In a way, it’s kind of sad. The old media squealing and squirming, trying pathetically to hold on to a time that has long been lost to the sands of… Well, time. Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC, made such a pathetic attempt before a US Congress committee yesterday, claiming Boxee stole Hulu’s content.
The hearing is taking place to investigate the proposed acquisition of NBC Universal by Comcast. During this hearing, Rep. Rick Boucher, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, asked Zucker specifically about Boxee. “What about Boxee?” Boucher asked, “Did Hulu block the Boxee users from access to the Hulu programs?”
Zucker responded in a way that makes me think the guy – CEO no less – has no idea what he’s talking about. “This was a decision made by the Hulu management”, he stated, “What Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal. And, you know, all, all the, we have several distributors, actually many distributors of the Hulu content that we have legal distribution deals with so we don’t preclude distribution deals. What we preclude are those who illegally take that content.”
This seems weird for a number of reasons. The most obvious reason is that if Boxee stole Hulu’s content, than so did Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and every other browser capable of displaying Hulu. Boxee can be simply considered a browser which you can use to access Hulu (if you live in the US, obviously).
On the Boxee blog, Boxee Founder and CEO Avner Ronen distanced himself from the accusations. “Boxee uses a web browser to access Hulu’s content – just like Firefox or Internet Explorer,” he explained, “Boxee users click on a link to Hulu’s website and the video within that page plays. We don’t “take” the video. We don’t copy it. We don’t put ads on top of it. The video and the ads play like they do on other browsers or on Hulu Desktop. And it certainly is legal to do so.”
The second reason Zucker’s answer is weird is that he claims it was Hulu management who made the decision to block Boxee – this is decidedly not true. In a year-old blog post, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar announced the blocking of Hulu on Boxee, and he made it very clear that the decision to do so came from the content providers – and not from Hulu itself.
Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes. While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence – bumps and all – we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.
The third and final reason Zucker’s answer is weird is a less verifiable one, but it has to do with the claimed willingness to negotiate with Boxee. “Mr. Zucker says they always said they are open to negotiations,” Ronen wrote, “That has not been our experience, but at this point, we will take Mr. Zucker’s offer at face value and will contact him.”
The world is changing – nay – the world has changed. People want their media delivered in different and more efficient ways, and the internet is the obvious transport medium here. Instead of embracing this new opportunity, content providers try to fight it, to absolutely no avail, of course. You’d think that by now, ten years down the line and several thorough beatings with the clue-stick later, they’d get the damn message.
If it hadn’t been for the internet, I would’ve never spent 160 EUR on my four seasons of Battlestar Galactica. They didn’t broadcast the show here, so the internet was my only opportunity to “test” it (which happens to be legal here). Without the internet, I would’ve never discovered I like The Gilmore Girls (I’ve heard all the jokes, people), and I certainly wouldn’t be saving up to spend 180 EUR on the special edition seven-season box set.
Content providers are short-sighted idiots. The market will take care of them.
I would’ve never discovered I like The Gilmore Girls (I’ve heard all the jokes, people)
What do you expect, he’s European. I kid, I kid. Back to the regularly time-shifted programming…
I love how when someone says “they’ve heard all the jokes” we all still try and find one that hasn’t been said!
Everyone has their guilty pleasure (Airwolf)…
Guess I just stole the latest episode of 24 I watched today on my Ubuntu system via Hulu since, you know, I doubt Canonical nor Mozilla nor even Adobe have a distribution deal with Hulu, NBC, Fox, etc etc… wow, being a thief isn’t as hard as I thought.
That has to take the cake for the stupidest thing I’ve heard so far this year. It even wins over the Joo Joo.
Edited 2010-02-05 23:13 UTC
Reminds me of an old time technical person I was working with. About some legitimate well-developed software (controlled development in fact) that happened to have an outlet via sourceforge he stated “I don’t trust anything from that site”.
times sure have changed, old timers.
Edited 2010-02-06 01:27 UTC
The sad thing is Zucker isn’t that old. At 44, he is practically Generation X.
Well times have not changed that much. There are some good projects in Sourceforge, but largely that site is a cemetery of open source source projects. Majority of stuff there is not really production-ready.
Things are of course much worse in something like Github where kids put their stuff without understanding a single thing about release engineering.
Edited 2010-02-07 07:23 UTC
Well, the kids have to learn somewhere. They need their little playgrounds.
Their content was stolen and now they have no videos to stream to people.
Sad, really, that these people don’t understand what they are talking about. I would’ve gotten the point if Boxee stripped the commercials or something, but that’s not even the case. Oh, well, I don’t have access anyways, since I’m not in the US – I really hate geographical restrictions :/
Proxies do wonders 🙂
Jeff Zucker took multiple money-generating franchises for NBC and flushed them down the toilet. The last two were the Tonight Show, which has been on for over 60 years, and Late Night, which has been on for over 30.
NBC at one time was a very large cash cow for GE. Now it is about to be acquired by Comcast, a cable company, because they lost their way and made a lot of bad investments that cost them billions of dollars. The last one was getting rid of their entire 10 o’clock primetime hour for Jay Leno, who is way past his prime and is IMHO not funny. He hired “Stuttering John” Melendez from the Howard Stern show as a writer, and now does old Stern bits in an unfunny way.
Jeff Zucker and Dick Ebersol will hopefully be shown the door by Michael Andreakis, the CFO of Comcast who really runs the show, when Congress approves their acquisition.
View him and Dick Ebersol as dinosaurs about to meet the meteor.
It is greatly hoped in the industry that Bonnie Hammer will be given the big chair. She was responsible for greenlighting Battlestar Galatica on Sci-Fi and turning USA network into what it is today.
After reading this story, I decided to give Boxee a whirl on my Ubu box
I was very impressed, and in no way saw how Boxee “stole” content from Hulu anymore than it “stole” content from CBS when I watched “Star Trek”…..
There is no question the NBC needs a major shakeup, that Tonight Show fiasco was a disaster. More so not just for Conan, but for his staff that got more screwed over.
The guy killed the shows Life, Journeyman and others. He deserves the door. Under his watch their ratings have plummeted.
With Comcast taking over controlling interest [whom I can’t stomach] perhaps they’ll be wise to phase him out.
His entire argument is as intelligent as it was for creating the entire Tonight Show fiascal.
My worry is that Comcast, a cable company, will allow NBC continue to wither. I can see the day that USA Network will be their primary outlet.
No, they won’t allow it to wither. It’s access to information for many people, and it gives them the ability to control a lot more of the marketplace. Comcast owns a few other networks, and has allowed them to prosper just fine, such as E!, Style Network, and their sports channels.
The problem with NBC has been that their smaller channels have been producing the good programming, such as Telemundo, Bravo, SyFy, and USA Network, and the main network can’t program to save their lives.
Those who think that they will let the network wither underestimate how much money the evening news brings in, which is the reason why the Leno experiment was such a failure. You want to have a good lead-in to sell Comcast to people who don’t own it already.
There’s also 60+ years of programming to sell via distribution channels, which they will find a way to do.
If anything I expect the quality of programming to improve, as Comcast will put in programming that makes a profit and builds loyalty, not experiments.
As a short-sighted idiot, I find the comparison offensive.