Hulu, Boxee, and the threat of user experience

I've been following the developing Hulu/Boxee situation closely because I believe the real issue here is one of user experience. In case you haven't been following along:

...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.

That good faith didn't last for long:

Early this morning, Boxee rolled out a workaround that let Boxee users watch Hulu shows again, which they haven’t been able to do since last month when Hulu pulled its shows off Boxee’s browser. Late this afternoon, Hulu squelched that workaround.

If you are in the business of serving web video content, why block one particular browser, one that could potentially be your largest channel? Because, when it comes down to it, Boxee provides a superior user experience for watching internet TV, superior, quite possibly to watching regular TV. In fact, Boxee, and it's brethren could very well be the tipping point in the great public switch to internet television. The networks apparently agree:

Why does the TV industry need to keep Web video off your big-screen TV? Not because it hates technology. But because it hasn't figured out how to make money off Web video yet -- and needs you to keep watching TV on your TV.

NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker all but admitted as much in a keynote this morning: "What we’ve lost in viewers and advertising dollars on the analog side isn’t being made up for at all on the digital side. We want to find an economic model that makes sense."

Television is being tivoed all over again.

Labels: analysis, innovation, user experience