Hulu Videos Return to Boxee (Sort of)

Fans of Boxee's streaming video service got a rude shock in February when Hulu's content providers (networks and movie studios) forced Hulu to pull its content from Boxee. Hulu was careful to distance itself from the decision, laying the blame on the studios instead, but for Boxee fans the end result was to same — all the great content of Hulu was gone.

Now, however, Boxee has come up with a workaround. It's not as nice as the former integrated Hulu features, but the latest version of Boxee (which is a "bleeding edge release", and potentially unstable) features an RSS reader optimized for video.

Because most Hulu content offers public RSS feeds, the new version of Boxee can pull in Hulu videos and stream them through Boxee. It's not nearly as simple or smooth as the old Hulu tools, but it does work.

Boxee released the new RSS scraping tool after talks with Hulu and its content providers fell through. The Boxee blog reports that while the content providers are thus far unwilling to change their position, Boxee thinks that "the people in the industry 'get it'... they are trying to adjust to a new reality, but they need time."

While Boxee may be playing the diplomatic card at the moment, we aren't. To say they get it, but don't want participate is an oxymoron — the content producers don't get it, if they did Hulu would be back on Boxee. Boxee offers one of the easiest and best ways to stream web-based content to your TV, excluding Hulu content from that is another attempt to control where and how you can consume video. It's doomed to failure.

Thankfully, while Boxee might be placating the content providers in blog posts, it's also doing what users want — getting Hulu content back on Boxee. While the new features may be primitive compared to the earlier version, at least you can still watch Hulu where you want, when you want.

To grab a copy of the latest version of Boxee head to the download page. Just be forewarned that it is pre-release software so there may be some bugs and other issues. Boxee says that a more stable version will be arriving on March 24.

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