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Hulu Again Removed From Boxee and Again Added Back
An anonymous reader writes "In a mouse and cat game, Hulu the popular online content provider of shows, movies, and more has blocked Boxee yet again from accessing the Hulu content from the Boxee application. Just as Boxee added RSS feeds to include Hulu content, Hulu responded with blocking Boxee users from accessing the content via RSS feeds the very same day. RSS feeds are publicly available and it's really disappointing to hear that a site would block certain applications from accessing their content in such a manner. I would assume that the Boxee development team is currently working on disguising its browser to look like Firefox, Internet Explorer, or some other known browser in an attempt to fool Hulu."
They're aliens.
And that's how they roll.
Did we really need a whole new article for this?
Couldn't it have just been added as an update to the original posted the same day?
Claiming that "Boxee" is like a browser's RSS feed is totally misleading. The software package cuts out the entire site, the adverts, etc and repackages it as almost its own material (with a small source icon).
How would you feel if someone hot-linked your content, consumed your bandwidth, and gave you no advertising revenue in exchange?
I blame 4Chan.
Goo goo g'joob.
This will result in us just losing the RSS openness of Hulu. Currently, their shows can be embedded in other webpages. They'll probably end up having to remove this too.
I think you forgot to include your signature: "This message brought to you by Hulu executives."
Boxee does not strip out the ads. It is still the same video stream, boxee just gives a remote-friendly interface to the media. It is no different than watching Hulu in full screen with your computer plugged into a TV. Hulu allows embedding into another website just like Youtube and other media sites, so how is embedding into the Boxee media player any different?
Also, Hulu's ads are played in the video. How are they being deprived of advertising revenue?
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
If every iteration of this cat and mouse game gets on Slashdot, then almost every other story will be about it....
Think Deeply.
There is no "ripping" of content. Hulu lets you embed their videos into another website. Their ads are in the video. Boxee just provides an interface to play the video with it streaming from hulu. If you are wondering why you need another interface, realize that Boxee is a Media Center app. It is streamlined to be controlled with a remote and its main function is playing your own content. Adding hulu into the mix gives you the ability to watch hulu's content legally without having to navigate with a normal web browser. The price you pay is you watch the normal Hulu ads. Sounds like free advertising for Hulu to me.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
You should see the larger image. Boxee is a fork of Xbmc, xbmc but stripped down. Xbmc can run python scripts, check other xbmc plugins which work, ninja video, ted talks, rev3. http://code.google.com/p/voinage-xbmc-plugins/downloads/list I have a plugin for fancast which hosts a lot of the same content as hulu. I'm not sure they intentionally strip out the ads, id be more than willing to sit through them though.
Ok, I am risking making people believe, I am an idiot. But, isn't it is as simple as changing the user agent ? This should take at most 3 minutes to any developer (one to get the UA of Internet Explorer, one to copy paste it in the code and one to commit it).
I must have missed something...
Does anybody know just why Hulu & Boxee don't get along? I've read that come content providers asked Hulu to block Boxee, but I completely fail to see the logic behind the request.
I'd never heard of Hulu so I went to the site and...
I use youtube-dl and mplayer to watch youtube hosted stuff, elsewhere I'll pull the URL manually from script or container files. Hulu can scream that users must use software configuration x/y/z to use their service but that's not how the web has ever worked.
The content providers, NBC and Fox, own Hulu. The Hulu president stating he had nothing to do with blocking Boxee is a lie. Hulu plans their own box on your TV.
Instead of watching Hulu's free content with commercials I'm back to buying content through Apple TV, and now Amazon through the Netflix/Roku box.
Sayonara, Scru-lu!
Since the US is the only country that can access Hulu's content this is hardly Earth shattering news.
When Hulu discovers there's a whole planet out there, the rest of us will start to care.
Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, admitted on the company's blog that the content owners demanded that Boxee stop displaying Hulu content.
It's scary being a Flash and Flex developer on Slashdot. You guys are unnaturally rabid.
This code, executed on a dd-wrt router, will give all your clients 30 seconds of nothing during commercials when watching Hulu videos. It will block most other browser ads also but what the hell... Works really well with Slashdot.
Just add it to your startup section and enjoy a nearly ad-free internet.
---- /tmp/dlhosts /tmp/hosts\nlogger DOWNLOADED http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt\nkillall -1 dnsmasq" > /tmp/dlhosts /tmp/dlhosts /tmp/dlhosts /tmp/hosts /etc/hosts /tmp/dlhosts" >> /tmp/crontab
logger WAN UP Script Executing
sleep 5
test -s
if [ $? == 1 ] ; then
echo -e "#!/bin/sh\nwget -O - http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt | grep 127.0.0.1 | tr -d '\015\032' | sed -e '2,\$s/127.0.0.1/0.0.0.0/g' -e 's/[[:space:]]*#.*$//' -e '2,\$s/0.0.0.0 localhost$/127.0.0.1 localhost/g' -e '2,\$s/0.0.0.0 pagead.*.googlesyndication.com//g' | grep 0.0 >
chmod 777
fi
ln -s
echo "45 23 * * 5 root
-----
Does anybody know just why Hulu & Boxee don't get along? I've read that come content providers asked Hulu to block Boxee, but I completely fail to see the logic behind the request.
"I don't care if it hurts, I wanna have control [...] 'cause I'm a creep."
You can't take the sky from me...
Hulu has made it abundantly clear that they do not want people to view their videos over the internet. Therefore, people should just stop watching them.
Awesome business move there Hulu.
This probably really isn't about boxee - it is about the content owners wanting to get rid of hulu and build their own individual sites. So anything they can do to make it harder to use hulu, especially on something likely to be playing on a TV screen is in their interest.
