"Boxee already has a license with Hulu."
Dude, it would help if you can back your talk with facts. According to this piece (Oct 29, 2008) from MacNN:
http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/10/20/b....hulu.cbs/
"The company says it used a specially-adapted Adobe Flash player to provide direct access to the additional content from the Boxee interface. Although the company says it has notified Hulu and CBS.com that it is providing access to their content, there are no partnership agreements with either site."
Now, this doesn't mean that it's impossible to get partnerships w/ Hulu et al, but it means that most of the hype (including yours) about Boxee is just that: Hype. Getting Hulu's permission would mean being able to display all of the ads on the page, not just in-video ads. Then, it has to work out a feedback mechanism back to Hulu so the ads can be measured. In short, it's a lot more complicated than developing a plugin to zap Hulu videos.
Right now, even Hulu still hasn't worked out the in-video ad format yet, and neither has any of the other online video sites--Youtube, AOL, etc. It's going to take a while to figure out. But one thing is for certain: They (the content owners) are not going to sit back and let some startup outfit make profit from their content without permission, while they pay the cost of developing and distributing said content.
The problem for Boxee has already been said: they don't own anything that they can make money from. The social networking beeswax is bleh, and the media-playing code base is already accessible to anybody. They don't have any hardware (they're just talking about it now on their blog), and they have no licensed content. You have to be a pretty serious fanboy to think that they can squeeze any money from this.
I'm of course more than happy to be proven wrong, but business is about making money, and hype is not an asset you can make money from. I do wish them all the luck, though.