaches and there’s different value points across that ecosystem. So with AMPD Technologies, we are very clearly focused on cloud and compute solutions. With Departure Lounge, we are very clearly focused on next generation media production technologies and the creative that goes with that.
So a compute company in many ways is different than a production company or a creative services company. They both work very well together and the creative services and the production technologies need the high performance cloud and compute that we have on the AMPD Technologies side of the business but nonetheless, I think it is a good thing that each of those companies has its own mission and its own mandate and has a clearly communicable value proposition. So the value proposition to investors is one thing. We are unlocking value across this ecosystem but I think the value prop to individual customers and potential partners is probably different for each of those subsidiaries. So by restructuring the messaging, we just wanted to make sure that everybody was clear as to which company within the group does what and how they fit together and as I said, it’s not that there isn’t synergies between them but we also just wanted to make sure that each individual subsidiary has its own leadership, has its own mission, has its own mandate potentially has its own strategic partners moving forward. So I think just being able to restructure the messaging a little bit will help delineate that more clearly for investors on the one hand, customers, prospects and other stakeholders on the other. So that’s why we’ve done it.
TMH: Your technology has been described as “green tech”, in what way does it fit into a category like that?
JH: That’s a great question actually and in some ways that speaks to the mission and mandate of the group as a whole. So I’ve just said that each individual subsidiary has its own mission and mandate but across the group we really do feel that it’s very important for us to adopt a sustainable approach as possible. So to give you a couple of bits of data, some of them from the Departure Lounge side and some of them from the AMPD Technologies side, there is statistics out there and I’m just checking notes here, that say for example, the US film and television industry as a whole results in carbon emissions of something like 15 million tons per year which is the equivalent to the electricity that’s required to power 3 million US homes. There’s other statistics out there that now say that the cloud computing uses more energy than the airline industry.
So wherever we can across the board, we want to be adopting green and sustainable approaches. So with Departure Lounge because we are very focused on volumetric and real-time virtual production technologies, the work that we recently did with Monstercat, which is a Vancouver based EDM label of some global renown we did a project with one of their artists, DJ Whipped Cream and it was this project that was recently acknowledged as an official selection at the South by Southwest 2023 festival, which was great but you can imagine Caroline, otherwise known as DJ Whipped Cream, coming to Monstercat and saying that she had this amazing creative vision for what she wanted to do with a song called The Dark and it involved being on a remote hillside, it involved a, a remote cabin, it involved these sort of pets flying around and then it actually also involves setting the entire environment on fire.
You can imagine Monstercat saying, Hmm, logistically from a cost perspective, from an interruption to touring, obviously these are working music musicians and so the idea of going off to the Hills of Iceland for 10 days to do this shoot is not really very practical but with the Departure Lounge from start to finish, we can have talent come into the studio, we can capture them using the green screen environment and capture their human performance and then what we can do is we can take those digital humans and put them into entirely synthetic digital environments that have been created in and in this case it’s the game engine Unreal and so what you can see here on the screen is Caroline and Jasiah doing those performances transported into these 3D worlds. Now obviously that means far less time needs to be spent, far less energy needs to be spent.
We don’t need to transport crew, we don’t need generators on set, we don’t need any of these things and so there is data out there that says in general, real-time virtual production technologies of this type are 90% greener than traditional ways of making movies and obviously in Vancouver because we’re on renewable energy in the first place, even more so and the same thing actually then applies to the cloud and compute. Particularly with DC one, which is our prototype first data center in Vancouver on the AMPD Cloud side, on the AMPD Technologies side with the cloud and computing, what we do there is that we take the heat that the servers are producing, capture it and use that then to heat the residential units in the surrounding buildings. So the combination of the two things is actually quite impressively sustainable because Departure Lounge is actually using the AMPD Technologies data center for all of the processing for this kind of video that you’re looking at now and so the production technology is greener and the way in which we’re doing the compute is greener and overall, I think it is actually quite a significant contribution to the ways in which we can meet the demand for digital content, which isn’t going to go away, right? I mean, if you look at statistics, the demand for it is rising.
I don’t want to say this is why it’s clearly but obviously in a recession people tend to stay home. They tend to play video games, they tend to watch Netflix, they tend to watch a lot of digital content and so in the position that we’re in, being able to offer these cost effective but still creatively progressive ways of making digital content, I think we’re relatively well positioned there but it is obviously very important that we can somehow meet this explosive demand for digital content obviously without destroying the planet. That is one of the overall mandates for AMPD Ventures as a group that everything we do really does need to address the problems around energy utilization and then obviously we have a mission to be as sustainable as possible.
TMH: As far as upcoming news, is there anything coming down the pipe that investors get to look forward to?
JH: We are very bullish about the opportunities that are ahead of us. Departure Lounge opened its doors on the 1st of September. We generated some significant revenue both on the creative services side of the house and on the studio rental, the volumetric capture stage, motion capture side of the house as well and actually you can see with work like we did with Monstercat and DJ Whipped Cream, how those things start to come together. So there is a healthy pipeline of work for Departure Lounge and then in addition to that on the AMPD Technologies side as well, obviously it was necessary to do some reset but the demand for high performance cloud and compute of the type that we offer is right there. We do have industry veterans using AMPD virtual studio.
So I look on the AMPD Technologies side of things and think that it’s more of a reset than a sort of fundamental issue or at least that’s what I’m trying to bring about for sure. In terms of future, we just did put out a news release around a MOU that we’ve signed with a UK based ocean conservation organization called Marina’s Guardian and we’re very excited about that one. What that one is actually again, sort of speaks to some of the strengths across the group. So initially the idea there is that we will be doing a range of Crossmedia products. So everything from a Roblox educational headquarters through a mobile game to potentially doing some Metaverse 3D spatial environment work around real world initiatives that Marina’s Guardian has.
For example if they do Ocean Lovers Festival type scenarios where there may be artists, there may be a startup festival, obviously a lot of those things can get translated now into 3D spatial digital versions, right? So we’re all pretty familiar I think at this point with the idea of artists doing concerts even within video games like Fortnite or what have you. So the idea of working across the digital initiatives for an organization like Marina’s is very exciting and really that’s a multi-year, multi product engagement that we have. It’s still in its early stages but that’s just one example of the type of work that we’re starting to see and again that kind of work needs high performance cloud and compute, edge based computing of the type that AMPD Technologies also offers. So there is a sort of logic behind the structure and individually there’s other deals that I can’t really say too much about but which again convinced me that the North Star is shining as brightly as it ever has been around the reason that we started the company and the overall vision for what we want to be doing, again in this new era of digital content creation and distribution and everything that’s associated with that.
TMH: Is there anything that I missed that you would like to add?
JH: I just would like to draw everybody’s attention to the fact that we are conducting a private placement at the moment. It is a convertible dementia. I believe under very attractive terms. We closed the first Transformers that Monday, and so we’re looking to fill out the rest of this current private placement. So if anybody’s interested in that, please let us know And then aside from that, just generally that we are conducting deep analysis to the business where it’s necessary But at the same time, yes we are very bullish about the opportunity and we’re looking forward to continuing to provide updates and good news as we move forward.
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