I like Hulu; I love Boxee.  Boxee is one of the best media centers I’ve seen with a brilliant interface bringing video on your computer and internet together on your TV.  This included TV shows and movies from Hulu on a convenient display for televisions.  Last month, Hulu blocked Boxee’s access to their videos, cutting off a viable audience.

Hulu blocking Boxee makes little sense. You still had to watch ads and couldn’t download the videos, thus Hulu’s business model was still in tacked.  Allegedly cable companies pressured Hulu to block Boxee for fear people would watch these free videos, shockingly, on their televisions.  Web video should be exclusively web video, it seems.

So Boxee found a work around (in addition to several third-party fixes).  Boxee used Hulu’s own RSS feeds – freely available lists of content on the website. So Hulu blocked Boxee’s access even to the RSS feeds.  Hulu is spending resources to block people from seeing its content. How does that make sense?

I’ve pointed this arms race mentality before, where companies want to control everything done with their products. Sony releases update after update to its PSP to block homebrew while Apple rendered many iPhones useless after an update to stop people from jailbreaking them.  But these modders and hackers are just expanding the value of the original product. Boxee is making Hulu videos more valuable by making them easier to watch the way consumers want to.  Cable companies are scared because they no longer control this distribution – but that should be a good thing. Customers are telling them what they want and smart businesses can use this information to make more money.  Taking away an important value like this is what sends customers to piracy and file-sharing – where they can get whatever they want without seeing those three minutes of Hulu ads.