TUAW‘s running a story on how the boxee devs managed to get around hulu‘s (feeble) attempt at blocking boxee from accessing hulu.

I was more than a little irritated at hulu at first about how they were going after boxee, especially since the ads were still being viewed, and there was really no difference between me watching content on my AppleTV vice a computer+browser, but Brian Brushwood made a GREAT point on TWiT this week: hulu’s not really trying to block boxee, they’re just doing the absolute minimum required to sate the content owners.

Their goal is to keep the content owners at bay just long enough to win the premium streaming content market. Once they win, they can go back to the bargaining table to renegotiate their contracts and start to really push for some of these restrictions to be lifted.

That said, it seems that boxee’s arrived at a solution that’s unbeatable. For hulu to block boxee, they’d have to cut off all of the firefox users, which is probably a significant share of their customers. Given that hulu’s not quite a household name, and that their primary audience are the web cognisanti, I’m willing to bet that their firefox numbers are higher than average.

Either way: cheers to boxee!