Blake Krikorian is CEO of Sling Media, purveyor of the SlingBox, which allows users to stream content from their home television to either a laptop or mobile device.
Q: Mobile television and video services have continued to grow in scale and quality over the past 18 months. What do you find most compelling about SlingPlayer Mobile?
A: Well I think the thing that I find most compelling is actually what every customer we’ve run into, frankly any consumer we’ve run into, their reaction to the product has been as well. There is interest in watching video, being entertained on a mobile handset, frankly on any display and the thing that’s really compelling about the SlingPlayer is that, coupled with the SlingBox it’s not just any kind of video entertainment. It’s video entertainment that you’ve come to love and know for the past several decades, which has been your living room TV content, whether that is your live TV channels or something that you might have prerecorded on a DVR. Basically, it’s the stuff that you already know and the stuff that you’re really interested in, it’s not a subset of channels. What’s more is that when you look at a lot of the video offerings that have been put on mobile phones besides SlingPlayer and SlingBox, if you really ask yourself as a consumer, it’s pretty obvious that a lot of those offerings were not really thinking too much about us as people and what we’re looking for, but instead were some industry-driven sort of top-down initiatives to give people, frankly a subset of what they were looking for at best. Some of the movement has been toward delivering appointment-based viewing, essentially live streaming of certain channels or certain content. And the thing that is really interesting when you think about that as opposed to on-demand content, if you will, or time-shifted content, is that a lot of people will say that appointment-based viewing even in the living room is dead. I don’t necessarily agree with that, I still believe people will watch certain types of content live as opposed to being prerecorded, you know things such as American Idol or event-based programming such as sports.
Q: In mobile-industry speak, SlingPlayer Mobile is about as off-deck as it gets. Can you talk about what off-deck means to you?
A: What off-deck means to me is frankly is applications or services that were not pre-bundled with the phone and inside of the walled garden, but instead content, services, applications that consumers really have interest in but weren’t bundled with the phone and they get access to those applications via open Internet access. Just like if you think about the vast majority of content and services that people explore and utilize on the PC. I would say a very, very small fraction of that content is what I would call on-deck. A very little bit of that content is something that came preconfigured on a laptop computer or, you know, is just inside of a Comcast.net service. People are going off to a variety of other sites whether it’s Facebook or myspace or any other type of service. And if you look at that usage, I mean I don’t know any data there, but I’d willing to bet that probably the vast majority, 80-plus percent of services that people explore on the Internet is not given by their service provider but from other companies.
Q: Can you explain how the success of SlingPlayer Mobile could benefit wireless carriers?
A: I think the last shoe to drop is on the mobile operator side, and I’m happy to say I think that’s changing as well. … Some of the concerns have been essentially a service or application that’s so great that consumers love it so much the industry will typically figure that because consumers really love it, it must be bad for them. And if you look at really what they mean by that when we’ve heard that, it’s been that nobody questions the compelling nature of SlingPlayer and SlingBox, in fact everybody that sees this thing understands the value proposition and how people would absolutely love it, but the concern has been ‘oh my gosh, people love it so much that means that they’re actually going to use the network. And if they use the network that means we have to build out the network and that means that maybe the pricing plans that we create were not right,’ because a lot of the pricing plans that most mobile operators created, at least what they had in terms of their business model or analysis, was that people are going to pay x dollars a month for service with the hope by the mobile operators that consumers would pay, but not use the service. And we all know where that will take you — essentially that is a nice pipe dream, but at the end of the day if you’re not going to be delivering value to consumers, they’re not going to just be paying for something that is not giving them some great new experiences that make them really happy. What has happened is that I think over time, the mobile operators have seen that that idea of selling gym memberships as I like to say, which is hope that people will sign up but no one actually goes to the gym because if everybody that signed up actually went to the gym, the gym would be overflowing and they’d have to build a larger facility, they’ve realized that actually no one is coming to the gym. And actually what they really need because they’ve invested hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars on this 3G infrastructure they actually need these compelling applications that are going to drive people to use it. So as that table has sort of turned, I think that the way that the mobile operators have been viewing Sling Player is that, ‘wow, this might very well be one of, if not the, killer application that is going to get people to move to this higher-speed network.’
Q: Where do you think Sling Media falls in relation to the form-factor of mobile video and what type of content do you believe is most compelling for mobile devices?
A: Again this comes back to just looking at the consumer. All these comments about ‘well I think it’s going to be snacks or exclusive content, short form, whatever,’ you know, frankly so much of that is just utter bullshit, I mean to tell you the truth. It’s people coming up with marketing spins to justify the content that they have rights to. You go down to the store, go on any street corner, talk to people and say ‘do you want to watch television on your phone?’ and the people who will say yes, then you ask them, ‘OK, like what?’ And they’re not going to say ‘Hmm, I would prefer to like watch some like short form or some exclusive content tailored for the phone.’ They’re going to say the Super Bowl is on and I want to watch the Super Bowl or ‘The Daily Show’ is on and I recorded it on my TiVo and I want to watch it. It’s the TV programming that people know and love today and are familiar with. It’s not any of this other stuff.
