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Remember the dismal news last month that Boxee would no longer be providing Hulu content?  Well, Boxee tried to come up with a way around that.  Although the solution was not the same as what those loving Hulu content on Boxee are used to.

Instead, the newest Boxee featured an RSS reader which is optimized for video.  This worked to get Hulu content on the site since Hulu offers up public RSS feeds.  So, the once “bleeding edge release” of Boxee grabbed the Hulu videos and streams them.  While it did work, it did not work as smoothly as the previous Hulu tools.  However, within the same day of this RSS work around, yet another glitch arose - Hulu blocked them.  What the heck? 

According the Boxee blog “we just found out that Hulu blocked the boxee browser from accessing the Hulu site. this is a disappointing development since their RSS feeds are publicly available, and our browser, while optimized for a great 10 ft video experience, is no different in how it accesses this content than Internet Explorer, Firefox, Flock, Opera or any of the other browsers out there.”

All I can think is that Hulu is caving to the content providers.  Previously, Boxee had talks with Hulu and its content providers, which fell through to keep things the way they were.  At that point, they added the new RSS tool.  Boxee, however, remains diplomatic on their blog stating that “the people in the industry ‘get it’ ... they are trying to adjust to a new reality, but they need time.”

Hmmm…I’m thinking if the content providers really did “get it,” Hulu would still be on Boxee.  The providers have to realize, if they try to block places like Hulu, viewers are just gonna go elsewhere to get what they are watching.  Places a little less than legal perhaps.  At least on Hulu we still have to watch all those blips of commercials during the programming.  Keep making it difficult to get your shows to watch legally and push your viewers to some commercial-free programming.

Boxee will be keeping their users up to date on the latest developments with the situation.  “to our users: if you choose to use boxee as your media browser to view legal and publicly available content on the internet, we will do everything we can to ensure that you can access it, no matter what the source.”  They have now implemented a status bar on the upper right corner of their page, showing if Hulu is available on the site or not.  Should be interesting to see how often the status changes.

If you want to snag yourself the latest version of Boxee, just go to the download page.  Just keep in mind that being pre-release software, there is a chance of bugs.  According to Boxee “a more stable version” should be coming March 24th.

Via: wired