boxee Loses Hulu

Sad news for boxee users – the folks delivering this wonderful piece of software to you have announced that support for Hulu has been discontinued. boxee is touted as an application able to provide a true entertainment experience delivering TV shows, movies, music and photos, as well as streaming content from various sources across the web.

According to the folks at boxee, Hulu is not the first company to request being removed from boxee. The misfortune stems from Hulu's content partners who are apparently not pleased with having its content distributed through boxee. A blog post on the boxee blog tells the whole story. Some excerpts can be found just below.

We love Hulu. They have built a great product and brand (including one [of] the best Superbowl ads this year). Since our early days in private alpha, Hulu was the most requested site by our users. so we built support for browsing Hulu on boxee, reached out to Hulu, showed it to them, and on Oct 20th, 2008 shared it with our alpha testers (without a formal partnership with Hulu). The response has been amazing. People love watching many of their favorite shows on Hulu via boxee. Last week we generated more than 100,000 streams for them...

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. You can see their blog post about the issues they are facing there.

The people at boxee insisted on noting that it tries to achieve its goals legally, as well as offer its content the legal way. As such, the company couldn't have gone any other way. Still, they promise they'll do everything in their power to show Hulu that there's a lot to be gained from combining these two services. But, for now, boxee remains Hulu-less.

About boxee

After installing boxee on your Mac, the application scans and adds all your media to its library. Then, it starts looking up any artwork that the media might have attached to it, such as an album cover. If it can find reviews, trailers, and lyrics that are associated with your content, boxee will bring those up, too.

boxee plays any non-DRM media, and it's compatible with nearly all file formats, including high definition (HD) videos. If you want to share media with others, you can do so through the boxee UI, as the app integrates with your twitter, or tumbler account. You can play files from your hard drive, network, or you can stream content from the likes of YouTube and flickr. Best of all, boxee has remote control support. Also, boxee is open source, therefore anyone can develop new applications and channels within the interface.