Boxee Investors See it As "Firefox for Media," Aiming High
by Sam Dean - Aug. 17, 2009Comments (2)- Related Blog Posts
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Last week, we covered the news of a new $6 million round of venture capital funding for Boxee which is behind the very popular Boxee open source media center application. Open source applications for managing videos, music, television content, movies and the like have been maturing, and the VC community is definitely waking up to Boxee's potential. The company's latest round of funding was led by Boston-based General Catalyst with participation by prior investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Now VideoNuze has a very interesting interview with Boxee investors Bijan Sabet and Neil Sequeira.
One of the main differentiators between Boxee's media center and other similar applications is that Boxee is chock-full of social and sharing features. It's also gaining more and more community-built plug-ins, some of which are seen here. And, Boxee is out in a pre-release Windows version, in addition to the very popular Mac version, and a Linux version.
A cross-platform, open source application improving rapidly through useful plug-ins? If that sounds to you a little like Firefox and other prominent open source applications, you're not alone. In the VideoNuze interview, Boxee investor Neil Sequeira says:
"We think Boxee has the potential to be the next generation 'Firefox for media,' a widely- used consumer platform. That's incredibly exciting to us."
The interview also contains information about how Boxee is growing. Reportedly, it has grown from 10,000 users to 600,000 users in one year. If those numbers are accurate, that's solid growth for an application that wasn't available in any Windows version until recently, and is still only in alpha on Windows. Boxee officials have confirmed before that the majority of their users are on Apple systems.
Boxee's investors also confirm that a number of deals between Boxee and consumer electronics device makers will be announced soon. The Boxee funding announcement also made that clear. For many more thoughts on the application, such as synergies Boxee can find with Roku and Hulu, check out VideoNuze's interview.
