The Hulu and Boxee Feud Continues

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Boxee, the open-source media center software, is a pretty cool platform and they’ve been doing a lot of things right. Hulu is the video site where three of the biggest US television networks put up some of their content. Hulu is free (for now) and Boxee has attempted to add Hulu to their platform, but Hulu has resisted. Now we know why… sort of.

Early on in Boxee’s history, they had Hulu has a channel on their platform, apparently with Hulu’s blessing. In February 2009, the networks that run Hulu asked to be left off of Boxee, and Boxee removed them as an official channel. This started the software engineering arms race between Boxee and Hulu. Boxee would find some ingenious way to add Hulu support to the platform, and Hulu would block them.

This has continued for some time. Boxee eventually resorted to using Mozilla software so, in layman’s terms, Boxee users accessing Hulu content only looked like a regular Firefox user to Hulu’s server logs. Hulu is currently trying to use JavaScript scrambling to stop Boxee.

Fast-forward to last week. Cable giant Comcast has purchased TV network NBC, who is one of the owners of Hulu. The US Congress is having hearings into the $6.5-billion deal and during one of the hearings, Virginia Rep. Rick Boucher asked NBC President Jeff Zucker, “What about Boxee? [...] Did Hulu block the Boxee users from access to the Hulu programs?”

Zucker replies, “[What] Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal.”

The folks at Boxee have chimed in, and saying that their current solution to getting Hulu content on Boxee is based on web browser technology – the same as typing in www.hulu.com into a web browser. It’s possible that Hulu’s terms of service somewhere note that you can’t use Hulu in this manner, but let’s cut to the chase – Boxee has support for BitTorrent and the TV networks don’t want Hulu to be associated with a BitTorrent client.

No word on what will happen now. Zucker said they are open to negotiations with Boxee. Boxee says in their blog that hasn’t been the case, but they’re interested as well.