THE SLINGBOX IS A cool little device – a neat-o box that lets users place shift their home TV – making their laptop into a second TV in the home, or delivering their cable TV to a conference in Berlin.
Of late, however, the company has gone beyond being a box maker and towards becoming a media company. They’re not making content, however. Instead, the company has created a platform where Sling users can create their own clips of shows and upload them to a secure portal where ads are sold around the clips – letting the content owners monetize clips created by fans.
Sling recently entered into a deal with the NHL that not only allows users to make and post and share clips from games (anyone can visit the portal and watch the clips, not just Slingbox owners), it will also see longer form, behind the scenes content shared on the site that hasn’t necessarily aired on television.
The deal will use the company’s forthcoming Clip + Sling application which is in beta mode right now. Clip+Sling will give Slingbox owners the ability to record and share portions of content with just a few short clicks. While customers will need a Slingbox to create and share clips, the clips posted to Sling Media’s forthcoming video destination site will be accessible by anyone. NHL clips posted to this site will be searchable and categorized by NHL as a league and NHL clubs to help users navigate through clips with ease. In addition, the NHL will also make its own long-form and short-form content available on the video destination site.
Sling is one of the new companies that is radically changing how, and especially where, people consume content.
Ben White (pictured below), Sling Media’s Entertainment Group chief creative officer spoke at NextMedia in Banff this week. Just prior to that, he chatted with Cartt.ca editor and publisher and Slingbox owner Greg O’Brien. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: Let’s talk about the Slingbox first of all and then how this is morphed into the Sling Entertainment Group and what you’re going to be doing differently going forward. For those who don’t know, what’s Sling about?
Ben White: Sling was really born out of kind of consumer frustration from (CEO) Blake (Krikorian) and his brother Jason who are big sports fans and TV fans and were frustrated because… they wanted to watch baseball and the notion of the Slingbox was born out of that. And I think the last, , 18-24 months.
, it’s been about establishing a brand. And I would say really creating and defining a segment, that segment being place-shifting.
GOB: I’ve even used the mobile beta software as well. 
BW: The mobile app. Yeah, that’s the one that gets the girls as far as I’m concerned. , it’s like you pull out the mobile app and everybody in the room is like, you “I can’t believe it – is that your TV from home?” Now, you’re not going to sit there for four hours and watch the Masters on a mobile app but it’s great for The Daily Show and it’s great for a lot of commutes and things like that.
I’m on my Verizon phone or I’m on this device or that device and I’m supposed to pay extra money to be able to access some video clips, but not all of them. I don’t really know what I’m getting. And it’s hard for consumers to get their head around which is why I think a lot of video, wireless video, hasn’t taken off as much as it could.
GOB: Well, Rogers has You Tube clips and a deal with Yahoo up here and CanWest Global offers Blackberry TV up in Canada while each carrier has MobiTV, so it can be very confusing.
BW: And that’s what’s so cool about what our offering is? All we have make you understand is that you download the app, and then you’re accessing your home television. I think that’s one of the things that resonates with consumers so much; it’s really the thing that you can attribute the success we’ve had so far – which is that we’ve been incredible at replicating that comfortable living room environment across a huge variety of screens and saying, , right down to all the remote control customization that we do.
GOB: Now why and how have you morphed and added an entertainment division to this?
BW: Basically you could see the progression. We’re in the consumer electronic space, specialists in video delivery. I think the idea of expanding into an entertainment and media kind of services business, that – if you will, live outside of a box — doesn’t necessarily require people to own and buy a Slingbox, but allows us to reach and continue expanding our distribution points. It expands the number of eyeballs that we can potentially reach.
So, the Sling Entertainment Group is focused on how do we partner with content owners, be they media companies, sports leagues, etc. in order to deliver these rich interactive experiences that leverage our expertise in video, leverage the strong connection we already have with users with the brand? It also leverages the existence of the Slingbox in our eco system to both create content, share it, and make it more viable, and in the end again get it out in front of more people.
GOB: Tell me about Clip + Sling, in the context of the NHL deal that was announced. How is that going to work and what is it going to look like?
BW: Clip and Sling is a feature that’ll be added to the Sling Player software that’s going to allow users to make clips from, in the case of the NHL, a hockey game. So, you’re watching a hockey game, you see a great play, and you’ll be able to, in the player, track back to where the play was, make a clip of that play, and send it out immediately to your friends and family and share it with a bunch of likeminded hockey fans.
GOB: But I could make a clip of the NHL and put it on YouTube myself, but it’s not especially easy – or as easy sounding as this since I’ve already got a Slingbox and would just need to add some software.
