Jason Hirschhorn

President

Sling Media Entertainment Group

In November 2006, Sling Media announced that it had hired MTV Networks’ former chief digital officer, Jason Hirschhorn, as the president of its newly formed Sling Media Entertainment Group. The news made quite a few headlines; mostly because industry spectators were anxious to see what the digital wunderkind would do with the Slingbox, TV junkies’ favorite new gadget—a device that allows you to watch your TV on a variety of different platforms from any location. Hirschhorn was tapped with developing entertainment experiences for Slingbox users. A little more than a month later, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Blake Krikorian, the cofounder and CEO of Sling Media, announced the Entertainment Group’s first initiative, Clip+Sling.

“It attaches to your cable box or satellite box and allows you to clip a show and share it with your friends,” Hirschhorn says. “I can talk about The Office before I get to the office, so to speak. This is a great way to begin that water-cooler conversation, but rather than you having to go find the clip, it gets sent to you.”

Sharing that stage at CES in Las Vegas was CBS Corporation’s president and CEO, Leslie Moonves. CBS was the first network to come on board for Clip+Sling, and Hirschhorn says that a slate of other deals have been signed, and more are being negotiated. The response from the content companies has, in general, been positive, Hirschhorn says. “Many of the executives that we’re dealing with have Slingboxes and love them.”

In addition, Hirschhorn says that content owners realize the promotional opportunities offered by Clip+Sling, where video clips will be accompanied by links to the network’s or show’s website. “If you walk into a network and you say, ‘We’d like to cut up the entire network and the shows into little pieces’—now that’s a tough sell,” Hirschhorn concedes. However, rights owners are also realizing that “if someone loves my show so much that they’re cutting up little pieces of it and sharing it with their friends, so they can introduce them to the DVD or the next episode, that’s probably a very good thing.”

Hirschhorn credits his tenure at MTV Networks for preparing him for the complicated rights negotiations with content owners. He joined MTV Networks in March 2000 via its acquisition of his company, Mischief New Media, a collection of content sites he founded while he was still in college. The move from running his own new-media company to being a part of a worldwide conglomerate was fairly smooth, Hirschhorn says. “The real transition was not going to work in sweat pants!” he quips. “I had wanted to work at MTV since I was 13 years old. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, truly a dream come true. I think maybe I was a little spoiled and naive. You can ask any of my [former] bosses. I often thought that the entire MTV Networks business was there just for digital media and that the television channels were just nice little channels.”

By 2006, Hirschhorn says he was ready to get back to his roots in digital media. He had become friends with Krikorian during his MTV Networks tenure, and the Slingbox had become, along with the iPod and the TiVo, one of the technologies that had enthralled him. [He cites Apple’s iPhone as the newest entry on that list.] “It’s been a very easy transition, other than understanding that I’m not the big executive at the big media company anymore. You have to be very much a salesman and you have to go out there and a lot of my job is really evangelizing.”

Hirschhorn, a self-described “child of pop culture,” is also thrilled to be back at a startup where “everyone really believes in what they’re doing and they use the product and love the product. Blake has done an amazing job of putting the company on the map. Now we’ve got to make sure it becomes a bigger business. That’s the fun of it. I like the thrill. There’s no fun in skydiving off a bench.”

Beyond licensing content for Clip+Sling, Hirschhorn says that the company is also seeking out completed titles for a new video destination on the Internet. Ultimately, he says, the company wants to be “a bridge between all screens,” whether it’s a PC, television set or a mobile phone. “We are innovators. We love television, we love entertainment. The idea that you have to go home to watch your TV is an old notion. We do everything we do for the audience that loves their Slingbox. They really dictate what we do. Users want access to their video content wherever they are, whenever, however they want it. We want to be one of the systems that are leading that way.”

—By Mansha Daswani