“We’re just really excited on where we get to take the company now,” said Blake Krikorian, Sling Media’s founder and CEO, as we kicked off a phone interview late in the evening to discuss the recent announcement that EchoStar would be purchasing Sling Media to the tune of some $380 million in cash and stock. No doubt Blake has been running in circles since the announcement, but devoted time to talk with me and the SlingCommunity about the buyout, what it means to the company, and what it could mean for devoted Slingbox fans everywhere.

I’ve read reports that Blake and Co. is pretty excited and enthusiastic about being swallowed up by EchoStar. As soon as we started talking I could immediately tell these reports were true. Blake wasted no time diving right into the details, and telling me about everything this acquisition means to Sling Media:

Blake Krikorian: I think we’re just going to be able to accelerate like crazy. Not that we’ve been moving slow to begin with, but this is going to give us a lot of juice that we were looking for and will let us really start to focus more on what we do.

You know the Sling brand is obviously something that’s really important to us and to our customers. All the products we have out there now and all the people who’ve bought a Slingbox… we’ll continue to support them with new software. And, we’re going to be rolling out new Slingboxes, SlingCatchers, Clip+Sling, new SlingPlayers, and hopefully be getting a chance to work with Dish Network, which would be terrific.

We’re in a position where Charlie’s [Charlie Ergen - CEO, EchoStar] going to be giving us the full freedom to continue to sell products at retail, work with other operators like with what we’re doing with DirecTV right now and UPC in Holland… it’s really great. You might have seen that other press release that they came out with today talking about a possible spin-out. Obviously I can’t comment too much on that, but the one thing that’s obvious, at least after you learn more about it because it wasn’t obvious to me right away, they’ve got an amazing set of technologies and resources. They’ve pretty much built everything themselves.

Dish has deployed more DVRs than anybody in the world, and all that software and everything that’s in those boxes and on the backend, it’s all stuff that they’ve developed. Getting access to all that really gives us the ability to accelerate some of the things that we were already working on. And maybe we can cut a deal or two here with the Dish Network guys, that’s thirteen, thirteen and a half million customers, to try and target… and the ability to combine Sling functionality with all the decryption and DVR... all that is pretty interesting.

Matt Whitlock: So you see a Dish Network / Slingbox hybrid device sometime down the road?

Blake: Sure... that’s absolutely possible. But it’s equally possible we would launch something like that with a different operator... could be in the US, could be elsewhere. Our whole business mantra has been that convergence should really mean that all my stuff works together, and it shouldn't matter who your operator is or what kind of mobile phone operating system you have. Our job is to make all that stuff just become invisible. We’re all about seamlessly connecting consumers to the content they love, regardless of their operator, the display that they’re on, or the source of that content.

Matt: So EchoStar invested in Sling Media a while back. Obviously they must have felt pretty good about that investment to take it to this level. Can you walk us through how all that came to be?

Blake: “I know Charlie has gone and visited the SlingCommunity a few times. He’s a Slinger himself. I think now he’s been using a Samsung Blackjack, so he’s out doing his demos, too. (laughs) You know, watching his Dish wherever.

They were really able to see us execute, and see how passionate of a customer we have. I mean all the guys on SlingCommunity, and not just you and those moderating, but all of the Slingers out there who participate. It’s just awesome. I read it quite a bit, but don’t post as much as I used to since I’ve had zero time. Hopefully I can step back and find some time to be more active in the community, too. They saw that, and what we have in that community is something special, you know, and we gotta grow it and keep growing it but keep it the way it is where it’s a community of people who are into it and voices are heard.

I think you’ll see as some of the new products that are rolling out, hopefully it will become pretty apparent that we’ve been listening a lot. Guys telling us we want this and that, fix this, or this things a piece of crap… we’re trying to tackle them as fast as fast and as hard as we can. And we’ll continue to do that, but at the same time hopefully come in with stuff that just blows you guys away that you’d never thought of before. Then you can say you’d like it to do this and this and this to make it better, and the cycle continues. The importance of that is just huge.

Matt: You were saying that Dish Network is going to do a lot of great things for you. So you don’t see a lot of change in the way Sling Media is doing things?

Blake: No. Definitely not, no way. We’re just going to accelerate, and be able to be more aggressive. We’ll be able to cut even better, broader, deeper deals with content owners. And so, we’re on our mission; we know what our product pipeline is and we know what our roadmaps are. As we get out into the future, we can certainly look to tweak things here and there, but it’s business as usual. The Dude is still living in his apartment...

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