Tomorrow, on Friday, Boxee will have to remove access to Hulu's video content
This week, Hollywood showed that it has full control of its content, on the Web or anywhere else; and the unfortunate victim of Big Media’s decision to show off its muscles is a tiny company called Boxee.
Tomorrow, the maker of the media center application will remove from its software, any access from Hulu’s TV shows and movies. Hulu‘s web site is a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp.
This is a significant blow for the New York-based startup – which software is currently in alpha – and relies on Hulu for most of its traffic and users.
“Since our early days in private alpha, Hulu was the most requested site by our users,” admitted Boxee CEO, Avner Ronen in a recent blog post.
So, is it the end of Boxee? I think so and I invite anyone from Boxee reading this post to prove me wrong.
But apart from Hulu’s video content, I didn’t find Apple’s movie trailers, CNN’s video snapshots or access to music or photos to be appealing enough to go through the pain of installing Boxee on my Mac and connect it to my HDTV to watch it. Right?
Boxee’s not dead. This a blow to them but there are many other alternatives. They offer Comedy Central, Joost, CBS, ABC, Youtube and many others among their internet video applications. Not to mention the miriad of independent plugins for other video sites. This is just a bump in the road created by the same type of executives that handled online music so poorly. This series of pipes we call the internets is going to be around for a while. Big media better learn to use it to their advantage.
Boxee is definitely not dead because of this. I love the system and use it mostly for access to my own media. Yes, while photos and music isn’t all that exciting, finally having a media center option for all my ripped movies is indispensable. I am not going to install Windows in my environment just for it’s media center capabilities, and I am not going to buy an XBox or similar system to cover this. Boxee has been a wonderful application and Hulu will hurt more from this than boxee.
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