Branding is very important in the advertising arena. If you want people to buy advertising from you, and to increase the popularity of your service, you must get your name out there and associated with your product. Boxee using Hulu's service gives a small source icon, and that's it. That means that advertisers are more likely to approach Boxee, than Hulu for advertisements if Boxee ever chose to offer that service. Even if they never offer advertising, that extra step in the referral process is likely to cause deminished advertising revenue for Hulu.
Short answer: Boxee should have gotten permission. If they don't, then while it is, or should be legal to use Hulu's content in this manner (as long as they show the correct source,) they will have to "put up" with Hulu's attempts to disable it.
This isn't even to mention the fact that I would like less annoying ads in the actual stream, which if Hulu allows Boxee to do this, are only likely to increase.
Conventional wisdom tells us that the best conspiracies are completely in the open. People never suspect because they figure a real conspiracy would try to hide itself.
So if the owners of Hulu are in fact aliens, this is exactly the sort of ad campaign they would run.
Hm. Guess we're screwed.
(So let's just hope they're abundantly stupid like the aliens in Signs and never take into account the fact that if water kills you on contact, maybe you shouldn't invade a planet covered in mostly water, inhabited by beings made of mostly water. HTF did that movie ever get past the script stage?)
They block boxee. So what? If your too lazy to navigate to hulu.com which works fine with linux and mac via firefox, maybe its a bad tactical decision but it doesnt stop you from watching hulu. Its still free and its still available...over the internet!
... I believe most TV shows are on BitTorrent sites. :)
Reminds me of the obligatory Star Wars reference "The more you tighten your grip Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers..."
All modern hdtvs made in the last 3 years have HDMI or DVI ports. Apple TV has an hdmi port.
The flaw is not in Hulu which works with any opensource web browser on windows, mac or linux, its in Apple TV, a closed source box with crippled functionality. That boxee software is opensource doesnt mean it can help itself to hulu's content.
Just because I am not an apple fanboy doesnt make me a troll and doesnt make me wrong either.
... it is Hulu's content providers that have made that decision. Hulu has to go along or lose the content providers. Hulu's difficulty is convincing the clueless executives at content providers like NBC that the provider's understand of the internet, and their desire to make the internet work just like TV broadcasting, is flawed.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
boxee is a troll, confirm/deny?
Wake me up when they allow people outside the US to use their site.
Honestly, I don't know the full history of this story, nor how exactly Hulu works.
This is the point where you should have canceled your post.
Two companies at war deploying tech solutions to battle each other is certainly a lot of fun to watch for web developers, engineers and geeks. It's like photoshop tennis but with real tech, not just words and art.
We are the spectators of a mild legal cyberwar.
Wake up, the future is here, science fiction concepts from 20 years ago are now reality.
Am I the only one finding this pretty amazing?
Hulu is really not worth using. There must be a more effective service for boxee. I can't use Hulu because my IP address doesn't appear to be in the U.S. and they claim some license restrictions that don't permit anywhere but the U.S. to view their content. What utter garbage to spend time worrying over a lame service further restricting who can use them!
The advertising is not "free" in this case. It is indeed PROFITABLE advertising for Hulu, as they receive the same video ad hits as they would on their site's player.
If you don't have a creative contribution to add to this world, you sure as hell shouldn't be getting paid to sit around all day publishing.
I think it's possible to have a successful publishing-only system: one which adds value by filtering noise, checking facts, and rearranging materials for easier readability. I just don't know of real-world examples.
(I almost wanted to point out Slashdot itself, then I realized the Slash system was created by Rob Malda himself. Same for Wikipedia, by Ward Cunningham.)
We want them to. If we bitch and complain enough they might do what we ask.
If they want our custom, we have the right to make demands. Capitalism is about providing people with what they want and finding a way to make money from it. It's not about providing people with what you're willing to offer and demanding some money for it.
A little explanation would be nice, or at least a link to the website...
Yes, I know google exists, but the point of the article summary is to inform.
Boxxy is our queen Boxxy is our queen Boxxy is our queen
Hulu is providing its content legally and for free to windows, mac and linux owners. If you want use torrent to get your content...be my guest. Hulu is saying we will let you watch whatever you want for free as long as you do it through our website. IMHO Its a reasonable request. If your media device doesnt have a web browser(many do) thats a problem with your device.
Boxee is a company that wants in the long run to make money off its set top boxes and to use hulu content free of charge to do so. They use it with a cloak of open source
What's all this nonsense? First off, this has very little to do with outfits like the MPAA. Hulu is owned by NBC and Fox. A lot of the content on there is directly owned by these companies and they could give it away for free on the streets if they liked. Second, the rest of the content isn't owned by them but is licensed by them. If you understand anything about licensing, you know it's regional. It's done this way to maximize profit for the content owner. For the stuff Fox/NBC doesn't own, if Hulu could come up with the same amount of cash as all their other distribution deals, I'm sure the content owners would love do a worldwide deal. Right now, they're probably making peanuts off of Hulu compared to their prior distribution methods. For example, they have deals where they sell the Simpsons around the globe. I'm sure that nets them a nice bit of change.
Now, what do you think would happen to those deals if everyone around the globe could watch them from Hulu? Okay, right now it wouldn't have that much of an impact because it has yet to go mainstream. But that kind of content access WOULD make it go mainstream. Do you think some network in France would pay top dollar for the most current season of the Simpsons if people could easily play it off of Hulu? In a sense, Hulu has to be afraid of its own success. It needs to have a revenue stream that would replace all these distribution deals that would fall apart.
(FYI, I'm not calling you stupid in the article title. It's just paraphrasing the Clinton slogan.)
Lusers that spell losers with a u.
does miro still work with hulu?