Boxee lands $4 million for social media center
Boxee, a company that delivers online content to your Apple TV or computer through its social media center platform, announced Tuesday that it has secured $4 million in funding from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. The company also announced that Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital and Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures will join its board.
Although Boxee has signed up about 100,000 alpha testers for its service, it realized that funding was needed for it to launch a beta and expand its business. According to a company representative on its blog, the funding will help Boxee work towards its goals of "building even more functionality and content into Boxee while making it easier to navigate; listening to user requests, ideas, and frustrations (and improving the product accordingly); working with team-XBMC, developers, and partners to extend Boxee beyond the confines of limited resources; and finishing the year with 1 million users."
But perhaps most importantly, the $4 million Boxee received will help the company increase the number of content providers it currently partners with beyond Hulu, CBS, Netflix, and others, as well as increase the number of set-top boxes its service can be found on.
If you'd like to learn more about Boxee or find out what the company's vision is for the future, check out an interview I conducted with its founder back in July on my CNET Digital Home Podcast.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
