It looks like high-time for startups developing technology to move TV viewing to the next generation. A place-shifting concern with only two employees called Inxstor has just secured 600,000 pounds ($1.2 million) in funding from Braveheart, a Scottish venture capital group, and the Scottish Co-investment Fund. The funding is in addition to a 400,000 pounds seed investment that the Fife, Scotland-based company had last year. Inxstor will use the cash to develop new products and expand its technical team.

The company expects to launch its product in the first quarter of next year (its site says it will be premiered at CES in Las Vegas), and already has an MOU with Pace. It’s also held talks with Nokia and Motorola and hopes to have a retail operation, writes The Herald.

Inxstor is of course not the first company to develop place shifting products. Others include Sling Media, Orb Networks, and CMWare. One of the more established competitors, Sling, last week was reported to be trialling a mobile version of its software to work on Symbian devices in the U.S. (The product is already working on Windows-based handsets, Palm devices, and some Symbian-based handsets in Europe.)

Inxstor’s unique selling point is that it claims to be the only one of these that allows content to be accessed remotely in a secure way, writes the Scotsman. An attractive idea to content companies, who have bristled over how DRM is affected by place-shifting, but have not attempted to take any legal action over such services as yet. (Blake Krikorian, the CEO of Sling Media, has said that this is because there isn’t really a legal issue with the service.)

Tony Combe, the CEO of Inxstor, told The Herald that the market for place-shifting is expected to be worth $700 million annually by 2011.

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