Ashwin Navin, a co-founder of BitTorrent and an entrepreneur, has decided to partner with different TV networks and electronics companies, in a bid to perfect the way Smart TVs connect with the web. They believe that the mission can be accomplished by an application called “Samba”.




Thanks to his rich experience and insight with BitTorrent’s technology, Ashwin Navin is going to try his luck with the content industry. His company, Flingo, is introducing Samba – an application which turns your smart TV into an even smarter one. Samba “sees” the images on your TV screen and then accesses and searches its database to find relevant data through a face-recognition program. Once the relevant content is found, it gets transferred to other screen-based electronic devices, including smartphones and tablets. In addition the program allows to sync automatically via the web.

In other words, Flingo manages to stitch these things together based around a TV-centric experience, without trying to turn into a PC in your living room. Although this mission sounds hard, the results are amazing – syncing the TV set with virtually any other electronic device is an awesome step forward in terms of entertainment. The content industry agues that if it can find ways to connect those screens, it will manage to deepen the engagement with the show and remind consumers that they are watching TV.

Ability to match the advertisements you are seeing on your laptop with the commercials running on TV will feature tremendous potential for those companies who advertise both on TV and the Internet. By the way, the technology in question is already used by such companies as Zeebox, IntoNow, and Shazam. The thing is that to use each of these services you have to install software provided by them in order to synchronize your own TV habits with a smartphone or a tablet. The collected data (cast lists and different interactive activities) will then be transferred to a smaller screen.

However, Ashwin Navin is planning to use a much larger screen – the TV screen itself, actually. Rapidly growing in popularity, smart TVs will go nowhere else but up. The statistics say that over 43 million smart TVs will be manufactured in 2013, and over 95 million – by 2016.