Hulu Encrypts Its HTML in Attempt to Fend Off Boxee, Others

The back-and-forth parry / thrust between Boxee and Hulu is back again. Hulu, as you may recall, had shut down content access via Boxee, and Boxee fought back, re-enabling it, but Hulu has fired back yet again.

According to, TunerFreeMCE's Martin Millmore, whose media center software is similar in form to Boxee, Hulu has encrypted the HTML they send to browsers, then decrypting it via Javascript.

Now, it took TunerFreeMCE what, pretty much no time to fix the problem with their app. But it took Boxee no time at all. That's because, as I suggested they do in my prior post, Boxee has included a Mozilla based XUL component that looks exactly the same to Hulu as any other Mozilla-based browser.

In other words, no problem.

I'm not sure what Hulu was aiming to do with this change, as it didn't affect their arch-enemy Boxee at all, but the war appears to continue.