I attended a Boxee meetup/beta announcement event here in New York last night.

Boxee, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is the small New York-based startup behind a “media browser” application that has received a lot of attention lately, despite being still in alpha testing.  Optimized for a 10 ft. lean-back internet video experience, the app can be installed on an Apple TV - or you can connect that spare Mac Mini you have laying around the house to your television and install it there.

Either way, this is precisely the kind of solution that’s needed for internet video to evolve beyond the solitary dorm-room/workplace short-form diversion it currently is to a true home entertainment medium.

The profoundly disruptive implications of such a scenario were not lost on Hulu owners News Corp. (Fox/Paramount) and NBCU, who decided to deny access from the Boxee client a few weeks ago, just as the app’s ability to provide a compelling Hulu experience on the television was becoming more widely known.  This started of a series of back-and-forth technical maneuvers between the two companies: Hulu first started refusing any connections originating from Boxee rather than from standard web browsers.   In response, Boxee quickly implemented a workaround solution, instead accessing Hulu streams via the site’s public RSS feed, only to have Hulu implement a block on all Boxee RSS subscription requests a day or two later.   And on it goes - Boxee tweaks their RSS reader implementation to get through, Hulu tweaks their RSS feed implementation to deny it…  It’s gotten to the point that recent Boxee releases include a status message in the upper right corner, alerting users to whether the Hulu service happens to be available at that particular moment.

It was interesting last night, then, as Boxee CEO Avner Ronen slipped in the following item while listing the feature set of Boxee’s upcoming beta release: Boxee will now include, as Ronen put it, a fully Mozilla (i.e. FireFox)-compliant browser.  Although not explicitly stated, the implication is that Hulu will no longer be able to identify Boxee and block it. In other words, when you select Hulu content on the next Boxee beta, the software will first connect to the Hulu web page rather than the stream itself, and will appear to Hulu as simply yet another instance of Firefox on yet another computer.   Boxee will then automatically display the stream in full screen mode.

In general, there was no shortage of Hulu-related catcalls from the assembled faithful throughout last night’s event - so I found it interesting that these two or three sentences failed to generate much immediate crowd reaction, especially since Mozilla compliance is both a major new feature and the strategy behind Boxee’s next round of maneuvers to maintain access to Hulu.

One has to give Boxee credit: the tiny (12 person) company is going up against News Corp. and (indirectly) NBCU owner General Electric - yet they are not going away.  In fact, Boxee appears more determined than ever to keep forcing Hulu’s hand, leaving America’s preeminent premium web video streaming service with no choice other than to continue having to do (as Hulu itself puts it) “a hard thing” - to  block access to users depending on what software they’re using - or to put it more accurately, depending on where (the desk or the couch) that software is being used.

Although it met with a similarly underwhelming audience response at the time, the other announcement worth noting consisted of one literally one sentence: “Look for Boxee to announce major content partnerships in 2009.“  Boxee has already partnered with some major content owners (CBS, CNN, and Netflix, to name a few), so it will be interesting to see who’s next.   Probably not Disney, due to their close relationship with Hulu competitor Apple/iTunes - but maybe Viacom (Comedy Central/MTV, etc)?

One thing is clear: Boxee will continue to be a fascinating company to watch in 2009.