VOBILE GROUP breaks through transformation with AI, reshaping the new pattern of content ecology

Fubo's third-quarter revenue grew by 27%, exploring new business opportunities driven by AI-generated film trading demand

Key Points:

• The company's third-quarter performance was strong, with a 27% revenue increase and a 28% growth in monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
• The company has shifted its focus from film content protection to assisting clients in enhancing product monetization capabilities, with revenue from the Chinese market now accounting for half.

Chen Zhu

With the emergence of AI tools like OpenAI's Sora, anyone can easily create high-quality films, leading to an unprecedented disruption of the film industry traditionally dominated by professional creators. While this trend has democratized content creation, it has also brought significant challenges—how to track copyright infringement across various digital platforms and strengthen intellectual property (IP) protection has become an urgent issue.

This wave of AI also brings new opportunities for companies focused on content protection and management, such as VOBILE GROUP (3738.HK). Last week, Vobile announced its third-quarter results, showing strong performance in its core business while actively exploring new opportunities in the AI era to find new engines for future growth.

Founded in 2005, Vobile initially focused on providing "digital fingerprint" and "digital watermark" technology for film platforms. This year, the company began to focus on AI content opportunities, launching a digital platform that allows content creators to convert their works into tradable digital assets.

Although this new model is still in its early stages and has not yet generated significant revenue, it positions Vobile to seize opportunities as AI-generated content becomes mainstream. Currently, the company primarily relies on its core content protection services as its revenue pillar and continues to expand its business scope from long films to short videos, music, and other audio formats.

Operational data for the third quarter shows that revenue grew by 27% year-on-year, with monthly recurring revenue also increasing by 28% year-on-year, indicating robust performance in its subscription business. This growth continues the positive momentum from the first half of the year, when revenue grew by 23% and net profit surged by 119%.

The announcement noted that the company's revenue in the Chinese market grew by approximately 22% year-on-year in the third quarter, with the proportion of revenue from China continuing to rise, whereas previously, the group's revenue was almost entirely derived from overseas markets.

Despite the strong performance, investor reaction has been relatively lukewarm, with the stock price only rising by 1.2% the day after the announcement, closing at HKD 5.07. In the long term, the company's stock price reached about HKD 9 in mid-2021, then fell to around HKD 1 during the downturn of the Hong Kong stock market from 2023 to 2024, and has since rebounded this year along with the market. For Vobile, this rebound reflects a recovery in investor confidence, especially after the company strengthened its sales in the Chinese market and expanded from long films to more content businesses.

Shift in Revenue Structure

Vobile initially started in the U.S. market, providing content protection software services to film content creators and platforms, such as "digital fingerprint" and "digital watermark" technologies, to identify potential infringing content and reduce revenue losses caused by piracy. As early as 2016, the U.S. market accounted for over 95% of Vobile's total revenue, with major clients including Disney, Warner Bros., Netflix, and YouTube However, in recent years, the company has gradually shifted its focus to the domestic Chinese market, particularly targeting Chinese video platforms that are actively expanding into overseas markets. One of the main growth highlights for the company is its "micro-drama" business—short dramas that are only a few minutes long per episode, which are becoming a global sensation and spreading from China to overseas through platforms like ReelShorts.

In the first half of this year, the Chinese market accounted for 49.9% of Vobile's total revenue of HKD 1.46 billion (USD 188 million), making it one of the company's major markets. If the international influence of Chinese platform content continues to rise, it is expected that the Chinese business will further grow, becoming the company's largest single source of revenue.

In addition to geographic expansion, Vobile's revenue structure has also undergone a significant transformation. The company has shifted from traditional content protection services to helping clients monetize their content through advertising. In the past, when its technology identified videos using clients' copyrighted materials, the main approach was to remove them; now, the company offers services that can generate advertising revenue from these videos and shares the revenue between the copyright holders and Vobile.

Vobile's rapid entry into this new business is primarily due to its acquisition of ZEFR in 2019. The company’s two core products—RightsID and ChannelID—provide content contextual identification services for brands. The RightsID platform helps monetize copyrighted content, while ChannelID offers complete channel management services for clients on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, including content uploading, data analysis, and fan interaction.

Vobile categorizes these two services as "value-added services." As of the first half of this year, revenue from such services reached HKD 846 million, accounting for 58% of the company's total revenue, still the main source of income; in contrast, revenue from traditional content protection subscription services accounted for only 42%.

Vobile clearly believes that the potential of its content monetization business far exceeds that of the old content protection services, which also brings the topic back to the previously mentioned "AI-generated content." The company believes that with the push of AI creation tools, a new wave of "derivative content" based on film and television IP (such as script adaptations, mashup videos, etc.) will bring more potential commercial monetization opportunities.

Vobile stated that the company currently manages a total of 4.29 million active assets on social media platforms, referring to licensed videos that generate revenue for clients in the first half of 2025. The company pointed out that the number of AI-generated content assets has begun to increase, but did not disclose specific data.

In the field of AI, Vobile's goals are quite ambitious, planning to build its own platform. The company launched two new services in May of this year—VobileMAX and DreamMaker.

VobileMAX is positioned as a trading platform that allows creators to buy and sell digital content. It helps creators register their works, prove ownership, and distribute content across platforms while tracking revenue. The platform uses blockchain technology to verify content ownership and supports the trading of content rights DreamMaker is an AI tool that can generate videos and music. Users only need to input the content they want to create, and the AI can automatically generate the finished product, adding a creator tag to ensure the source of the work is clear and identifiable.

However, the specific goals and development directions of these two AI platforms remain unclear at present, and the company is still exploring how to position itself in the AI era. At this stage, a more pragmatic approach for VOBILE GROUP is to continue expanding its existing copyright content business.

Currently, the company's business has extended from film to the music field, especially after acquiring the technology and team of audio content recognition company PEX earlier this year, which expanded its content copyright database. This acquisition added 120 million music asset fingerprints and 23 billion online audio fingerprints to VOBILE GROUP, further enhancing its system capabilities