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That Was Quick – Hulu Blocks Boxee Browser
This looks like it’s going to go ten rounds people. First Boxee runs Hulu content. Then Hulu blocks Boxee. This morning Boxee launched a work-around based on RSS feeds. Now Boxee has told their users that Hulu is blocking the Boxee browser. So for now once again, it’s no Hulu content on Boxee.
Boxee co-founder Avner Ronen notes on the Boxee blog:
we just found out that Hulu blocked the boxee browser from accessing the Hulu site. this is a disappointing development since their RSS feeds are publicly available, and our browser, while optimized for a great 10 ft video experience, is no different in how it accesses this content than Internet Explorer, Firefox, Flock, Opera or any of the other browsers out there.
Boxee is down but not out – let’s see what they do next!
Update: Greg Sandoval at CBS was able to track down a Boxee employee and has some quotes regarding the service interruption.
They should just change the user agent string of the browser, to something like WinXP / Firefox 3. Then there would be no way Hulu could tell it was actually Boxee.
hacker!
Yeah I agree I was thinking the same as Sean but i would take it further and build in a feature where the end user can modify the user agent when ever they want to stop this method of blocking fullstop in the future.
What’s up with Hulu? Anyways, you can use Yahoo Pipes or Feedity – http://feedity.com to create a custom RSS feed for a Hulu page and it should work just fine.. for now at least!