Boxee Looses Hulu as Content Provider

Hulu, a website that offers commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies, posted yesterday that they would no longer be serving content to Boxee. Boxee is a freeware cross-platform media center software with social networking features that is a fork of the open source XBMC media center software with some custom and proprietary additions. Boxee enables its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social networking features. Hulu said in its blog that they "never had a formal relationship with Boxee and are under no illusions about the likely Boxee user response from this move."

This major change comes from the request of Hulu's content providers and that Hulu turn off access to Hulu content via the Boxee product, and they 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." the hulu blog stated. "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."

Beginning this Friday, the connection will be severed between the two companies. Boxee made a post in their blog stating that their goal has always been to drive users to legal sources of content that are publicly avaliable 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." the blog stated.

Perhaps with enough media attention and users requesting the content from Hulu to be once again available to Boxee, the content partners of Hulu will agree to make things right again.

Hulu is a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp, with funding by Providence Equity Partners, which made a USD$100 million equity investment and holds a 10% stake. Hulu distributes video both on its own web site and syndicates its hosting to other sites, and allows users to embed Hulu clips on their websites. In addition to NBC and FOX programs and movies, Hulu carries shows from other networks such as Comedy Central, PBS, USA Network, Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, SPEED Channel, Sci Fi, Style, Sundance, E!, G4, Versus, Noggin TV, Nick Jr., PBS KIDS Sprout, Disney Channel and Oxygen.