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Hulu Wants Off of Boxee

Feb 18, 2009  •  Post A Comment

Online television convergence play Boxee got hit with some bad news: It must remove Hulu from its service at the end of this week.
Boxee, which landed $4 million in funding late last year to help make above-board content deals, brings Web sites including CBS.com, CNN.com and ComedyCentral.com directly to the television set through AppleTV and other devices.
However, Boxee said late today that Hulu has asked to be removed from the Boxee service.
In a blog post, Boxee said: “Hulu was the most requested site by our users. So we built support for browsing Hulu on Boxee, reached out to Hulu, showed it to them, and on Oct 20, 2008, shared it with our alpha testers (without a formal partnership with Hulu). … 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.”
Hulu said in its own blog post that its content owners asked that Hulu be removed from Boxee.
The removal of Hulu likely will put a crimp in Boxee’s previously stated goal of reaching 1 million users by year end.

9 Comments

  1. one little step forward….
    one giant leap backwards.
    thanks hulu.

  2. It’s not Hulu’s fault.
    To quote from their blog post (emboldening mine):
    Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes. While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence — bumps and all — we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.
    Our mission to make media dramatically easier and more user-focused has not changed and will not change. We will not stop until we achieve it and we are sober in our assessment that we have such a long way to go.
    The maddening part of writing this blog entry is that we realize that there is no immediate win here for users. Please know that we take very seriously our role of representing users such that we are able to provide more and more content in more and more ways over time. We embrace this activity in ways that respect content owners’ — and even the entire industry’s — challenges to create great content that users love. Yes, it’s a complex matter. A tough mission, and a never-ending one, but one we are passionately committed to.

    To blame Hulu is like blaming the Apple for DRM the labels had formerly required them to add to songs.

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