Boxee raises $6 million, eyes more deals

Boxee, a New York-based start-up that makes "media center" software, announced Wednesday that it has raised $6 million in a Series B financing round led by General Catalyst Partners. Existing investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital also participated in the round.

Boxee raised its series A round, to the tune of $4 million, last November. With the new financing the company hopes to ink more deals with media companies and set-top box manufacturers, as well as hire more employees to keep building out its technology (which includes a developer platform). Currently in an alpha test phase, Boxee hopes to expand to a beta test in October.

More deals will also help Boxee gain some industry cred. It has still been unable to convince Hulu, now the big name in premium online video, to reverse a ban on Boxee's access to its content--which includes a huge library from NBC Universal, News Corp., and Disney's ABC Entertainment.

"I think that the best thing that we could do in order to become partners with Hulu is, on one end, work with other media companies so they see that Boxee is overall a friendly company to content owners," CEO Avner Ronen told CNET News. "And the second is that we need to grow our footprint, we need to grow our user base, we need to get on more digital devices, and I think if we do those things it will open the opportunity up for us to partner with Hulu."

"Our belief is that, eventually, content owners need to follow the users," Ronen said.

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Cool deal I hope they work it out. Never going back to cable again. If only I can find a way to get better broadband service than cable. Ultimately cable internet will put a strangle hold on watching online content. Sometimes when watching even Hulu Desktop (from hulu labs) I have to restart the stream a couple of times to get a good amount buffer. I'm paying for Turbo 20Mpbs DL 1Mbps UL and its far from meeting its advertised speeds. Dam those cable companies. We need an internet broadband company other than cable TV companies. telco companies are slow and expensive, DSL is barely able to deliver and FIOS is not available to everyone.