NBC: Please watch our shows on Hulu (only sometimes)
File this in the, “Um, you’re kidding, right?” department.
Yesterday, NBC, one of the owners of Hulu, demanded that Hulu force Boxee to stop letting its 200K+ users watch Hulu programming through Boxee. Boxee, in case you haven’t tried it yet, is a wonderfully simply interface for browsing media on the net in a “lean back” experience. It is directed at those of us who have attached our computers to a nice TV screen and would rather watch Hulu, YouTube, and all the other free content on the web on a nice big screen, ads and all. Boxee is an internet browser at its core. It is not licensing content, selling you downloads, or directing you to stolen shows. It is making watching web-delivered video easier to find and watch. It is helping Hulu. Last week it sent Hulu more than 100,000 viewers.
NBC, who licenses thousands of shows to Hulu, in their wisdom, is getting scared. They are hearing about all these 20-somethings who are cutting their cable bill and foregoing the $80 a month to instead watch their faviorite shows online. They aren’t stealing the shows through torrent sites, mind you, they are watching them legally through the means that NBC is providing. The problem is that NBC makes an overwhelming amount of their profits through subscriber fees paid to them by the MSOs. The ad revenue they get from putting ads in Hulu are the digital pennies I refer to here.
While I understand the digital transition is challenging for big media, doing things half-hearted won’t help. If you want to beat piracy, you have to embrace the methods consumers demand. Boxee has done what AppleTV and all the other digital media adapters have not done which is to put a pleasant interface on the browsing of web-delivered entertainment. And they have 200K+ of the most savvy internet video viewers as their customers. What do you think those customers will do now? Throw away Boxee just to watch NBC’s shows? Nope. One of two things: watch non-NBC programming, or worse, steal NBC’s shows. Either result is a loser for NBC.
Tip o’ the hat to Dave Mandelbrot for a bit of prodding to post.
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[...] pulling its boxee support. The creators of boxee have issued a statement describing their position. Here’s another blogger’s well-put explanation of the situation. As of Friday, I have to go [...]
[...] pulling its boxee support. The creators of boxee have issued a statement describing their position. Here’s another blogger’s well-put explanation of the situation. As of Friday, I have to go [...]
David:
Great post as usual.
I think you have the wrong URL in your link to Boxee. It should be http://www.boxee.tv/ (not http://www.boxee.com/).
:Kendall
Kendall, thanks for the edit! Fixed!
Heh, this reminds me of a completely dumbfounding experience on the Acela last week that speaks to the inanity of this arbitrary situation.
I wanted to catch up on an NBC show (BSG) and went to iTunes to download and pay for it. Forgot.. they don’t let me watch it there.
Oh, but they do let me watch it, for free, on Boxee. So they literally forced me to give them an ad revenue dollar instead of direct money (albeit through Apple). They must have made an order of magnitude lower than what I would have actually given them.