Hulu Builds Itself a Boxee Clone

By  |  Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 3:32 pm

4-01-09huluWhen last we reported on the odd relationship between the Hulu Internet TV service and Boxee media center software–part tango, part warfare–Hulu was doing everything in its power to foil Boxee fans who simply wanted to watch Hulu programming via Boxee’s TV-friendly interface. Today, the company launched  a new product: Hulu Desktop. It lets you watch Hulu via a TV-friendly interface. Kind of like Boxee–very much like Boxee–except without all the content, and with terms of service that forbid you from running it on an Apple TV

When the whole spat began back in February, Hulu adopted a sad, thoughtful, open tone in its blog post on the matter. The blog post introducing Desktop, however, trumpets Desktop as something cool invented by some Hulu engineers, and makes no reference to Boxee.

I’m not a Huluhater. I think that content owners are allowed to make decisions about how their content is consumed, even if they A) make my life difficult; and B) may be self-defeating in the long run. And I haven’t given up all hope of some deal being struck that puts Hulu back on Boxee. But this is sad, just sad–and if Hulu Desktop flourishes and Boxee withers away, it’ll be sadder still.

Anyhow, I can’t get Hulu Desktop to run on my Mac–it flings error messages at me, refuses to stream video, and shuts itself down. I’ll try again on another machine. Any opinions?

 
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2 Comments For This Post

  1. Stuart Says:
    May 28th, 2009 at 11:21 pm

    I had some trouble with the program earlier (between it being in Beta and the fact that they probably got slammed today, it makes sense). A delete and reinstall seemed to cure my issues (tried it on my Mac mini and HP laptop).

    I do have to disagree with the title of the article – the program isn’t a Boxee clone, and I suspect its development had nothing to do with Boxee. It’s a desktop app, a nicer way to view the content, not a means of creating your own set top box.

  2. Roberta Says:
    May 29th, 2009 at 9:58 am

    I put it on My 2008 iMac lat night. I had no problems running, just some issues trying to navigate around in the interface. Not as intuative as it could be I think

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