Transgaming CEO Vikas Gupta presents at the M Partners Tech12 Conference

CEO Vikas Gupta says Transgaming’s ultimate goal is to deliver a premium content collection in much the same way Sony and HBO have.Five hundred channels and nothing on? Transgaming is changing that, says its CEO.

Transgaming (TSX:TNG) CEO Vikas Gupta was second to present at the M Partners Tech12 Conference this morning in Toronto.

Gupta opened by talking about how consumer consumption habits have changed in the home. The Transgaming CEO says people now expect their living room to be interactive and connected the way the rest of their online lives are.

Gupta says the smart TV trend is starting to hit its stride, quoting data that says 152-million smart TV units a year will ship by 2016. He says Transgaming solves “The big smart TV problem”. This problem is three-pronged, he says. Consumers, offers Gupta, have a demand for content that is interactive and varied like an app store. Service providers are dealing with consumers who have been cutting the cord. Lastly, Transgaming is helping TV makers get up to speed on the software business, where they traditionally do not have expertise.

Toronto-based Transgaming got its start more than a decade ago, designing porting software that allowed PC gamers to play games on other platforms without the time and cost of rewriting code. The software became especially useful to gaming giant Electronics Arts because it could save money on coders while publishing simultaneously on multiple platforms. With this model, TransGaming revenue crept up from $1.59 million in fiscal 2008 to $5.07 in fiscal 2011. Two years ago, however, the company announced a more ambitious plan; it was partnering with Intel to create GameTreeTV, an on demand gaming system that works much the way Netflix does for movies.

While the rollout of the GameTreeTV was plagued by delays, momentum in 2012 has been decisive, including the acquisition earlier this year of the interactive TV division of Oberon Media, a New York-based games distributor. That pickup added more than a hundred game titles to TransGaming’s portfolio, including iconic Hasbro titles such as Scrabble, Risk, and Monopoly.

Gupta says Transgaming ultimate goal is to deliver a premium content collection in much the same way Sony and HBO have.