Boxee, the OTT underdog that keeps hanging on through thick and thin, just announced a new $16.5 million in funding. While the traditional money route is to host a roadshow to meet VCs, Boxee loves to do things their own way. Their team is celebrating with roadtrips to SxSW ultimately throwing The 2nd Annual Boxee SxSW Kegger. But that shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with Boxee, a company whose mystique is fueled by the paradox of their approach and the exuberance of their users. After all, it was at OTTcon last year that Andrew Kippen, VP of Marketing, addressed their business model as "asking venture capitalists for money and they keep giving it to us."
All humor aside, clearly the company has some challenges to address. TDG spoke to a Boxee repersentative in a call from this year's OTTcon and their tune was quite different than one year ago. Boxee plans to apply this round of funding to differentiate their platform and expand content and hardware partners. While they have the usual assortment of content players like Netflix, VUDU, and Pandora, their platform licensees to this point are traditional data and storage companies like D-Link, Iomega, and Viewsonic. Yes, they have an upcoming iPad app, but the mission is to build a solid platform that will maintain appeal to their vocal users and finally turn the heads of the major CE firms. They see this happening by late 2011... or once that keg is empty and floating.
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