Unless you’ve been under a rock lately, no doubt you’ve heard about the proposed merger between media giants Comcast and NBC Universal.

In today’s round of hearings for what is sure to be a landmark media merger (and not in a good way), a slandering of all that is good in the world of open access digital content was brought to fruition by one simple question from Rep. Mark Boucher: “What about Boxee?”

The softball question was asked of Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC Universal, during the House Commerce Committee proceedings.  Mr. Zucker responded by saying, “This was a decision made by the Hulu management.”  He was later quoted as saying, “What Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal.”  (You can watch a video clip here.)

Without missing a beat, Avner Ronen took the opportunity to respond to Mr. Zucker’s slanderous allegations via the Boxee Blog by stating, “We don’t ‘take’ the video. We don’t copy it. We don’t put ads on top of it. The video and the ads play like they do on other browsers or on Hulu Desktop. And it certainly is legal to do so.”  According to Ronen, Boxee was denied access to the material due to the content providers objections, and not because of a Hulu management decision.

Here’s my take:  Nice try, Jeff, but Hulu doesn’t produce the content.  If anything, Hulu is a syndicator of the content, dealing with movies and television shows much like an stock broker deals with securities.  The broker doesn’t own the companies that produce the stock, yet they deal securities for multiple corporations on the free market.  They are merely a third party dealing with someone else’s products for them.

Rather what NBC and Zucker are stuck up about is the fact they they are losing revenue with a failing business model.  It’s quite well known that ad-sponsored content is a failing business market for the content producers and subscription based models are quickly filling the gap.  Hence why Hulu is rumored to move to such a subscription-based model mid-2010.  Boxee is quickly stealing market share from them with the amount of dynamic content they can syndicate for independent production houses like Revision 3, Suicide Girls and many others.

Typical ploy for the big conglomerate cable companies to keep the content where they want it – in their own playpen.  They don’t want to share with the rest of the room and they will suffer dearly for it in the end.  They want the consumer in their back pocket because they know that it is the only way they will continue to survive in the future.

It’s time that our national legislature stand up for free media and net neutrality in this country instead of punishing the producers of thought-provoking, independent content.

John Fox : Starting at the age of 6, John was always fascinated with computers. His first machine, an IBM PCjr, had him hooked and from that sparked a love affair with technology. Creating webpages at the age of 12 and the advent of social media that came about in his 20's, he started his own media company, New Media Designs, in 2009. Due to the success of IndyGeek.net, New Media Designs' flagship product, the NMD brand was stopped in April 2010 and IndyGeek became the name of the company founded by Fox, his wife Esther and Alex Conner.