Boxee, maker of a social media center software platform for HDTVs and laptops, has secured $4 million in first round funding from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.
The two firms each accounted for exactly 50% of the investment. Bijan Sabet from Spark and Fred Wilson from Union Square (also see Fred’s blog post on the investment where he calls boxee the ‘Firefox of media center software’) will join the boxee board.
Boxee is bringing us a step closer to a true open, social TV experience. The app gives your computer (Mac OSX or Linux, and soon also Windows) or AppleTV a TV-like interface where you can stream local files like personal videos, music, and photos as well as third-party, mainstream web content from sites like YouTube, Hulu, Comedy Central, CNN.com, ABC.com, Last.fm, Flickr, etc. Basically anything that isn’t DRM-protected (which also means there’s no chance you’ll be able to play your entire iTunes library with boxee).
Update: also check out this related post on Netflix streaming movies and TV episodes instantly to the TV via the Xbox 360, starting tomorrow.
Boxee also enables you to retrieve music and movie reviews, song lyrics, trailers, album artwork etc. from the internet, and comes with a social layer too: you can share information about what you’re watching with friends and make recommendations. You can also add services like Twitter, FriendFeed and Tumblr and post to them from the (beautiful) boxee interface, which turns it into a very powerful communication hub to boot.
I gathered from John’s initial review on Crunchgear that boxee uses XBMC, a media center system that makes everything look as elegant as it does. XBMC was created by creative developers who had modified first-gen Xbox consoles to run the software once it was sent over to the machine through FTP. It’s open-source, so that means developers are free to work with the code in order to create their own plug-ins, skins, and alternate interfaces.
Boxee says it is going to need the funding to be in a better position for negotiations with larger content providers like CBS, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and the BBC. Boxee is also talking to a series of hardware manufacturers who could be interested in licensing its software for set-top boxes.
Boxee is only available for closed alpha testers for the time being, and has already received 100,000 sign-ups according to the company blog post. They’re aiming for a beta release in 2009, which sounds rather vague. The software is completely free, although we assume a premium version is in the works.
The company was founded in 2007, has about 10 employees and has offices in New York City and Israel. The company previously raised an undisclosed amount of seed money from friends and family.
quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.
first!
Great news for Boxee! good luck!
This is definitely a revolution in your living room.
GO BOXEE! been running it on my AppleTV for a short bit, and we love it! looking forward to seeing better features for user switching and parental controls. you know–those things that make the product useful to Normal People
So we can get Hi Def movies and other Hi Def content streamed to our TV’s. Im still having problems getting basic web pages loaded onto my computer on a Verizon DSL line. How am I going to get these higher bandwidth hogging services.
Congrats to everyone at Boxee! This is a top gun team and killer product thats destined for greatness, especially with Fred and Bijan on board. Onward and upward!
well done!
Congratulations, Boxee. I’ve been alpha testing it on AppleTV, and it’s a great piece of software. Here’s hoping Apple see what a great product it is, and include it with AppleTV as standard rather than having to hack it in. Pipe dream, I know…
i am using in Boxee for quit long, very very cool.
Great Israeli startup and very justified investment. Congrats to Boxee and Avner for making this happen in the worse climate – I hope it didn’t impact the valuation. See VC Cafe’s previous coverage on Boxee here: http://www.vcca...-compatibility/
Congratulations. Great News.
I talked about Boxee in my podcast (Moxie Mo Show) and Geekbrief did a great job installing it and showing us how as well – FINALLY got my Boxee invite today so I will be installing it tonight!
I’m a big fan of Boxee, and have it running off an old Macbook Pro and a new HD LCD TV.
I’m thrilled to see startups providing such improvements over the ubiquitous Comcastesque DVRs that are in everyone’s living rooms now.
I am finding it hard to justify spending in excess of $100 per month (which I am currently doing) for the privilege of turning on the TV and being greeted with 5 minutes of constant irrelevant ads with boosted volume levels. Flip the channel – you’re midway through another 5 minute adbreak on another channel. Attempt to use the DVR features of the Comcast box and you must suffer through a horrible interface, and repeatedly reach for the remote to uber-fast-forward through ads (then back up because you overshot).
When I get home from work I reach for the Apple remote now and fire up Boxee. Catch up on the news from CNN and watch the segments I’m interested in. If it wasn’t for Entourage I probably wouldn’t even need the Comcast service.
I’m thrilled we’re getting closer to the stage where a single cat-5 cable delivers all your entertainment needs and your time isn’t hijacked by the old-school TV format.
Wow! This looks absolutely amazing!
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Boxee is pretty cool. Installed it on an AppleTV, though the interface is a little slow and Hulu is rather choppy. Hopefully they’ll put some effort into optimizing it for slower devices like AppleTV.
Though I wonder what the business model is.