BW: I’m glad you mentioned that, because it’s not like you can’t do it now. The point is that for our existing Slingbox owners and for the future of the market, we’re diversifying, we’re adding more features and we’re removing a lot of barriers and obstacles that exist right now in making and sharing clips on the web. So, right now you’ve got to have a TV tuner card, you have to have some video editing software, you need to know what you’re doing when it comes to encoding that video, uploading it all, that kind of stuff.
The new Clip and Sling service will do all of that stuff for our users in a matter of a few clicks and mere moments.
GOB: Is it a Sling-user-to-Sling-user type of thing?
BW: You don’t have to be a Slingbox owner to view it. So, all of a sudden we’re taking all the passion of the current Slingbox owners, adding this feature allowing them to be the ones who are generating all the clips and then pushing them out to friends, family, etc. and allowing, all those people to view.
GOB: Now, this type of thing can be somewhat frightening to traditional broadcasters and producers. What message do you bring to them that says “Don’t fear us, come and partner with us,” like the NHL has?
BW: The reality is our approach toward this is all about partnerships. We’re talking to all the content owners and our track record proves that we’ve had a huge amount of respect for the rights of the content owners.
The Slingbox today, is a one-to-one connection. It’s an encrypted stream. The way we see it, we’re extending the service that consumers already pay dearly for, i.e., their cable subscription, their DVR, all those things at home, and we’re just allowing them to access that service from wherever they are. We’re going to take that same respect for those content owners into everything that we’re doing. And again, that has us out there right now having the conversation with all the leagues and all the media companies and all the content producers saying “hey, what we have here is a great solution for you, because if you look at the music business, this stuff happens anyway.”
The attractiveness of our solution actually is that it is a solution for the media companies to a lot of those problems. Once they sit down and talk with us, they understand that what we’re doing by virtue of our unique connection to the television set, we are able to learn a lot more about where the clips are coming from, know a lot more about where the clips are going and have a better idea of the attribution of those clips, right? Who they belong to, and what exactly they are. So by the time they make their way up and they’re getting shared and millions of eyeballs are seeing those clips, we’re in a position to share in the wealth so to speak.
We’re going to be doing ad deals with all those partners and if there’s advertisement running alongside any of those pieces of content, they’re going to share in the revenue from that. It’s a much more controlled environment in terms of respecting the content owners because all the stuff that’s coming from kind of a known environment and we’re spending a huge amount of engineering effort making sure that we have metadata for the consumers too, so when a clip comes from the NHL we know it’s from a game. And when it gets pushed up, we have all the great information that consumers would want anyway telling them what exactly this clip is.
GOB: Now, is this a PC to PC or PC to TV or TV to TV service? How do people send it? And how do you ensure that the clip isn’t posted to YouTube or someplace the content owner doesn’t want it to go to?
BW: This happens via a video destination portal that we’re working on – it’s all going to happen via the web. So, all the friend to friend stuff happens with e-mails and things that get pushed around saying hey, I sent you a clip, go check it out. You go check that out on the web… The hope is we create a huge amount of ad inventory and again, we’re working with the content partners and respecting the fact that this is their content.
I like to think that this is kind of a win-win for everyone, because the consumers are going to have a destination where they can easily find their way and navigate through content that they’re familiar with because we have all this meta-information around it. And then on the media company side, they’re going to have much better control, they’re going to know what content of theirs is up and they’re going to see a cheque (from ads sold around viewed clips).
GOB: Is this all going to be generated from the Sling users, or will there be anything generated by the media companies themselves?
BW: I’m glad you asked that. We’re starting with Clip and Sling — all about short-form clips… but we’re also doing partnerships with a lot of different media companies that are going to give us access and allow us to distribute long-form content as well (the company has a deal with CBS)… So you could take the short form clip and obviously that’s great marketing to get you into long form.
Let’s say there’s some incredible joke from Two and a Half-Men or there’s some awesome scene from CSI. Or you’re a huge Andy Rooney fan on 60 Minutes. Any of those things could be great entry points into watching the full long-form of the show.
… You put a lot of control into the user’s hands, so, it doesn’t feel like you’re going to some destination where there are only dictated pieces of content that are just for the web – you’ve seen a lot of those sites.
Instead, it’s a place where the community and the users and the fans are really getting involved. They’re getting involved because they’re spending their time making great clips, they’re that passionate about it. And you can see how – I think a different kind of community can sprout around that than would happen if it was just media companies themselves pushing clips out into this site or that site.
It’s more organic and that’s what we think is so exciting and different about it.
