[swlevy]

It isn't quite that simple; I work for an "old media" company, and for us, Boxee jumped the gun by ingesting content prior to having the requisite agreement. Since they did not consult our developers, our ads were not implemented correctly, and we weren't getting paid (even though Boxee's users may have been seeing the ads).

[mechanical_fish]

Have your employers considered how many ads the Bittorrent users are paying for?

Boxee is taking off. Its users are voluntarily watching your ads. And, instead of trying to work with that and ride the wave, your tired media company is emasculating it. Sounds like the kind of brilliant logic that led the music publishers to destroy Napster, only stupider.

[jnoller]

Then work with them to forge the deal, instead of yanking your content and causing a frenzy which isn't in your favor. Maybe explain why the ads were not generating revenue, for starters. Just having it yanked begets bad blood.

There's a lot of early adopters and people using boxee+hulu, and pulling it means people will simply tune you out.

[jonursenbach]

How is what Boxee was doing any different from the EMBED tag that Hulu gives out?

[ja2ke]

Progess is slow, and it's hard to get people to change, etc, but Boxee seems extraordinarily dedicated to getting real partners onto its service, and serving as much legal content as they can. I do think that they might be overstepping or at least stepping out of being "professional" by just integrating things like Hulu content, basically "rogue," but it's what they have to do to get a userbase and to get the buzz that they have.

But now, they're here, and they want to play. There is a service and a userbase who are all clearly invested in supporting your legal content, sitting here staring content providers in the face. Surely entertainment hubris or ego will get in the way of things actually going smoothly in a situation like this, but its one of those times where I wish everyone would just shut up, play ball, and make money.

[bestes]

Isn't this something you(or they) could fix on your end?

[peregrine]

Hulu probably signed an agreement with say Tivo or Microsoft(360), nintendo, sony, heck even samsung. To do the same thing but have people pay for it and get some royalties. This product only

Hulu wasn't making any money with this. Boxee was full of people who would use Hulu without boxee and see the ads but the Hulu brand and ads wouldn't be connected as clearly as they would be online.

In a recession things like that can fly but when your trying to make money you gotta work for it.

[noahlt]

"Since they did not consult our developers, our ads were not implemented correctly, and we weren't getting paid (even though Boxee's users may have been seeing the ads)."

Honest question: don't you normally pay for ads, rather than getting paid for them? I must be missing something here.