“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,” Andrew Kippen reports via The Boxee Blog.
“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,” Kippen reports.
“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,” Kippen reports. “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.”
Full article here.
Hulu CEO Jason Kilar writes in the Hulu Blog, “Later this week, Hulu’s content will no longer be available through Boxee. While we never had a formal relationship with Boxee, we are under no illusions about the likely Boxee user response from this move. This has weighed heavily on the Hulu team, and we know it will weigh even more so on Boxee users.”
“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,” Kilar writes.
“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,” Kilar writes.
“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,” Kilar writes.
“For those Boxee users reading this post, we understand and appreciate that you’re likely to tell us that we’re nuts. Please know that we do share the same interests and won’t stop innovating in support of the bigger mission,” Kilar writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: So, instead of watching their content legally, it seems that Hulu’s “content providers” wish us to use alternate means to view their content. That seems like a wise business decision (dripping sarcasm while firing up Transmission).
One day, even the painfully ignorant “content providers” will awaken to the fact they they no longer have the power to dictate, consumers do.
Oh, by the way, this still works just fine, too: Google’s ‘Understudy��� plugin brings Hulu and Netflix to Apple Macs’ Front Row – February 16, 2009
