Type VC funded Website Samba.tv | Key people Ashwin Navin, CEO | |
Industry Media, broadcast, television, digital cinema, Internet, Automatic Content Recognition, Social television, second screen, Smart TV, application software, Interactive TV Founded San Francisco, CA (incorporated 2008) Headquarters San Francisco, California | ||
Samba TV (formerly Flingo) is a content recommendation engine within Smart TV apps, co-founded in 2008 by early employees of BitTorrent (company), including Samba’s current CEO, Ashwin Navin. Samba TV develops software for televisions, set-top boxes, smart phones and tablets to enable interactive television through personalization. Through its portfolio of applications and TV platform technologies, Samba TV is built directly into the TV or set-top box and will recognize onscreen content—live or time-shifted—and make relevant information available to users at their request. Through APIs and SDKs for mobile application software developers, Samba TV is usable on a second screen or the TV itself. Samba TV applications are currently available on over 30 million screens in 118 countries.
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History and Features
The company was founded to help media companies like Showtime, FOX, A+E Networks, TMZ, Revision3, PBS and CBS develop apps on Smart TVs that synchronize with linear Broadcast programming and Non-linear media. In January 2012, Samba TV launched one-click sharing on social networks like Facebook and Twitter from the television. In January 2013, the company announced further developments and features and named its interactive TV platform Samba.
In September 2013, the company adopted the Samba TV name to reflect the company's focus on interactive television and market traction with signed contracts with leading players throughout the ecosystem including TV and set-top box manufacturers, advertisers, content publishers and broadcasters. In the company’s own words, the core services of Samba TV include:
Ownership
Samba TV was incorporated as Free Stream Media Corp. in 2008, a company founded by Ashwin Navin, David Harrison, Alvir Navin, Omar Zennadi and Todd Johnson. According to the public source code repository, Flingo's open source client was written by David Harrison and Omar Zennadi in Python, and is free software licensed under the GPL.
In February 2012, Flingo announced a $7 million Series A round investment from August Capital. In May 2012, Flingo added additional investors, closing at $8 million, including entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Gary Lauder. Cuban discovered Flingo at CES 2012 when he saw a crowd in the Flingo booth watching a demonstration of its SyncApps technology. The funding helped Flingo expand its presence with smart TV and device manufacturers worldwide, building on its existing partnerships.