VentureBeat

Sling Media, known primarily for the SlingBox, a device that can stream your home television signal to you anywhere in the world, is branching onto the web today with a limited beta release of Sling.com, a video portal that will let users not only watch premium and live video content, but also share clips of their favorite shows with friends.

Sling.com will give users access to a library of video content — movies, television and popular clips from 60 content partners — making it competitive with services like Hulu, Joost and Jadsters. What is unique, however, is the inclusion of PC-based SlingPlayer software that will let users watch their live or DVR’ed TV through the site (if they already own a SlingBox, that is), as well as an eventual Clip+Sling option that will let them record and share bits and pieces of video content with their friends through a social network.

Combined, these features might not be enough to make a serious run at popular YouTube, with its user-generated content, but Hulu and its ilk should sit up and take notice. The site isn’t fully baked yet. A select group of users received an invitation to a private beta yesterday, nearly two years after the company announced its intention to launch a portal. There will probably be several rounds of feedback before the site sees the full light of day.

This is just one of several ideas the company has thrown at the public in the last couple weeks, the biggest of which is the SlingCatcher, a $300 device that will let viewers watch any video existing on the web on their living room televisions. They aren’t alone in this pursuit. Startup ZeeVee is marketing a set-top box that will deliver whatever is on your computer’s screen to any television, and the Digital Entertainer EVA8000 by Netgear will do largely the same. As of yet, the pricey Sling device doesn’t seem to differ. As a footnote to their other developments, Sling last week shipped its new SlingBox PRO-HD hardware, capable of catching and streaming HD programming.

BitGravity is a bit player in the world of moving video through the web. But it believes in rounding up some powerful partners.

The Burlingame, Calif.-based company is announcing today that it has raised $2.5 million from media dealmaker Allen & Co. and Blake Krikorian, cofounder and CEO of Sling Media, the maker of the popular Sling Box. (Sling Media is now owned by EchoStar.) Krikorian will join the BitGravity board.

BitGravity has created a technology that is good at moving video from one place to another on the Internet. That job is the domain of “content delivery network” companies such as Akamai. But Perry Wu, chief executive of BitGravity, believes his company is more efficient at moving high-definition video and live multimedia on the web. Most CDNs were created a decade ago, in the era of long delays, slow modems, and download errors. Those frustrations are no longer acceptable for today’s Internet users.

BitGravity’s BitCast technology tries to eliminate some of the overhead costs associated with routing and processing. It uses a 10-gigabit-per-second network, allowing for larger Internet packet sizes and fewer data bottlenecks. But no special clients or servers are necessary for customers. Among its features are the ability to enable live broadcasting on the Internet, secure delivery of content, and faster delivery times.

While it is a smaller player, BitGravity signed up Tata Communications as a partner and it now has hundreds of big customers using its services. Among the sites using BitGravity are CollegeHumor.com, Revision 3, Tom Green, and Steve Hatch Racing.

Founded in 2006, BitGravity has been bootstrapped until now. Perry Wu, a former general partner at ComVentures, said that he believed in holding out as long as possible before accepting outside money. But this new investors will help the money achieve its business goals, Wu said. The company has 50 employees and Wu hopes to double that by the end of the year.

(He called this strategy “The Marshmallow Test” in a guest editorial for VentureBeat. In the story, a researcher put a marshmallow in front a child and told the kid not to eat it or he or she wouldn’t get the second marshmallow. He did this 400 times and tracked the results. Those who held out for the second marshmallow turned out to have much better school grades and careers. By extension, Wu believes that entrepreneurs who wait as long as possible to raise money will fare better and get a higher valuation).

The company has been generating revenue since its launch in 2007. Wu said that the company’s executives, including cofounder Barrett Lyon, didn’t take salaries for 18 months. Besides big companies such as Akamai, there are smaller rivals such as Andolis, which is trying to use “peer-to-peer” technology to create a low-cost CDN.

Did Wu take the first marshmallow by raising money? “I took a nibble,” he said. “I followed my own advice.”

Echostar, a satellite TV provider, has purchased Sling Media, the maker of the Slingbox device that lets consumer record and play television shows on computers and mobile phones, for $380 million.

Sling raised two rounds of funding for a total of $56.6 million,

Echostar participated in its second round — a cool $46.6 million in January 2006, that also included investment from Allen & Company, Goldman Sachs and Liberty Media.

It previously raised $10.5 million in a November 2004 round from Mobius Venture Capital, DCM (Doll Capital Management), Hearst Media Corporation, and others.

DCM, Sling’s largest VC shareholder, made a 10x return on the investment from its first round alone, it says, calling the purchase one of the “most successful post-bubble exits among consumer-device plays in digital media.”

Lots of action this week, as two technology conferences compete for attention. Here’s the latest:

–At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that started last night, Micrsoft’s Bill Gates announced Windows Home Server software, to be made available in the second half of 2007. It wants to become the center of a home’s computer network, from photo and video storage to television, to accessing computer files at the office while away from home. (More details here and here, at the Mercury News, which also summarizes seperate plans by Micrsoft to make the Xbox 360 console a set-top box for Internet protocol television, or IPTV, by the end of the year.)

