Apple Mac HQ

My wife is not going to be happy. Just last week I showed her how to use Boxee on our Apple TV to watch her favorite TV shows via Hulu. Tonight, I had to break the bad news to her. Boxee is being forced to remove Hulu from their application. This situation upsets me greatly.

Hulu has a post on their blog about the situation. As you can see from the picture above, Hulu and Boxee are no longer friends. Ok, so I made that part up. The crude pictures help me cope OK.

Sometimes, OK often, I just don’t understand the media companies. You don’t want people to pirate video/music so you give us a legal way to obtain your content. Just as adoption rate of this new method starts to take hold, all the sudden that method is not good anymore. The viewing experience with Hulu and Boxee was working just fine! I didn’t mind watching the ads. Perhaps BitTorrent traffic will tick up because of this.

Hulu says their content providers “requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product”. So basically all is fine and dandy as long as you can’t watch Hulu on a TV? I can just hook my Mac to my TV video input and watch Hulu on my TV. Why is it any different if I’m using an application to do the exact same thing?

As to my wife and Hulu? We’ll they have broken up too. She’s not going to watch her TV shows on her laptop via Hulu.com. There goes at least one set of eyeballs!

Are you upset about the Boxee and Hulu situation? Write Jason Kilar, the CEO of Hulu, at Jason@hulu.com. He’ll be seeing my email soon.