This is so insane. Boxee is doing nothing wrong and even the Hulu team have no real problem with whats going on. But oh no the content providers can't understand the whole situation and have demanded Hulu be removed from Boxee. The users are going to lose out big time in this. We really need to educate the content providers about this new world of digital distribution. This is from the Boxee blog…
we love Hulu. they have built a great product and brand (including one the best Superbowl ads this year). since our early days in private alpha, Hulu was the most requested site by our users. so we built support for browsing Hulu on boxee, reached out to Hulu, and on Oct 20th, 2008 shared it with our alpha testers. the response has been amazing. people love watching many of their favorite shows on Hulu via boxee. last week we generated more than 100,000 streams for them…
two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it. you can see their blog post about the issues they are facing.
our goal has always been to drive users to legal sources of content that are publicly available on the Internet. we have many content partners who are generating revenue from boxee users and we will work with Hulu and their partners to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.
we will tell them how users love Hulu on boxee, why it represents a great opportunity for them to better engage with fans of their shows, how boxee can help in exposing their content to new people, and why they should be excited about future opportunities of working with us.
In the i'm a pirate and what you going to do about it session at Beebcamp, it was identified that streaming could be the answer to bit torrent downloads for most users. But with decisions like this one, there's almost no choice but to look to the darkside for the same content. I'm really hoping the BBC is stronger that Hulu and won't remove the unofficial iplayer plugin from Boxee. I actually just helped a friend get boxee setup because he would like to watch BBC content on his TV instead of his laptop. There a family which don't really watch live TV and own a Apple TV, Boxee with iplayer makes tons of sense for them and I'm sure many others…
Fear not the users of Boxee, the Boxee team are collaboratively working out a pitch for the content producers. If its any good, it could be very useful for other content producers large and small. I highly suggest everyone get in there and add to there pitch.
