Admission to AIM

Orca Interactive Ltd 13 October 2004 Embargoed for release at 8.00am on 13 October 2004 Orca Interactive Limited FIRST DAY OF DEALINGS ON THE ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENT MARKET The Board of Orca Interactive Limited ('Orca' or 'the Company'), a software provider for the IPTV market, announces that the Company's shares have today been admitted to trading on the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange ('AIM'). The Company's trading symbol is 'ORCA'. 14,141,414 new Orca ordinary shares have been allocated to institutional and other investors at a price of 99 pence per share (the 'Placing Price'), raising approximately £14 million for the Company. On admission to AIM a total of 35,278,549 Orca ordinary shares were in issue capitalising the Company at approximately £35 million at the Placing Price. Altium Capital is the Company's nominated adviser and broker. Commenting on the successful fundraising, Haggai Barrel, Chief Executive of Orca said: 'The growth prospects for the IPTV market look to be gaining some momentum at the moment so the timing of our IPO is particularly fitting. 'There's a great opportunity for Orca to make the most of this growth and these funds will give us the financial strength and flexibility to grow both organically, by accelerating the adoption of our products, and through selective acquisitions.' For more information, contact: Orca Interactive Limited Haggai Barel, Chief Executive +972 9 7699400 Altium Capital Limited Garry Levin / Tim Richardson / Matt Lee / Alex Church +44 207 484 4040 Financial Dynamics James Melville-Ross +44 20 7831 3113 NOTES TO EDITORS Company overview Orca develops and licences proprietary middleware which enables IP service providers e.g. telecommunication companies ('telcos') to deploy enhanced entertainment services, such as broadcast TV, directly over broadband telephony infrastructure (e.g. a DSL line) to a subscriber's television set - a service known as IPTV. Within an IPTV system, the middleware is one of the key enabling technologies as it integrates the various components of the system and plays a central role in the delivery and management of the IPTV service. Established in 1995, Orca was an early entrant to the IPTV middleware market and has since established itself as one of the leading developers of IPTV middleware solutions. In April 2000 the Company was acquired by Emblaze Limited, an Israeli company, listed on the Official List of the UK Listing Authority that focuses on rich-media personal communication over wireless and broadband IP networks. As a member of the Emblaze group, Orca has received the financial support which has allowed it to accelerate the development of its core products and demonstrate its ability to commercialise them by establishing key reference deployments. The Orca Directors believe that Admission will increase the Company's credibility amongst its customers and partners and provide the Company with an appropriate platform from which to accelerate the adoption of its products. Furthermore, the Directors believe that the proceeds of the Placing will give Orca the financial strength and flexibility to grow effectively within its markets, both organically and through selective acquisitions. The IPTV Market Although the IPTV market is currently at an early stage of development, it is expected to grow rapidly in the future as incumbent telcos accept the business necessity of providing IPTV as part of a 'triple-play' offering of bundled voice, data and video services. According to research by Multimedia Research Group (MRG), the number of global IPTV subscribers is expected to grow from 0.7 million in 2003 to approximately 15.6 million in 2007. This growth is expected by MRG to be led by the service providers in the Asia Pacific and European regions where DSL is most widely deployed. As one of the key constituents of an IPTV solution, the middleware market is expected to be a beneficiary of the rapid growth in IPTV subscriber numbers. MRG predicts that, cumulatively, over the next three years (2005 - 2007) the middleware market will be worth approximately $313 million. In calculating this figure, however, MRG has only included revenues derived from subscriber licence fees and has not taken into account customer support, professional services and software upgrades fees. The Orca Directors believe that these additional revenue streams will result in the value of the IPTV middleware market exceeding MRG's forecast. Key strengths The Orca Directors believe that the Company has now established itself as a leading middleware provider in the IPTV market and that the following factors differentiate Orca from its competitors and represent barriers to entry for potential entrants: • Embedded relationships - Orca has strong relationships with a number of large incumbent telcos and IPTV prime contractors. In addition, unlike many of its competitors, Orca is not exclusively aligned with any access provider. The Company has alliances with access provider partners, for example, Huawei, ZTE, Samsung, Corecess, Nortel, ECI Telecom and Nokia, in many of the key markets for IPTV. • Open architecture - Orca's middleware platform is built with strict adherence to open standards which the Directors believe gives operators flexibility to work with a variety of set-top-boxes (STBs) and other components, enables open integration with external legacy systems (like billing and subscriber databases) and allows the addition of new devices and formats. By offering an open architecture middleware solution, Orca allows service providers to choose from a wide list of potential IPTV component providers. To date, the Company's middleware is integrated with, or used in, six different STBs, four different video servers, five different DSLAMs and five different encoders; • Scalability of solution - Orca's RiGHTv(TM)Core platform has been designed to meet strict telecommunications industry requirements for scalability, availability and security. The platform has undergone load testing benchmarking that has proven its ability to support a large number of subscribers. In January 2003, the Company carried out a series of benchmark tests using its middleware solution and Oracle databases to simulate an active subscriber base of 100,000. The Orca Directors believe that Orca is the only middleware provider which has so far undertaken such rigorous testing and that it is a clear demonstration to the Company's partners of the strength of its solution; and • Established customer references - Orca has established key customer reference points through a number of commercial deployments with incumbent telcos and other service providers and is now firmly established within the IPTV middleware market. - ends- This information is provided by RNS The company news service from the London Stock Exchange
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