Cinemacraft receives investment from Samsung Ventures, prepping smart TV interface

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You may recall back in December when I caught up with Cinemacraft CEO Sandeep Casi, whose Videogram solution is gradually turning some heads in the media industry. Their alliance with Turner Broadcasting after their 12-week Turner Media Camp has apparently been a fruitful one, helping them get official embed status for displaying Videograms inline on Twitter [1].

And now today the company announced that it recently closed a $775,000 round of funding from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation and Tyra Banks, who has an investment company called Fierce Capital.

Cinemacraft is also launching a new Smart TV interface, a mockup of which can be found over on videogram.com/show/samsung/on-tv.html. Some of you may recognize this as a mockup of Samsung’s On TV panel, though as far as I can tell this doesn’t necessarily mean that Samsung is going to adopt it anytime soon. As we learned the last time we spoke with Casi, his company often whips up such mockups for companies on spec, and that strategy looks to be working.

Casi could not elaborate on when or where their new Smart TV interface would launch, but it’s good to see Cinemacraft attract the interest of Samsung Ventures.

I had a chance to visit the startup’s office here in Tokyo a few weeks back, and developers Alex Wilhelm and Hiroyuki Fukuhara demonstrated Videogram’s Leap Motion integration, and that was really fun to see. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, their Videogram app is available in the Leap Motion Airspace Store for free.

I can’t help but imagine a few years down the road when I’m sitting in my living room, swiping through TV listings Minority Report style.

The Cinemacraft team is a small one, but so far they’ve accomplished quite a lot. The company also announced a new ad unit today, which you can see below. The key feature here is the shoe panel ad placement in the lower right, an interesting alternative to annoying video pre-roll advertising.


  1. My guess is that Facebook support is not too far away.  ↩