Demand Satisfaction!

Hulu just announced that they will be blocking Boxee users from accessing Hulu content via Boxee. This is coming hot on the heels of Hulu announcing that they were pulling content from TV.com.

As you may know, we’re huge fans of Boxee here at Get Satisfaction. Heck, it seems almost everyone is. We held a Boxee meetup a few weeks ago, which was massively successful. The funny thing is that we’re also big fans of Hulu.

The folks from Hulu contritely explain it on their blog:

Later this week, Hulu’s content will no longer be available through Boxee. While we never had a formal relationship with Boxee, we are under no illusions about the likely Boxee user response from this move. This has weighed heavily on the Hulu team, and we know it will weigh even more so on Boxee users.

The folks from Boxee wearily confirm it on their blog:

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, and on Oct 20th, 2008 shared it with our alpha testers. the response has been amazing. people love watching many of their favorite shows on Hulu via boxee. 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.

This reminds me of the Netflix situation from last year, whereby some Netflix PR folks proclaimed that they would be taking away a feature. Customers raised awareness (and a little hell) on the Internet, including on our site, which ultimately led the Netflix executives to rethink and rescind their plan to take away a feature from their customers.

Maybe that can happen in this case.

Weigh in on our site, and let’s see if we can help suss out the reason behind this and try and convince those folks holding the reigns of digital content that their decision may not be the best one for consumers who are keen to get — and ultimately, happily pay for — content over the Internet.

One aspect of this decision that occurs to us in the office: Blocking channels of distribution like this makes it more likely that people will simply rely on illegally downloaded content via Bittorrent — where commercials don’t exist anyway.

What’s your take on it?