Sling Media CEO Discusses Deals With Leagues, Future Products

Sling Media's Blake Krikorian

Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian took part in a One-on-One interview yesterday during the Fantasy Sports Association Sports Media & Technology Conference in N.Y. Slingbox has made headlines this year by signing a deal with the NHL, and its legitimacy in the marketplace was secured when the company was recently purchased by EchoStar.  Krikorian said the company "always had a hope that content owners across the board, whether it was sports or other forms of media owners, would see the light in terms of our technologies." He said, "The licensing of sports content in the digital world is much more straightforward than movies or television shows, because there’s typically one owner of the property. The buck stops there, and we don’t have to go all the way down to the guilds, because we can see what is happening today with the screenwriters and other guilds. With the exception of MLB, all the major sports have things pretty much consolidated into one place, whether it's digital, or audio or other technologies." Krikorian said EchoStar intends to spin Sling, along with some in-house technology, "into a separate company." Krikorian: "While there may have been some synergies and some leverage points of being all one big happy family, now we’ll be a technology provider to Dish Network, but we’ll also be an independent company. Our ability to bundle the Dish Network into a deal with a sports league will now be pretty handicapped, but it frees us up to work with multiple operators."

CLIP & SAVE: Krikorian said the company has a new product in the works called Clip and Sling that lets users with a Slingbox watching a game to "hit a button and a very basic video editing screen pops up."  Krikorian: "I can start, stop and sling the video immediately to all my friends, even if they don’t have a Slingbox. I think this can really change the way people socialize around sports."