Boxee Raises Another $6 Million for Assault on Big Media

Boxee, the controversial company trying to marry Internet video to the big-screen TV, has raised its second round of financing. The New York start-up says it raised $6 million from a group of investors lead by Boston-based General Catalyst Partners. Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, which contributed to a previous $4 million round raised late last year, also contributed.

Avner Ronen, Boxee’s founder and chief executive, said the company would use the capital to add more content, make the service friendlier to independent developers and approach makers of Web-ready TVs, DVD players and set-top boxes to add Boxee software to their devices.

Boxee, which I first profiled earlier this year, is a free service that draws in a wide variety of video from the Web and presents it in an interface designed for viewing on a TV screen and navigating with a remote control. The company is perhaps best known for its cat-and-mouse struggle to add Hulu.com to its lineup, which also includes the Netflix streaming service, YouTube and MLB.com.

Boxee represents a potentially dangerous idea for the TV industry. The more free Web video that makes its way to the television, the fewer reasons people have to pay those hefty monthly bills to the cable and satellite companies, which split revenue with cable networks. The big media bosses understand that, which is why they are engaged in efforts like “TV Everywhere” which will offer cable TV programs on the Web only to people who pay for them.

It’s not clear what Boxee brings to a world in which content creators are shunting their most precious content behind pay walls and Web companies like Netflix and Amazon.com are independently forging deals with TV and set-top box makers. Mr. Ronen said that Boxee’s appeal lies in its accumulation of hundreds of video services, unique applications and social features. He said it would be easier for some TV makers to simply do one deal with Boxee rather than multiple deals with various video sites.

He also noted that Boxee’s future would be limited if it only appealed to people willing to connect their PCs to their televisions. “It has given us a great platform of over 600,000 users to grow from, but if you really want to make it more accessible for a mainstream consumers, you need to install it on the connected devices people put in their living room,” he said.

By Brad Stone