A trend started to develop in the US over the past few months. People were dropping expensive cable and satellite TV subscriptions in favour of building web TV boxes. The main service they used was Boxee, a commercial wrapper around a shareware XBMC software.
Boxee was able to offer a good selection of content since it re-presented content from services such as the NBC/NewsCorp JV Hulu, which carries a good range of contemporary programming.
But now the party's over... Hulu has pulled all its content, saying it's down to the content owners. But, wait a minute, in many cases, they are the content owners. The pathetic bleating on the Hulu blog belies that this is a media giant behaving monopolistically.
TV 2.0 is behaving just like TV 1.0 and closing down on any upstarts as quickly as they can. Thank God the regulators in the UK didn't allow Kangaroo to become our Hulu. But I suspect Mr Murdoch will still have the last laugh when Hulu launches over here and sweeps all before it.
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