The world’s worst manager, Jeff Zucker, who just so happens to be the president of NBC Universal, was on Capitol Hill today trying to persuade lawmakers to allow the proposed merger with Comcast go through. Interesting to note his take on Boxee’s relationship with Hulu, which, you’ll recall, has been something of a mess. Boxee adds Hulu compatibility, Hulu breaks said compatibility, Boxee re-works its code so that Hulu works again, Hulu breaks compatibility again, etc. And on and on and on.

Anyhow, here’s the relevant exchange, as carefully jotted down by Boxee’s point guards.

We’ve seen in that past year that Hulu gets testy about their video content being used on other sites or platforms, with Boxee and TV.com both forced to remove Hulu content from their sites and applications. Now startup Rippol is facing the same fate.

Rippol just publicly launched their video discovery sites at yesterday’s Real-Time CrunchUp, which combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting video content.

Less than a few hours after Rippol launched, the startup’s co-founder Aaron Crayford received notice from Hulu that the video embeds on Rippol from Hulu were in violation of the terms of service which state that embeds are for personal, non-commercial use only. While Rippol says that they won’t place ads in the videos or around the videos, Hulu says that the single fact that Rippol plans to make money from the entire content service violates the TOS. Instead, Hulu offered Rippol the ability to us its site map, which is a feed that links back to Hulu for video playback. Don’t embed, says Hulu. Link instead. Here’s the email notice:

We saw that you launched today. We want to notify you that you are using our embeds in violation of our terms of service which state specifically that embeds are for personal, non-commercial use only. As such we will plan to block embedding from your site by 12/4. Typically we disable embedding immediately but given that you just launched, we want to give you some time to transition.

In the place of the embeds, we can offer you is a site map feed that links back to Hulu for video playback and includes several useful pieces of metadata in a feed. It includes video titles, descriptions, thumbnails, video type, duration info, season number, episode number, air date, expiration date, in addition to the video link on Hulu.com.

It is updated every few hours: http://www.hulu.com/video_sitemap.index.xml

When Rippol responded that they will never put ads in or around Hulu content, Hulu responded:

Ad placement would be more relevant to the “non-commercial” part of the TOS vs. the “personal” part. While you may not plan to place ads near our content, Rippol is a commercial business in the sense that you plan to make money from the content service you create. Thus our content on your site is being used for commercial purposes, even if it is indirect (i.e. you attract users with Hulu content but only monetize other content).

Note we are not singling out Rippol as we have transitioned other premium video aggregators to our site map feed.

Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It also looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you’ll like. Naturally, some of the TV shows and movies that surface on Rippol are from Hulu.

Boxee encountered a similar issue in February. Boxee’s software package converts computers, Apple TVs and other popular products into media centers, and integrated Hulu content. But this ended abruptly in February when Hulu’s studio content partners demanded that Boxee take down all videos pulled from from Hulu. TV.com suffered a similar fate when Hulu pulled the plug on content earlier this year, although CBS Interactive, which owns TV.com, vehemently argued that they were within their rights to stream Hulu content.

The thing is that Rippol, and perhaps other video sites like Boxee, may be willing to enter into a distribution agreement with Hulu with regard to embedding content. In Hulu’s note to Rippol, the representative stated that “the only way for a company to legitimately embed our videos the way you do is to enter into a structured distribution relationship with us. However, we are currently entering into these very selectively.”

When Hulu axed the Boxee integration, CEO Jason Kilar wrote in a blog post:

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.

Our mission to make media dramatically easier and more user-focused has not changed and will not change. We will not stop until we achieve it and we are sober in our assessment that we have such a long way to go.

The maddening part of writing this blog entry is that we realize that there is no immediate win here for users. Please know that we take very seriously our role of representing users such that we are able to provide more and more content in more and more ways over time. We embrace this activity in ways that respect content owners’ — and even the entire industry’s — challenges to create great content that users love. Yes, it’s a complex matter. A tough mission, and a never-ending one, but one we are passionately committed to.

Even before Hulu launched the site had announced partnerships to embed content with AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo. The site also has a partnership with Comcast’s Fancast . And the site also recently launched the ability to watch some video content its video content on its Facebook page.

It’s clear the Hulu is at the mercy of of studio content owners who are calling the shots on partnerships and who should be allowed to embed Hulu content. Kilar is correct in saying that Hulu’s strategy of limited partnerships is not a win for users. But the other party left out here are the developers and startups, like Rippol and Boxee, which are crating innovative and useful products that provide a creative way to watch their videos and even drive traffic to Hulu.

When Hulu was announced in 2007, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said that Hulu would aim to have “ubiquitous distribution.” The press release issued at the time said that Hulu “will actively seek agreements with a variety of additional distribution partners.” The release also stated that each “distribution partner will feature the site’s content in an embedded player customized with a look and feel consistent with each site, making the offering organic to each destination.”

Clearly, when Hulu was announced, the ambitions were to have many more partnerships to distribute the site’s content. But all signs have pointed to the fact that Hulu and its content partners are simply not open to startups and smaller sites who have new innovations to video consumption. Frankly, it’s disappointing for the developer community as well as consumers.

In the meantime, Rippol’s Crayford says that most of Hulu’s content is available on the content owners sites, which means Rippol will point crawlers to a lot of different domains instead of Hulu, which is tedious (TV.com does this).

When we asked Hulu about the Rippol situation, they responded:

Thanks for the heads up. I’ve been told our folks are in communication with Rippol on how to possibly work together.

