Mark Cuban invests in social TV startup Flingo

By Natan Edelsburg 

We uncovered Flingo back in November of last year, a company cofounded by Bit-Torrent cofounder Ashwin Navin. Back then the company was focused on building connected TV apps for a wide range of television and entertainment clients. At CES in January the company made some big social announcements around their platform with launch partner A+E Networks.

This February the company raised $7 million and today they’ve announced that Shark and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Gary Lauder will invest another $1 million in series A funding. We’re upset that Navin wasn’t forced to present on ABC’s Shark Tank but are happy that cash continues to pour into social TV. We interviewed him about the announcement.

Lost Remote: How is Flingo working with Fox, A+E Networks, Showtime, Warner Bros., CBS, Blip, Vimeo and Linkin Park?

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Ashwin Navin: Flingo has created Smart TV apps for all of these companies. If you own a Smart TV, you will see these apps in your app store next to Netflix, Hulu and YouTube. We have also developed a platform for these companies to synchronize their TV app with linear programming to enable interactive TV features on top of the traditional, scheduled TV.

LR: How have they helped networks make TV more social since CES?

AN: Flingo works closely with networks to share both the lessons we have learned from our own usability testing, as well as learn more about the product and revenue strategy the networks have in mind for our platform.

LR: Why did you go after funding and what will it be used for?

AN: We’ll use the funding to continue attracting the best and brightest people. In North America, we’re busy deploying infrastructure to fingerprint and analyze hundreds of linear feeds from the leading broadcasters and cable networks in realtime, 24 hours a day.

LR: Did Mark Cuban ask you to go on Shark Tank? If he did, would you have? How did you get him interested in investing?

AN: We were able to get Cuban on board by showing a demo on the CES floor and doing some follow on due diligence with his team. After chatting with him about how Flingo wants to enhance linear programming, Cuban was much more excited about our strategy than other Smart TV platforms which seek to marginalize linear programming.

LR: How do you think your background as the co-founder of BitTorrent has helped you navigate the new social TV world?

AN: For one thing, most major media companies remember me as the guy within BitTorrent who sought to partner with media companies, not fight them. So there was a pre-existing relationship in place, and a lot more trust and shared-understanding. Executing long-lasting partnerships with studios and networks is something I’ve been working on for years now.

Furthermore, because I ran a very strong engineering team who invented many novel things, people take our product development seriously. People know we have seen real scale, recruit great people and know how to build for large-scale deployments.

Lastly, I think of a lot folks see BitTorrent as the original social TV company because it formed affinity groups around videos that members of a group want access to. The sharing of bits between that group made the video more available, and that’s a very fundamental Social TV application.

At Flingo we are going to take the social TV movement to a whole new level. With deep Facebook and Twitter integration, we enable you to evangelize your favorite TV moments among your friends, and also very quickly discover what your friends think is cool. All of this will happen within your TV and made accessible with a few clicks of your remote control.

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