Behind the Money: Boxee's Avner Ronen on raising VC, competition, new features (The Deal Video)

Behind the Money: Boxee's Avner Ronen on raising VC, competition, new features

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After raising $4 million from Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital earlier this month, media center software developer Boxee is releasing new content and features on Thursday. The biggest change is that users can play, browse and queue up movies through Netflix (although the Netflix program doesn't work with AppleTV yet).

Boxee is also releasing new content from several sources, including TheWB (popular TV shows "Angel," "Buffy," "Firefly," "The O.C.," "Smallville" and "In Living Color"); The Boston Globe (the Big Picture blog); and MTVMusic (songs and artists in your collection are now linked to music videos). And the company has upgraded its interfaces for Hulu, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa. Boxee is also distributing a "pre-alpha" Windows version of its software to a few hundred "friends and family" users.

In Tech Confidential's Behind the Money video, Boxee founder and CEO Avner Ronen talks about how he managed to win over Union Square's Fred Wilson and Spark's Bijan Sabet and raise venture capital in today's dismal economic climate and about the company's competition for control of the living room with the likes of Apple Inc. [APPL], Comcast Corp. [CMCSA], Microsoft Corp. [MSFT] and Sony Corp. [SNE]. - Mary Kathleen Flynn
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