Hulu says “Bye bye” to Boxee

This is a guest post by Merlyn Akhtar. Merlyn Akhtar is a tech-savvy person who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty with hardware. One of the first upgrades she performed was installing a 2X CD-ROM drive in a PC in her early teens back when Prodigy was an awesome ISP.

Hulu announced today that its content providers have requested Hulu’s content to be removed from Boxee. If you haven’t heard of it, Boxee is a free media center and is an offshoot of the XBox Media Center that currently supports Mac and Linux (Windows support is coming). In the blog post announcing the cut, the Hulu team comes off almost as frustrated as I am as a Boxee-user.

Hulu has a right to be quite frustrated. It just launched a big ad campaign during the Super Bowl. Now is not the time to have your content providers pushing you around and forcing you to alienate part of your user-base. Boxee’s response in its blog was disappointed, but understanding.

Unfortunately, Hulu has been pushed around by its content providers before – it seems to be a regular occurence for them. Awhile back, Hulu was forced to remove a large portion of back episodes for the FX show “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” As it stands, Hulu can only keep up the last five episodes of the show. In another example of bullying, the Fox network only allows new “House” episodes to be posted eight days after initial airing. Even then, the episodes are only up for a limited time. Network greediness is definitely rearing its ugly head.

As if Hulu didn’t have it bad enough, it also announced today that it is cutting ties from the CBS-owned TV.com due to contractual issues.

Read:
[Boxee's Blog Post]
[Hulu's Blog Post
via [Cnet]