Last week Hulu announced that they were going to be blocking access for Boxee and TV.com because of pressure from content providers. This obviously makes sense because Hulu still looks as though they are having a hard time capitalizing on advertisements when being compared to what they’re able to sell on TV. So it should come as no surprise that they don’t want online viewing directly competing with their broadcast television, and when users are given the choice between the two they may lean towards the online viewing since there are less commercials.
I thought Hulu handled themselves as good as they could given the situation. A lot of companies would have probably just blocked Boxee without ever saying a word, and yet Hulu is openly allowing comments on their blog regarding the news. For that they do deserve credit.
The community, however, has channeled their negative energy and turned it into something good. Lifehacker has a step-by-step guide of what you need to do in order to get Hulu working again on Boxee. It will take a little bit of work to get it all up and running, but I’m sure it will be worth it for those users who used Boxee primarily for the Hulu support.
It will be interesting to see how things end up playing out now. Will Hulu ever unblock Boxee? Are other content providers going to follow down the same path?
As of Saturday the 21st this no longer works, Hulu blocked it again
The media companies just don’t get it! I am ticked about this!
Some day they will realize it just like they realized that services like YouTube could be used as a promotional tool. It takes them a few years to catch on to a trend, but they’ll get there. In the mean time we’ll be dazzled with services like Boxee, and as soon as they start to get popular they will be yanked from our grasps.