Sling Media will this year continue a global expansion programme and hopes follow its recent CBS agreement to try clip+sling with new content partnerships. The company, best known for its Sling Box, which lets consumers view home television programming on a PC or mobile handset, won placement for its mobile player on the UK’s 3 network in November, followed by roll-out in Denmark and Sweden. At a Mobile Entertainment Forum gathering at 3GSM, Sling’s Europe VP Stuart Collingwood said more countries would follow shortly. “We announced CBS at CES and right now we’re not making any public comment,” he told me. “But you can imagine, since CES, with CBS behind you, everybody’s been knocking on the door. We’re working our way around the rest of Europe. I’ll be down in South Africa soon [meeting with companies].”
In the first such content tie-up, Sling in Las Vegas last month unveiled clip+sling, a service allowing TV viewers to clip and share segments of programming with their friends. Speaking here in Barcelona, Collingwood said the company is “now in discussion with major content companies such as MTV” in pursuit of new hook-ups. However, sharing the same stage, MTV Networks’ Gideon Bierer, SVP-digital media, was critical of Sling’s business model, asserting “made-for-mobile” video content was better suited to handsets than programming designed for a big screen. Speaking to me later, Sling Media’s PR director Brian Jacquet said the company’s global expansion was in part allied with 3’s country-by-country roll-out plans.