Boxee Asked to Drop Hulu Support Tomorrow

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A serious blow to the well-liked media software: “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.” A blog post at Hulu offers an earnest if not particularly detailed acknowledgment that this is an unfortunate situation for users of both Hulu and Boxee; no real explanation is given, other than Hulu’s content providers asked for the removal. To be honest, I doubt if I will have any use for Boxee unless this situation is remedied somehow.

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  1. Drew Peifer

    This is truly an unfortunate situation. Hulu’s film and TV archive was the most comprehensive index available on Boxee, and had the least glitches and easiest integration (at least in my experience). As they said on the Boxee blog, “people love watching many of their favorite shows on Hulu via boxee. last week we generated more than 100,000 streams for themЁ”. Keeping in mind that these are Boxee users, that’s a lot of disappointed, out-spoken, tech-savvy fans.

    I’ve been running Boxee for months now on OS X as well as 32- and 64-bit versions of Linux, and the only thing that has grown faster than Boxee itself is the community foaming at the mouth for a solid release. The near future will undoubtedly bring full Netflix functionality, a few crucial bug and crash fixes, and stronger networking support, and I think that Boxee users will inevitably learn to live without the Hulu channel and its goodies. After all, they can always go to Hulu.com (even though it involves using the, ahem, mouse).

    And even though I’ve enjoyed Hulu on many occasions, I’d have to say that their request to leave the Boxee family is probably a sign that they didn’t belong there in the first place. If they have to splice commercials into their features, you’d think they could at least normalize the volume so you didn’t have to mute the commercials or cover your ears. We’re trying to get AWAY from real TV, remember?

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