Andrew Kippen's Library tagged boxee → View Popular

12 Aug 09

"We've seen a lot of momentum over the past couple of months. It seemed like it made sense to go ahead [with a new round]," Boxee's new head of marketing Andrew Kippen tells us.
Kippen, who previously worked with Boxee in his role at Stage Two Consulting, is the first of many hires Boxee hopes to make over the next couple of months, CEO Avner Ronen says. When it closed its Series A round in November, Boxee was just 11 people, the goal is to ramp up to 20 as soon as possible. This includes engineers but also a strong business team to work on getting Boxee into more devices.

"I think that the best thing that we could do in order to become partners with Hulu is, on one end, work with other media companies so they see that Boxee is overall a friendly company to content owners," CEO Avner Ronen told CNET News. "And the second is that we need to grow our footprint, we need to grow our user base, we need to get on more digital devices, and I think if we do those things it will open the opportunity up for us to partner with Hulu."

"Our belief is that, eventually, content owners need to follow the users," Ronen said.

Boxee's potential competitors are formidable, including Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Sony Corp. (NYSE:SNE). While those companies mostly use closed, proprietary technology, Boxee's approach is open source, which means anyone can write a program for it. That has made the company popular with developers and with the coveted early-adopter crowd.
His introductions and insights are a perfect fit for our board."

Boxee, the software company that makes it easy to get Web video onto your TV
So what’s the appeal for company’s backers, which also include Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, which put $4 million into the company eight months ago and participated in this round as well? It’s pretty straightforward: The $70 billion TV business is in the first steps of a massive reordering, and perhaps Boxee can play a role in it.

Local Boston coverage of the Series B funding announcement.

Already he’s brought over Boxee’s outside PR consultant, Andrew Kippen, to be the company’s first VP of marketing (actually it’s first marketing person at all).
Earlier this summer, Boxee signed MLB.TV as an official content partner, and added Digg and Tumblr integration to its platform. Boxee has proven itself popular with the tech set, and now it needs to move more into the mainstream. If Boxee can secure the content people want on the devices they want, it could be the glue of the digital living room. There are a lot of “ifs” in there however.
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- Earlier this summer, Boxee signed MLB.TV as an official content partner, and added Digg and Tumblr integration to its platform. Boxee has proven itself popular with the tech set, and now it needs to move more into the mainstream. If Boxee can secure the content people want on the devices they want, it could be the glue of the digital living room. There are a lot of “ifs” in there however.