The Digital Dembroski

There’s a ton of interesting news circulating today about how Boxee, a slick media center front end, and Hulu, a high quality way to consume popular television and other such content legally, have been forced to break up their love affair. That was an amazing run on sentence that I just typed.

Anyway, I first heard to the problem from my good friend Conigs – his take on the story here.  Ars Technica weighed in as well, it would seem that both Hulu and Boxee are torn up about the forced separation:

Boxee’s Avner Ronen was naturally upset to have to announce to Boxee customers that Hulu support is being removed as of February 20. The feature has been widely popular and, along with Netflix Instant Queue integration, it was one of the reasons I joined in the alpha program. Folks already paying for a fat data pipe into their homes have been ditching cable or satellite subscriptions for online content, and Boxee has been one of the tools that has made that choice quite enjoyable, especially on the Apple TV.

Hulu’s CEO, Jason Kilar, was equally displeased to have to explain why Hulu was forced to make the request in the first place. “Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes,” he wrote in a blog post. “The maddening part of writing this blog entry is that we realize that there is no immediate win here for users. Please know that we take very seriously our role of representing users such that we are able to provide more and more content in more and more ways over time.”

Content providers are stuck in their traditional mode of thought; they’re prioritizing their needs before the needs of their users.  This used to work in the days before the internet.  Television viewers were forced to consume content on the terms of the broadcasters.  Sure, if they didn’t like the way content was being doled out they could change the channel, but there were only a handful of broadcast options.  Cable viewers might have had a few hundred or even a thousand options.

Today users, via the internet, have a millions of ways to interface with millions of “channels” of content.  The old thinking no longer works – the availability of content has been democratized.  You need to make your content easy to access with minimal cost to the user.

Very often the easiest way to consume content is piracy.  For the savvy user, piracy offers the fewest amount of hoops to jump through.  Content is high quality and free. This is where Hulu stands out – it’s an easy way to consume high quality A-list content that’s both free AND legal.  That’s why users have been flocking to it.  Boxee made free and legal consumption even easier.

Chris Foresman writes:

One detail to note is that Hulu content is paid for by advertising, and Boxee did not in any way block or eliminate the ads. And, in practice, there is no difference between watching the content via Boxee and watching via the Hulu website in full-screen mode on a computer attached to a TV—except that it’s more time consuming and annoying to set it up via a browser. Boxee made it easier for viewers to enjoy legal content they way they wanted to, which was exactly the purpose of creating Hulu in the first place.

So basically Hulu’s content providers are, inadvertently, actually turning away ad-revenue because they either have some sort of horrible and decidedly less elegant scheme up their sleeves or they simply just don’t get it.  I’d argue that it’s most likely the latter.  Content providers are struggling to force their square-pegged old business model into the round hole that is the internet.  It will never fit – maybe it’s time for a new business model.

(Conigs and Ars Technica)