Hulu Blocking a Browser?
The more I think about this Hulu/Boxee thing, the more one thing keeps bugging me: At the end of the day isn’t Boxee just another browser? I mean sure you can use it on your TV, but you could use any browser on your TV (as long as you hooked your computer up to it). Basically, what I’m thinking is that Boxee is just an alternate interface for viewing web content, no different than Firefox, Internet Explorer or Google Chrome. And while Hulu (or any site for that matter) has no responsibility to support any browser, I’ve never heard of blocking one (though a quick Google search did turn up Paypal considering blocking browsers that weren’t tough enough on phishing).
I don’t actually think this has wider implications for the web, but for fun let’s imagine it did. Google blocking non-Chrome users from accessing Google.com or Microsoft saying no Hotmail for Firefox folks would put people up in arms (and I’m sure spurn some anti-competitive lawsuits). Now I’m sure some lawyer (or Hulu’s TOS) could easily tear this apart, but how come this is different?
(And while on the topic of Hulu, CBS is saying they can embed the player on TV.com.)
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Agreed 100% – what were they thinking with this? I weighed in on my blog too, it’s clearly a move that was made by someone clinging to the past.
The thing that I find most entertaining about Hulu blocking Boxee is that I have yet to see any ad blocking software for Boxee, where as it’s pretty easy to get it for your average web browser.
I wonder how Hulu’s content partners would respond if a large swath of Hulu watchers started blocking ads in their respective browsers of choice. Who knows? Maybe they would move exclusively to boxee and other set-top-box-like interfaces. This is, of course, only wild speculation on my part.