Sling Media Founder Backs Net-TV Startup
Blake Krikorian Invests Undisclosed Sum In Clicker Media
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 11/5/2009 2:10:48 PM
Blake Krikorian, founder and former CEO of Sling Media, has joined the board of Clicker Media, a Los Angeles-based startup hoping to become "the complete programming guide" for Internet television, the company announced Thursday.
Krikorian left Sling -- inventor of the Slingbox TV "place-shifting" device -- in January 2009 along with four other company executives, following its acquisition by Charlie Ergen's EchoStar for $380 million.
Krikorian also is investing an undisclosed sum in Clicker. The startup's other investors include Benchmark Capital general partner Bill Gurley, Redpoint Ventures' Geoff Yang, Clicker CEO and founder Jim Lanzone, and J.D. Heilprin, founder of ModernFeed, a Web site acquired by Clicker. Clicker has raised nearly $8 million to date, according to technology blog GigaOm, which reported Krikorian's involvement earlier Thursday.
"Blake is a proven innovator with peerless experience navigating the Internet, entertainment, cable and hardware industries, and is quite simply the best independent director Clicker could ask for," Lanzone said in a statement. "We're lucky to gain his support and guidance as we mold Clicker into the ultimate programming guide for the new era of online television." Lanzone was previously CEO of search site Ask.com.
Krikorian commented that "in this new, ever-expanding world of virtually limitless choice, there simply will not be one place that hosts all of the world's content. It will be massively dispersed. This creates the opportunity for a service like Clicker to make it easy for all of us to find, discover and keep track of the shows we like...regardless of the site or service they are hosted on."
Clicker, currently in a private beta stage of testing, claims it has indexed more than 350,000 episodes of 5,000 shows from 1,000-plus networks. The content includes broadcast programming online, original Web video, movies and music videos.
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