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Rukmini Priyadarshini

Sling Media seems to be embarking on a David-Goliath confrontation with consumer electronics biggies. What's in its sling-bag that lets this start-up think it can take on the giants?

Blake Krikorian

SAN Mateo, California, start-up Sling Media is calling itself the Consumer Experience company, and its Slingbox is the obvious but hitherto missing consumer product. The answer to all those football and cricket matches that you could not watch live because you had to work. Or because you were sitting in an airport terminal waiting for your connecting flight. Or because you had to attend an eminently dispensable meeting at office!

The Slingbox lets users watch their home television programmes live from any device, via any network, anywhere in their home or around the world. No more replays that you pay your mobile service provider for when you have already paid your TV cable operator for the content. Slingbox gives live digital-quality streaming TV on the user's handheld or networked device.

"The Slingbox connects to and `place-shifts' content from any cable box, satellite receiver or personal video recorder (for example TiVo). As the VCR allowed consumers to `time-shift' a TV show and watch it when they wanted, the Slingbox empowers people to watch their TV wherever they want," says Blake Krikorian, CEO and co-founder of Sling Media.

The company, which recently received $11.5 million in venture funding from Mobius Venture Capital, DCM-Doll Capital Management and undisclosed strategic investors, is getting ready for its first product introduction, The Slingbox Personal Broadcaster, in the first quarter of 2005. The device, which is expected to be sold for $249, is a small hardware appliance that plugs into analogue cable, cable box, satellite receiver, PVR (such as a TiVo) or stereo and converts the analogue stream into digital bits. The software in the device then determines the end-device screen size, the Internet connection quality and speed and appropriately compresses and re-broadcasts the signal digitally. The user can watch streaming TV live wherever he is from his networked device.

Enabling technologies are already here, even available at down-to-earth prices, says Krikorian. "All it takes is a little thought about how consumers use digital media at home and in person to let us come up with innovative products.

"The basis for our products is that consumers are interested in products, not just in technologies. The bottom line is what value the product delivers to the customer. The VCR is a decades-old idea and though the technologies enabling the SlingBox have been around for a while the product idea had not been conceived," says Bhupen Shah, Sling Media's co-founder, COO and serial entrepreneur.

Large consumer electronics companies are not able to do this because though they are sitting on a lot of IP and technologies, they are organised in silos that don't allow true convergence of technologies that will add a new dimension to end-consumer experience, says Krikorian. He should know.

Krikorian co-founded the Philips Mobile Computing Group, a company funded by Philips Electronics, and his most recent venture, the id8 Group, was an industry consultancy that advised and defined digital media products for AOL, Microsoft, Hitachi and others, ranging from digital imaging to mobile entertainment devices and smart phones.

We believe that most of the innovation is now possible through software, says Shah, who merged DiTango, his company which was developing home-focused digital media solutions for OEMs, with the Krikorian brothers — Sling Media's other co-founder is Blake Krikorian's brother, Jason — to form Sling Media. The company has had a hardware and software development and research wing in Bangalore from Day One and is planning to expand operations in India to 100 people.

Krikorian explains that the company takes off-the-shelf technologies and builds software around them to enable the convergence of telecom, video, mobile and communications technologies to come up with innovative products.

"We plan to come up with more products with the same theme of using software to enhance the way existing enabling technologies can come together to let users get the most out of what is possible," says Krikorian. "We are innovating in solving problems on functionality. This will be a big differentiator for us in the market as we want to leverage technologies into consumer experience."

There is the TV programming you have at home, the content you are paying for and with a little help from Sling Media, your laptop, PDA or other networked handheld devices can work as a wireless LCD TV, liberating you the user, says Shah. No further infrastructure to install, no more services to pay for. Just a little device that extends the features of devices people already have in a way that takes the consumer experience to a new level.

"We are small, and we are nimble. We can think without silos and organisational politics impeding us," says Krikorian, who intends to market his products under the Sling brand name, to sell through stores and online retailers and creatively plan a marketing and distribution programme, too.

"Our products have ease of use, ease of set-up, ease in control of place and time built in from the beginning," says Shah.

"The surprise element from leveraging existing technology innovatively and the enhanced experience is what most people get pumped about," adds Krikorian. "We are hoping people will see us as a company that thinks like them."

That is no pot-shot, for certain.

Picture by G.R.N. Somashekar

priya@thehindu.co.in

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