Hulu apologizes as it bids an early goodbye to Boxee

Freeware media center Boxee is still very young, but offers a comprehensive solution for both managing a user's existent collection of movies, music, and photos, and discovering free online content. Unfortunately, it will be continuing ahead without support from Hulu.

In a blog post entitled Doing hard things, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar today announced that Hulu's content will no longer be available on boxee after this week. Done at the behest of content providers (aka Hollywood Studios), Kilar said that Hulu really had no choice but to suspend support for boxee.

"The maddening part of writing this blog entry is that we realize that there is no immediate win here for users," Kilar wrote. "Please know that we take very seriously our role of representing users such that we are able to provide more and more content in more and more ways over time. We embrace this activity in ways that respect content owners' --and even the entire industry's-- challenges to create great content that users love. Yes, it's a complex matter. A tough mission, and a never-ending one, but one we are passionately committed to."

Avner Ronen, boxee's equivalent to Myspace's Tom, responded, "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."

Ronen's tone was actually much more positive than that of Hulu's Jason Kilar. "We have many content partners who are generating revenue from boxee users, and we will work with Hulu and their partners to resolve the situation as quickly as possible. We will tell them how users love Hulu on boxee, why it represents a great opportunity for them to better engage with fans of their shows, how boxee can help in exposing their content to new people, and why they should be excited about future opportunities of working with us."

Boxee is still in beta for OS X and Linux, and last month began private alpha tests in Windows. The free software is available at boxee.tv.