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.
There's a lot of early adopters and people using boxee+hulu, and pulling it means people will simply tune you out.
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.
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.
Honest question: don't you normally pay for ads, rather than getting paid for them? I must be missing something here.
This is especially frustrating for me because I set up my HTPC with Boxee expressly to have an easy-to-navigate interface for Hulu via my remote control.