Tech Visions: TV extends its reach

The impact of place-shifted video...

The power of broadcasters to dictate what you watch and when is waning. Silicon Valley-based Howard Greenfield looks at what's accelerating that trend and giving businesses easy remote access to video. He talks to Blake Krikorian, the man behind the Slingbox streaming device that lets you watch your home TV from anywhere on the internet.

First, TiVo lets you time-shift video and watch it whenever you wanted. Now the small rectangular Slingbox allows you to place-shift - to watch your TV, cable, or PVR/TiVo system from anywhere with a broadband link.

This new reach for television signals a revolution. Consumers' viewing options will open up even further and the incumbent studios and broadcasters will have to invent new ways of securing and monetising their precious intellectual property.

Sling Media is not as big as Cisco or Apple but it embodies today's major shifts in interactive media and rights management. Last month's agreement by pay-TV provider EchoStar Communications to acquire Sling Media for $380m provides strong evidence of the Slingbox maker's likely impact on the industry.

Big push power from broadcasters is waning. Consumers increasingly expect to pull media that comes to them, to select and control it themselves.

The days of passive consumer media behaviour fade into the distance as companies enable features such as Sling Media's clip and sling that allows you to cut up content with a simple editing tool and seamlessly send it via email or post it to a web portal.

Audiences want to mix and match from different media sources and aggregate personalised playback. They want to share - with or without final integration or industry supervision.

The company has many global business relationships including ViaSat, 3, and Hutchinson Whampoa, which sells its handsets with the Slingbox application through the likes of Dixons pre-installed on Symbian-based handsets as well as reselling the Slingbox device itself.

The Slingbox costs less than £100 and uses a Texas Instruments DSP to encode video digitally in real-time from component sources - 480i to 480p, 720p and 1080i - and transmit it as protected Windows Media Video (WMV) format for streaming at resolutions up to 640x480.

Each Slingbox has a unique 32-digit alphanumeric ID. Customers assign passwords to their device. Because only one SlingPlayer software client can connect to a Slingbox at a time, the content remains personalised. Yet the practice of allowing video retransmission over the internet - even though it's only to yourself - is creating waves in the entertainment business.

Blake Krikorian, Sling Media's CEO and co-founder, explained his company's place in this historic shift during an interview at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters just before the EchoStar announcement.

Greenfield: Is Slingbox being used in enterprise media and IT environments?
Krikorian: I believe Disney is using Slingboxes in post-production. They plug in video post-processing machines into Slingboxes so they can sling dailies to people either onsite where the machine is not accessible or to people that are offsite. We've had fire departments starting to use Slingboxes so that when they are out fighting fires they can use a cell phone or laptop to view what helicopter cameras from the local news are showing.

We've got government agencies using it for things I won't go into. But also consider traffic cameras, typically very expensive, but in limited volume, requiring expensive T1 lines going to the camera. Now we have television networks, like KPIX here in California, that are actually using Slingboxes and maybe a wireless modem that they can put in a lot of places they never could before like ferries on the [San Francisco] Bay.

Procter & Gamble and other large companies want to use it as an efficient yet inexpensive way to deliver their content to a lot of other satellite offices. We're starting to ramp up a group to focus in on that because there're so many applications we hadn't really envisioned when we developed the technology.

How does an upstart like Sling Media, which shipped its first product in 2005, expect to close the gap with Goliaths like Viacom?
One, you have attitude and educational issues, if people just dig their heels in and don't understand what the technology is you've got a problem. You'll grow at the expense of another part of the business, that whole 'innovator's dilemma' sort of scenario, and then last but not least, you have to have the proper business model alignment.

So, for guys like us, when we first came out with the Slingbox, there was a lot of concern from the content owners about anything new that changes things that empower the consumer.

And then they see that, 'oh, it doesn't allow the consumer to sling to 5,000 people? Oh, it only allows the one person? Well, that's OK'. Is Sling Media yet another P2P file-sharing company such as Napster, Grokster, Kazaa? Do they have horns?

How will the likes of Google and Viacom resolve the content rights issue?
The consumer and the technology are going to push on these rights and these territorial issues but it's going to keep on going forward. Those experiences, the relationships, the technology is going to continue to adapt. If YouTube gets too much resistance, there's someone else who's going to take that mantle.

What's really causing the dispute?
If you look at most of the content providers most of their life blood has been advertising inventory. If you have a company coming in that wants to control the ad inventory - well, I've met Philippe Dauman [current CEO of Viacom] and he's a pretty reasonable guy. He's just got a business to run. The technology guys try to paint the content guys as evil and they're not.

Is an accord ever likely between content owners and tech providers?
You can't underestimate the importance of delivering great experiences to the consumer. In the past the consumer didn't have as much power so things could be force-fed. Now the consumer has to have a say in things and has to be delighted but also the business models need to make sense. So what you see with the copyright battle between Google and Viacom has less to do with Viacom trying to stop innovation, and more to do with business models that are conflicting between those two companies.

How will you lead Sling Media through this maze without becoming road kill?
The responsibility of any new tech company is to get out there and explain. We were fortunate enough that a lot of those technology and content companies would take our meetings at the beginning. They started to realise we are trying to empower the consumer and also be very respectful about how we've implemented the technology. We want to find a way that will work for the industry as well as the consumer.

So, we got past that stage. A lot of the networks and content holders said look, we see this technology and we see you're trying to do the right things. What if we got behind some of this stuff? How could we turn it into something powerful even though there's going to be disruption somewhere through the cycle?

Is Sling Media a driver or a by-product of the TV 2.0 revolution?
In the past, interactivity has been on computer screens whereas the TV has been held captive on the TV display. So, everyone has always talked about bringing the interactivity or the web to the television. Well, it didn't happen.

We just did exactly the opposite of what everyone was talking about for 20 years which is bring the TV to this interactive platform. So, now I'm watching the news, and I click here, and out slides the traffic reports in a graphical format, or you're watching a particular commercial and you click here if you want more information. So, there's a whole bunch of enhancements we can start to roll out that are very easily implemented.