–This sets up a showdown with Apple Computer’s MacWorld in San Francisco beginning tomorrow, where Apple’s Steve Jobs is expected to provide more details on its iTV set-top box.

–The big question is whether Jobs will also unveil a rumored Apple phone, dubbed by some the iPhone, but unlikely to be called that. See review of other most likely stuff to be announced at MacWorld. And regarding the phone, evidence that something was up showed up a couple of months ago, with some more speculated details here last month. Now, the expectations have reached frenzied levels: “Apple is about to touch off a nuclear war,” Paul Mercer, a designer of software for hand-helds tells the New York Times: “The Nokias and the Motorolas will have to respond.”

–HP has a new HP Pavilion tx1000 Entertainment Notebook PC with high-speed cellular technology EVDO built-in, available in February for $1,2999, giving users a way to get online without needing WiFi.

–Sling Media, of San Mateo, has unveiled a new device, called the SlingCatcher, which will take video and audio from you PC or from your TiVo recordings in your living room, and transfer them to another TV in another room in your house. It will sell for under $200 by mid-2007. The SlingCatcher attaches to TVs, and comes with both wired and wireless networking. It lets you transfer just about anything online — from YouTube videos, or Flickr photos — to any TV.

Silicon Valley never sleeps. Here’s the latest tech stuff:

Digg subverted — The news site that ranks stories based on how many users submit them, is being subverted by a group called Spike the Vote. It lets its members conspire to submit certain URLs of stories — thereby lifting the odds those stories will get front-page coverage.

MyBlogLog goes live — This is a site we’ve mentioned before, while it was in testing mode. It hasn’t changed its basic model, so we’ll refer to that earlier story for the full background. MyBlogLog has provided a way for bloggers and other sites to get more information about its visitors. One of its offerings is a “recent readers widget,” which shows the photos/avatars of the recent readers on a site. So for example, every time we show up at blog of venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who has implemented the widget (see lower left hand side), we are surprised to we see our own face. It is opt-in, so if you haven’t signed up to MyBlogLog, your photo won’t be there).

Three of the four major music companies make money off of YouTube deal — This is a bizarre. Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony and Bertelsmann’s jointly owned Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and the Warner Music Group — each quietly negotiated small ownership stakes in YouTube as part of video- and music-licensing deals they struck shortly before the sale to Google, the New York Times is reporting. The music companies collectively stand to receive as much as $50 million from these arrangements, sources told the Times.

Moreover, the music companies rushed to complete the deal ahead of the YouTube deal, in part so that they could benefit in the jump in YouTube’s value, the Times said.

Sounds a bit like extortion, in other words: Wink, nudge, you let us make $50 million, and we’ll let you acquire YouTube and leave you alone legally — for the time being.”

Sneak preview of the Sling Media for Mac — Here.

The $1,200/year online calendar — Trumba has some guts. The Seattle start-up (which we mentioned here), backed by profit-focused firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, August Capital and Oak Investment Partners, is lifting its price to $99 a month from $39.95 — even though a host of free competing calendar offerings exist on the market. We don’t get this one. (Via Jeff Nolan).

Paul Graham always makes you think — The essayist has written “The 18 Mistakes that Kill Start-ups” and it’s great reading.

Friendster says it has a new patent — Liz Gannes at Gigaom says social networking company Friendster called her up to chat about the new patent it has , which Friendster says covers uploading a photo and associating it with someone you are connected to on an online social network. Friendster says it should extend to “videos, audio, comments,” and any other content type, supported in public or private forums, within a social network. But we don’t see any reference to video or audio in the patent text, so we’re not sure what they’re talking about. We’ve contacted Friendster to check.

SF’s WiFi project derailed, or seriously delayed, by crazy nut jobs — Or so says David Freeberg. Sounds like Google’s Chris Sacca was right when he blew up in frustration about this earlier.

Google Optimizer — If you are an advertiser on Google, this new tool lets you experiment with different headlines, copy, and images that people see when they click on an ad link and come to your site. This experimentation, Google says, will let you find out which combination results in the most conversions.

Washington is in sad state of ignorance — On Tuesday, we referred to comments made by the AeA’s Bill Archey, a lobbyist for high-tech, bemoaning the ignorance most members of Congress show on technology issues. Eric Schmidt, chief exec of Google, made a similar point Tuesday: Those in the know about technology must spend more time reaching out to governments and helping them understand the Internet’s role in society, he said: “The average person in government is not of the age of people who are using all this stuff,” ZDNet quoted Schmidt saying. “There is a generational gap, and it’s very, very real.”

Kongregate lets game developers make money directly — This is a San Francisco start-up that lets game developers upload their Flash-based games, and gives them a cut in any revenue made from users. It is in a closed testing phase, but is eager for feedback. Founder Jim Greer told us yesterday the company is raising a seed round of capital.