Boxee Secures $6 Million Funding Round - Gets Ready to Take Over the Living Room
Boxee just announced that the company has closed a $6 million Series B financing round led by Boston-based General Catalyst with participation by prior investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Neil Sequeira from General Catalyst will join the Boxee board. Boxee will use this money to hire more developers as it gets ready to expand beyond the desktop and work on embedded versions for connected TVs, game consoles, and set-top boxes. In addition, Boxee plans to attract more content from independent producers and big media companies to its platform by offering ad-based and subscription-based services to them.
Getting Into the Living Room
The company just raised its first round of venture capital funding last November, but when we talked to Boxee's CEO Avner Ronen yesterday, he stressed that the company thinks this is the right time to expand. Ronen noted that Boxee will use the money to grow its development team to about 20 people, as it sees a chance to become a major player on connected TVs and set-top boxes. These devices are only now starting to gain a foothold in people's living rooms and will give Boxee a chance to go mainstream.
Currently, the software runs on Macs, Windows, Linux, and Apple TV, but while it is getting easier to connect a PC to a large TV set in the living room, this is definitely still a niche market. In order to reach a larger audience, Boxee will have to get its software onto TVs, game consoles, and set-top boxes directly. The company is already talking to a number of manufacturers, though Ronen wasn't ready to announce any partnerships yet.
Ronen also told us that the company plans to offer a platform for content producers and doesn't want to get into the content business itself. Instead, Boxee will give media companies and independent producers options to sell subscriptions to their content or give users access to content on an a la carte basis. Major League Baseball started to offer access to its content to its Premium subscribers on Boxee last month.
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This is awesome news! I love using Boxee, especially with the iPhone remote control app. I do wish that it had better support for Netflix and Hulu, but maybe this $6MM will help!
I second Justin's comment ... I really like Boxee but rarely use it, as there is no Netflix integration. I would also like to see Rhapsody integration!!!
The Netflix integration works really well on the Mac OS-X platform, better than Xbox 360 and Roku, etc. Their implementation of Silverlight for DRM kills the performance on the Apple TV with its weak CPU. We also hope that they give us a solution that works with the Ubuntu users.
As for Rhapsody, we've talked to the team early on, and are looking to them for a solution. That's the best part about boxee; since it's all open, your favorite providers can make plugins within the boxee framework to enable their service on the platform.
So reach out to content aggregators and let your voice be heard! More of your favorite content on boxee!
As more and more video content finds it's way onto the web, I wonder if we are heading towards a day when we will go back to the sofa to watch TV content scheduled by our friends and influencers? Enter Delicious TV....
Delicious TV is a simple mashup that lets you subscribe to a single Delicious TV RSS feed, and then programme video channels via your delicious account. Channels can be built up from (currently) Youtube and BBC iPlayer content, as well as from online MP3 files. Tuning in to someone else's Delicious TV channel is as easy as bookmarking the appropriate channel page from their delicious account.
Delicious TV – Personally Programmed Social Television Channels on Boxee
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/delicious-tv-personally-programmed-social-television-channels-on-boxee-preview/