Boxee removes Hulu, time for Understudy

For those of you following the Hulu / TV.com story, we wanted to share the news that Hulu has also requested to be removed from boxee at the request of their content partners. 
We’ve put up a blog post on our site (http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/02/18/the-hulu-situation/) giving a little more insight, but we wanted you to hear it from us first.

Here’s the text of our post:
we love Hulu. they have built a great product and brand (including one the best Superbowl ads this year). since our early days in private alpha, Hulu was the most requested site by our users. so we built support for browsing Hulu on boxee, reached out to Hulu, showed it to them, and on Oct 20th, 2008 shared it with our alpha testers (without a formal partnership with Hulu). the response has been amazing. people love watching many of their favorite shows on Hulu via boxee. last week we generated more than 100,000 streams for them…

two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it.  you can see their blog post about the issues they are facing there.

our goal has always been to drive users to legal sources of content that are publicly available on the Internet.  we have many content partners who are generating revenue from boxee users and we will work with Hulu and their partners to resolve the situation.

we will tell them how users love Hulu on boxee, why it represents a great opportunity for them to better engage with fans of their shows, how boxee can help in exposing their content to new people, and why they should be excited about future opportunities of working with us.

we will blog/tweet as soon as we have any updates and hopefully we’ll be able to bring back the Hulu experience to boxee sooner rather than later.

Best,
Andrew