The basic policy on our embeds is that we do not allow sites to host the entire Hulu content library without a formal distribution agreement. These agreements are evaluated on a case by case basis with the involvement of content owners. Alternatively, we provide a video site map to allow publishers to link to our videos.

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In the NewTeeVee Live conference held in San Francisco last week, Avner Ronen, Boxee’s CEO, announced that the company is planning to unveil its new hardware product, the Boxee set up box slated for release in 2010. According to a recent post on the company’s blog, the product was enabled through a partnership with a consumer electronics company he met at CES. Details on the partner company remain secret:

I am very happy to announce we have signed our first partnership with a CE company. At this point we can not say more about the partner or the specs of the device, but we can tell you we are working closely with them to make sure we deliver a great Boxee experience on it.

The dedicated Boxee device will make it easy for users to consume and find content, no matter what source. The product will be competing with devices like Roku and Vudu, but the company is working on integrating its open-source media center in other living-room devices: game consoles, BlueRay players, etc. As stated in a recent blog post: “Our goal is to be on every Connected device in the living room.”

Specs and mocks of the Boxee Beta will be presented in on December 7th in an event in Brooklyn, NY (RSVP HERE). In addition to the product announcement, Avner offered the following predictions for TV Everywhere by 2015 :

• The biggest Internet show is going to be bigger than the biggest TV show in terms of overall business
• More Apple subscribers for video content than Comcast subscribers
• People will watch more videos and will pay more money for them

Watch the video:

We recently wrote about the real-time update and redesign of Cliqset, a Friend-Feed-like online identity platform that lets users merge and share a vast variety of social information, including status updates, location, photos, and more, onto one platform. Cliqset aims to be a one-stop-shop for social communications, pulling in content from close to 70 social networks and services, including MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and more. Users can also update their status, and share photos, bookmarks, reviews on Cliqset and push them out to wherever they choose. Today, Cliqset, which is exiting private beta, is launching two external applications of its platform—a Boxee app and an Adobe Air-powered desktop app.

Cliqset’s Boxee app lets you comment on any videos you are watching within Boxee. The app lets users chat with their friends or any other user in real-time while watching TV episodes, movies or other video content on Boxee. While the stream that will appear while watching a video only includes Cliqset users who are watching and commenting on the same content, you can also access your comprehensive Cliqset stream from within Boxee as well. Boxee has partnered with other social media platforms such as Digg and Tumblr, to incorporate each site’s functionality within the streaming software.

The Adobe Air-powered app lets you have much of the same functionality as the website, but users can organize and filter streams in stacks, similar to Seesmic or Tweetdeck. Users can share content, such as text, links, photos and bookmarks, and can also create various activity streams broken down by type of service. So you could break out your Twitter and Facebook streams into separate stacks. This is actually helpful, because aggregating real-time content from a variety of services can get confusing. The app also has a notification system that alerts you to comments made in a stream you are attached to.

My only complaint about Cliqset’s desktop app is that it is powered by Adobe Air, which tends to be buggy and slow my computer down. But for those of you who dislike Adobe Air as much as I do, there’s always the web-based platform. In September, Darren Bounds, president of Cliqset, told us that the platform aims to be a less clunky version of FriendFeed, with a target audience of users who aren’t as technologically savvy. And Cliqset plans on launching and iPhone app and an Andoird app in the near future.

Similar to the web app, Cliqset’s Boxee app and desktop app are both The platform fairly intuitive, which could boost its popularity amongst users. But as we’ve said in the past, the real-time social media stream is fast becoming a crowded space with Threadsy, Streamy and others launching compelling platforms. And who knows what Facebook will do with FriendFeed.

Cliqset closed a second seed round, $1.5 million coming from angel investor Derek Mercer, founder and former chairman and CEO of Vurv Technology, a provider of talent management software that was acquired in 2008 by Taleo for about $128.8 million. This comes in addition to an earlier early-stage capital injection of $500,000 by the man, bringing the total invested in the startup to $2 million.

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Boxee, the media center software startup, has won a lot of fans with its open approach to streaming content. And as a result it has won some more money, to the tune of a $6 million second round, led by Boston’s General Catalyst Partners. The new money will be used for growth: Both expanding the team and expanding the service’s reach in the market, we’re told.

But why now? After all, Boxee raised its first round of funding just 8 months ago, a $4 million round with Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital investing. “We’ve seen a lot of momentum over the past couple of months. It seemed like it made sense to go ahead [with a new round],” Boxee’s new head of marketing Andrew Kippen tells us.

Kippen, who previously worked with Boxee in his role at Stage Two Consulting, is the first of many hires Boxee hopes to make over the next couple of months, CEO Avner Ronen says. When it closed its Series A round in November, Boxee was just 11 people, the goal is to ramp up to 20 as soon as possible. This includes engineers but also a strong business team to work on getting Boxee into more devices.

At the same time, Boxee is working hard to get the beta version of its software out the door (it’s still currently in Alpha). Back in June, it previewed that release while also unleashing a huge update to its service which finally included support for Windows. With that important support, the service now has over 600,000 users, we’re told.

General Catalyst Partners accounted for $4 million of this second round, with previous investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital each throwing in another $1 million as well. On top of the investment, General Catalyst’s Neil Sequeira is also joining Boxee’s board. Also on the board is Union Square’s Fred Wilson and Spark’s Bijan Sabet.

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NBC, BBC, ABC... and maybe soon RayV TV as well. Israeli RayV raised a second round of $8M to develop live 24 hour broadcasts of quality programming for the PC and TV in what they call a "Virtual TV...

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