Raiden: You'll note I added a clarification of my "they're clueless" point: A piece from a blog post I did on the Hulu-Boxee thing:

"See I'm old enough to remember life before cable. A time when Cable was for HBO and Showtime and little else. I saw how Cable went from something extra for the TV to something necessary for TV. Most of the compelling TV has moved to cable. OTA (over the air) broadcast is basically, medical shows, CSI shows and "unscripted" reality shows. That's it really. Well if you don't include the weekend sports. So OTA is really only useful for local news casts. And since 9-11, reception of traditional air broadcasts have sucked by me. So most people pay at least $12 for basic cable (AKA clear OTA programming). Now all those other stations, TBS, SPIKE, etc. are revenue streams for the likes of Time Warner, Cablevision, etc. as well as the "content providers." Cable companies and their local subsidiaries also have a monopoly on break in advertising. They sell advertising on various channels to local businesses. This is a brisk business that has branched out into movie theatres as well. Hulu breaks this business model completely since a great deal of people who use Boxee have cut the cable/satelite and use Boxee as their content viewer of choice. So the really big losers here: Cable companies. Not only are they losing customers who no longer pay the 70+ bucks/month for "premium content." They also lose the advertising bucks because they can't claim to reach x-amount of people per station.

The "content providers" still make money because all Hulu programming has advertising so they can still make a profit and that profit would increase as more people moved from Cable to Boxee.

Now if you don't want to believe me about the cable angle, then take a look at the Boxee blog where they discuss the cable company execs that came to "visit" Boxee at CES. If you think those execs left the Boxee booth saying: "Yo, good **** they have there." I suggest laying off the herb. I will lay out cold cash that these execs were on the cell phones with lawyers and "content execs" as soon as they left the Boxee booth. I surmise the conversations went something like: WTF!!! WTF!!!These people are putting your **** on OUR TV's!!!! We have CONTRACTS!!! WTF!!!!(Think Christian Bale interrupted during a Terminator shoot). I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some threat to not broadcast any "content provider" who continued to allow Boxee access to their content. Think not? How many times have you seen the scrolling threat to cut off some set of channels or another over some dispute with the tag: please call such and such company....?

Yes folks, my thinking is that the "content providers" were more than happy to get Boxee users streaming Hulu content to their shiny flat panel TV's. I believe that the cable companies saw the end to their business. Of course had they NOT decided to stick the public for way overpriced "content delivery." They wouldn't have had this problem, but anyone who did the math I did, realized that streaming video over their internet connection which is a must have today, along with a AppleTV costs less per year even in the first year, than a cable subscription."