Media center in the cloud player Plizy raises $4 million in funding

Online media center in the cloud company Plizy received an early holiday gift when Atlas Venture poured $4 million into its coffers as part of a Series A round of funding.

According to a Plizy press release, the new round of funding allows the company to focus on "expanding its audience, aggregating more content from providers such as Cinemax, Snagfilm and Starz, and build out its offerings across multiple platforms, specifically Android and iOS."

The Plizy application lets users find relevant online videos based on an individual interest graph. It was first launched in May 2011 and last month added version 2.0 with a new website and iPad app helping users find videos and TV shows along with offering content discovery and sharing with deeper personalization, the company said.

"As video content is fragmented across many sites there is no easy way for consumers to get access to the content they want," Jonathan Benassaya, Plizy's founder-CEO, said in the news release. "Plizy offers a unique service for consumers to seamlessly search, organize, watch and share any movie, TV show or video online."

In addition to the funding, PayPal President David Marcus and Fred Destin, a partner in the technology group at Atlas Venture, have both been named to Plizy's board of directors.

Destin will be aboard to watch how the money is spent, although a quote provided in the news release indicates he will also take a proactive role in the company.

"Video is both extremely exciting from a content standpoint and completely broken from a user perspective," Destin said in the statement. "We're going to solve that with Plizy by centralizing all content in one place for easy viewing and discovery on any device."

For more:
- Plizy issued this press release

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