hulu on tvloopWatercooler CEO Kevin Chou was interviewed by the LA Times today for a piece about Hulu removing its content from Boxee and TV.com over the last week.  In case you’ve been living in a cave, you can read all about this Internet video brouhaha at any of the following blogs:

There have been several theories as to Hulu’s rationale for pulling the content.  With regards to TV.com, it’s really of no great surprise since the relaunch of that site put it squarely in Hulu’s backyard.  Plus, I’ve read that there could still be some lingering bitterness that CBS didn’t joing FOX and NBC when Hulu was created a few years ago. The Boxee situation is a little stickier as that service is probably more competitive to Hulu’s parents than it is to Hulu itself.

In the LA Times piece, journalist Jon Healey mentions that Hulu could be concerned about the safety of its content on Boxee.  If that’s true, it could end up suffering the law of unintended consequences - meaning that in an attempt to keep FOX and NBC content safe from piracy, Hulu may actually increase illegal downloads. Without official Hulu support, Boxee users will have no choice but to use BitTorrent to get shows like The Simpsons and The Office.  I wrote a similar post about this very topic several months ago with Hulu again in the lead role after pulling It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episodes from Hulu.com.  If nothing else is clear about the online use of professional content, consumers will find ways to get it.

If Hulu’s reason for removing the content from Boxee is because Boxee’s ability to bypass cable networks when it comes to broadcast TV shows, then the company really could be swimming upstream. As Healey mentions in his post, there are a host of other hardware providers that do what Boxee does, and Hulu (or FOX and NBC rather) can’t stop them all.

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