Blake Krikorian

April 2007

Back in 2004, Blake and Jason Krikorian, two brothers with years of experience in convergence technologies, founded Sling Media, with the aim of empowering consumers in the digital world. Sling Media’s first product, the Slingbox, has literally transformed the way we are able to watch TV. It turns any Internet-�connected PC, Mac, or mobile device into your home television. That means you can watch TV virtually anywhere. Beyond North America, the Slingbox is being sold in the U.K., Scandinavia, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong, with more territories to follow. CEO Blake Krikorian explains how this all sprung from a love of baseball, and how it very well may revolutionize the TV industry.

WS: How did the idea for the Slingbox come about?

KRIKORIAN: So many times someone comes up with a technology and tries to find an application. This was very different. This was born out of consumer frustration, mainly my own frustration as well as my brother, Jason’s, who is also one of the cofounders of Sling. We were born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area and are big San Francisco Giants baseball fans. [It was] the summer of 2002, and the Giants were doing very well. One of the games was on TV and we were stuck in the office, and we thought, there’s got to be a way we can get the game here, right? At the time, we didn’t have a TV feed coming into our office. So we looked on the Internet to see if there was a service that we could subscribe to that provided the game. We came across a baseball Internet streaming service that had promised to give us all the baseball games live. I wasn’t too pleased that I was required to pay yet another monthly fee to get access to this, and I thought, jeez, I’m paying my $100 a month cable bill back home, this is kind of a bummer. But I wanted the content bad enough that I signed up for this service. But the big problem was that when I went to watch the Giants game, the Giants didn’t come on. I read the legal fine print down at the very bottom of the page and it said, sorry, you actually get all the games except for your local teams. And I thought, what’s the point in having this?

And at the same time, there was some news event that was happening while I was traveling and I recall going on to my laptop to CNN.com, [but] I wanted to watch live CNN, I didn’t want to watch [just video] clips. I realized no one was thinking about what the consumer wants. If you talk to normal consumers, the TV programming they understand is what’s on their television back at home. Now, we all know that consumers are spending more and more time in front of their PCs, and on their mobiles, and more and more, displays and devices are proliferating. And this has actually been to the detriment of the TV industry because ratings continue to decrease.

But really what we all want as consumers is a seamless and familiar living-room tele�vision experience regardless of what display we happen to be looking at and regardless of what location we happen to be in. The other trend is that more and more people are getting DVRs, so more and more of the content that they want to watch is stored on a hard drive in their living room and all these displays are connected via the Internet, right? So there’s got to be a way—as long as we’re connected to the Internet—that we can access our living-room TV programming on any device in any location. And that’s really how the idea of the Slingbox and place-shifting came about. Then we started creating prototypes and one thing led to another, and here we are today.

WS: What are you finding about how the Slingbox is being used?

KRIKORIAN: It’s been really, really surprising. About 35 to 40 percent of the use is just around the house. We see a lot of usage by people taking their laptop to the kitchen, so it becomes that kitchen TV. Or people who have DVRs like a TiVo and they have it maybe in one room in their house and they’d like to be able to access all that stuff off of that TiVo in another room and then see it on their laptops.

If you look at that from the TV-industry perspective, it’s great. They were losing eyeballs because people were doing other things on the main TV, like playing video games. So in a lot of ways you can look at what we’re doing as tripling or quadrupling the number of television sets on the planet by basically turning every laptop, every desktop and eventually every mobile—we don’t support every single mobile phone on the planet yet!—into your living-room TV.

WS: While devices such as the iPod and cell phones and laptops allow viewers to watch what they want to watch when they want to watch, where they want to watch it, they are eroding the concept of a linear channel. You do not, because you take the channel as it is.

KRIKORIAN: Right, exactly! It’s preserving that existing experience. TV networks should be looking at this as a great way to take their existing experiences and extending them on all these other platforms. And help build that tighter, closer relationship with the customer. And the same thing applies for local television. Think about local stations. They are under threat by the �national broadcasters, by all these other means. To steal a quote from Les Moonves [the president and CEO of CBS Corporation] when we unveiled this new service with him at CES [the Consumer Electronics Show], he said, with the Slingbox, local becomes global. And that’s exactly what it does.

WS: What other devices do you have in store?

KRIKORIAN: In January we unveiled two really exciting things. One of them is a product called the SlingCatcher. Think of it as a device that does exactly the opposite of what the Slingbox does. The Slingbox takes TV programming and slings it out. What the SlingCatcher does is takes your Internet-based media, whether that’s CBS.com that [streams its programming] or any other type of video website, and wirelessly projects it onto your TV set. So I can be on any Internet site, and be able to watch it and control it on my living-room television.

Then there’s this new service that’s going to be incredibly exciting. This is what we unveiled at Les’s keynote. It’s a new service, a free service, which we call Clip+Sling, and this is actually working in partnership with the TV networks and the studios and the content holders. You can be watching TV on your laptop or on your mobile phone via the Slingbox, and let’s say you happen to watch something that you think is really funny or interesting, or a news article, or a great sports play, and you want to share it with a friend. This is a quantum leap in terms of ease of use. You just hit a little button, and you can select a start time and a stop time and then you can Sling it to your friend.

As you know, we’re living in this clip culture and there’s a lot of talk about user-generated content, but I think fundamentally what we’re really focused on is user-endorsed content. This is about the TV programming that people want to share around. One of the challenges is that we’re living in this clip culture but the content owners have not had the opportunity to monetize this. It’s been all happening without them. What we’re attempting to do with Clip+Sling is build up this service that consumers love but provide a way for the content owners to actually monetize this. We’re trying to build that bridge and I think we’re having some tremendous success. The first one was Les Moonves getting up there and letting us unveil this with him on stage. It sends a very clear message that what we’re all competing with—and this is really, really important—is stealing.

We’re attempting to build a service that actually competes with stealing. We need cooperation from the networks and from the studios. There are a lot of issues that need to be resolved, from who owns the rights to this clip, all the way down to the Actors’ Guild. There are some really visionary people running these media companies and they know that things need to change. And while it might not be incredibly clear how it’s all going to get done and who’s going to get paid—those are high-class problems. With Clip+Sling we’re signing up major networks and content owners and we want to [show] that there’s an ecosystem here. This is a great consumer experience—they can clip and sling whatever it is that they want—but at the same time, let’s make sure we compensate and share the upside with the content owners. What you end up doing is building a real economic model where everybody is making money, and that means that more investment can be put into the system, in which case you make an even better experience and it ends up being better than stealing.

We’re hoping to find more television networks that have the same view—who are not afraid to delight the consumer, as crazy as that sounds. We’re out to show that you can build something that’s great for consumers that can also be great for the industry. And some people call us idealistic, but I don’t think so.