Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Boxee Hack Restores Hulu Support (Sort Of)

Posted by timothy on from the black-marker-on-the-edge dept.

DeviceGuru writes "Boxee has restored support for Hulu, along with several other enhancements, to its free media center platform for PCs and Macs. The modification, a hack to Boxee's RSS feed functionality, involves having Boxee users enable the support themselves by cutting/pasting URLs from Hulu's RSS feed page into their account on Boxee's website. It works, but one can't help wondering how it's really different from Boxee's original — superior — Hulu support. Oh, the games media companies play!"

2 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Good will? by qoncept · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The Boxee guys claimed they were removing Hulu support in an act of good will toward Hulu (I'd guess hoping to maintain good relations with a content provider they wanted to get back). Now they're completely negating the good-will-effect by helping users work around it while still making it more of a pain for their users. Genius.

    --
    Whale
    1. Re:Good will? by Chyeld · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It was 'reasonable' for Hulu to ask Boxee to remove a feature that tied solely into Hulu.

      It is not reasonable for Hulu to ask Boxee to remove a feature that ties into a number of services and just happens to work with a service that Hulu provides.

      Expecting Boxee not to point out how to do it, given it hardly even an open secret at this point, is absurd.

      If Hulu's partners don't want people watching their content from outside of the website, why do they provide an RSS feed? Either they are ignorant or they are playing games.

      To be honest, given the situation, I don't know which. But it's definately one of the two.