Airborne Media Group Inc.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: COMPANY

INITIAL LIGHT BULB Working at the Old Tymers Cafe, a sports bar and restaurant in downtown Durango, Ryan Danford and Justin Ginn learned time and time again that a noisy crowd at a sports bar makes it very difficult to hear play-by-play, especially with multiple games playing on omnipresent flatscreen TVs. They saw a possible solution: smartphones.

They approached Chip Lile of another Durango bar, El Rancho, and Cordell Brown, a veteran of the wireless Internet business who relocated from Houston to Durango after selling his previous company.

Both of them liked the idea, and Airborne Media Group was born. "They de-mothballed me and got me involved," says Brown, who now serves as the company's CEO.

The company ramped up development of its technology, Audioair, that would provide the missing link between televisions for the eye and smartphones for the ear.

The use of smartphones allows for delivery of all sorts of relevant content, Brown says. "In the sports bar market, they saw the need," he explains. "How can people experience the rich content?"

IN A NUTSHELL Now up and running in more than 50 venues, Audioair is Airborne Media Group's solution for the noisy sports bar.

"We use wi-fi to transmit an encoded message from the satellite or cable box to your smartphone or mobile device," Brown explains. Users download an app and select the channel they want to hear. "Then it's simply a matter of putting in the earbud or holding the speaker up to your ear."

The latency is nearly nil, Brown says, so sound and vision sync up almost perfectly. "On the play-by-play, you can't even notice it."

Audioair debuted in September 2011 at the Uptown Sports Bar and Grill in Albuquerque, N.M...