Hulu drops boxee

Hulu took down its content from Internet TV platform boxee Wednesday, as gripes from content partners forced Hulu to remove its content from a second online video destination this week. Hulu's content was taken down from CBS-owned TV.com on Wednesday for the same reasons.

boxee allowed users to watch all of Hulu's content for free on their televisions, but according to a blog post by Hulu CEO Jason Kilar entitled "Doing hard things," the NBC-News. Corp joint venture had to respond to content providers' wishes.

"Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes," Kilar said in the statement. "While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence-bumps and all--we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites."

Bloggers and analysts have speculated that the decision to remove Hulu content from TV.com and boxee was made due to cable companies bickering about declining subscriptions or the threat of them from Hulu on the TV via boxee.

boxee staff blogged a response bemoaning the Hulu takedown, and said they would fight to bring the Hulu content back to the service. "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."

In the blog post, boxee claims it generated 100,000 video streams for Hulu this past week. 

For more:
- see the Hulu blog post here
- see the boxee blog post here
- see the Tech Crunch post here 

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