With CES inching closer, the connected, smart, Internet-enabled TV market continuing to heat up. In fact, the Connected TV Marketing Association (CTVMA) just launched this week, which strives to promote and grow the quickly-emerging connected TV business.
One company that’s already been developing connected TV apps for three years is Flingo, a company that builds “super apps for smart TVs,” on Insignia, LG, Samsung, Vizio, Sanyo, Western Digital, and Netgear devices. Last month the company announced they’d be working with Collective Digital Studio to bring YouTube celebs The Annoying Orange, Fred, iJustine and FreddieW delivered straight to connected TV sets — a step to create a new kind of primetime on TV for these stars.
Today they announced a Smart TV app for Linkin Park (over 36 million Facebook fans and over 620,000 Twitter followers), which member Joe Hahn described as giving his band, “total creative control over the format and frequency of which we can reach viewers and listeners, an uncommon luxury for most musicians today.” They’ve also built tons of apps for TV companies.
For their first appearance at CES (they’ll be at booth 74106), they’ll be announcing new technology — called “syncapps” — that they hope will catapult the company into the forefront of the social TV market. The apps automatically detect what you’re watching, and then enable viewers to share their favorite moments with their friends.
Up until now, their main focus has been on building apps for clients to become the leading OS developers in the space and bring in revenue. They also have an open-source app called Flingo.org allowing you to fling web-video to seamlessly appear on your Smart TV (similar to how iOS’s “air-play” let’s you do this with the Apple TV). Excitingly, Flingo’s CEO & Co-Founder Ashwin Navin was also a Bit Torrent co-founder. He answered questions on what they’ll be launching at CES, building apps for TV companies, the emerging Smart TV market and how “social tv should not be confined to an app or tablet.”
Lost Remote: What TV companies have you built apps for and how has Flingo grown with the Smart TV Market?
Ashwin Navin: Fox, CBS, TV Guide, MTV (for Atom and Game Trailers), Warner Brothers Television, TMZ. When all of these [Smart TVs] first came to market a year and a half ago, Netflix, Pandora, maybe a Facebook or Twitter app and maybe a weather application was all that existed. We wanted to bring a lot more and allow content creators to launch more apps and brand them. We brought 70 to the market so someone like Fred or FreddieW, with over 10 million subscribers on YouTube can have their own app sitting next to Netflix
LR: What’s your business model?
AN: Sponsor driven – all of the videos carry a sponsor and have a placement. In the ecosystem, the advertiser gets brand name inventory, media company gets a percentage, Flingo gets a percentage and the TV manufactuerer gets a percentage.
Lost Remote: Why are you giving the manufacturers a cut?
AN: Consumer electronic manufacturing is a terrible business now, it exists in a very low margin, when they open their platform up to content. We align everyone’s interests by involving them in the revenue. By next year there will be many more millions of [Smart] TVs in these households. The difficulty right now, is the TV manufacturers are not software companies. The challenges we have to overcome, is to develop software for their platforms that’s easy to go live. Only Netflix can afford to hire 20 engineers to do it.
Lost Remote: What’s the future of Smart TVs and Flingo?
AN: Don’t change too much, just make it do more things. Google TV flopped because it tried too much. Now that Walmart bought Vudu and Best Buy bought CinemaNow if you want to be on their shelves you’ll have to be a Connected TV.
What we are working on next is “syncapps,” which lets you easily share your broadcast TV experience with friends. We think this is the missing piece in the social TV movement: where your TV automatically detects what you’re watching, and lets you easily post to FB or Twitter with one click of the remote. Its like building Shazam into the TV and improving the performance and ease of use A LOT.
