Boxee RSS feature gives Hulu a backdoor

After Hulu and Boxee were forced to stop working together, I began to feel that it was necessary to look closer and explain how this was one of the rare instances where the loss of Hulu wouldn't be so much of a deal breaker. However, upon closer inspection and with frequent use these last few weeks, the loss of Hulu really did create a big chasm in content.

Boxee is a media center application based on XBMC that awaits a dedicated hardware home. In alpha, this software is already more elegant and fully featured than many set top boxes are after RTM, and that's with such critical features as network drive awareness still disabled. It offers support for most audio, video, and image formats and has streaming audio and video solutions built into its interface. However, due to squabbles with content providers, some of these streaming services, most notably Hulu, had to be temporarily disabled.

And it's such a shame. The Boxee UI is clean and pretty and easy to use, perfectly suitable for remote control manipulation. The only drawback to it currently is that it is something of a resource hog; the graphical effects it presents make it unsuitable for use on devices less powerful than a moderately powered media PC. AppleTV can be nicely hacked to run the Boxee interface, but the results are not yet as clean as when it's run on a PC.

We've been playing with it on a 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo-based Macbook Pro, where it runs flawlessly, and we also took it to the TV on a 2.1 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Acer Veriton running Ubuntu 8.04, which took considerably more work to get running with comparable results.

Some Boxee users started a Facebook group calling for a Hulu boycott until it could "end [its] archaic stance on content linking." Today, those boycotters got a sly workaround that allows Hulu's RSS content to be linked into Boxee.

Hulu's Avner Ronen said, "The fact that it's becoming easy to consume Internet video on a TV brings into question many of the industry's business models that developed before the Web. That's part of the reason why Hulu asked to be removed from Boxee. Our meetings over the past week weren't able to change that, but the people in the industry 'get it.' They are users. They read the blogs. They talk with users. They are trying to adjust to a new reality, but they need time...users on the other hand, won't wait."

So in observing the ways users have cleverly obtained content, Boxee has been enabled with a video-optimized RSS reader that supports Google Video, Yahoo, YouTube, and yes, Hulu's public RSS feeds. Ronen warns that it's a "bleeding edge release not for the faint of heart," because of the lack of testing done before pushing out this alpha update. A more stable release will be rolled out on March 24th at a Boxee meetup in New York City.

Additionally, in the time since Hulu's content was officially removed from Boxee, software developer Andrew Chatham updated the Android Boxee/XBMC remote interface, so if you dropped Boxee after it dropped Hulu, you may want to give it another go.