When I first met Avner Ronen in January, the Boxee CEO was beaming. His Web video company was one of the breakout hits at the Consumer Electronics Show.

But when I had lunch with Ronen yesterday, he was much more subdued. Going head-to-head against the TV establishment can take the wind out of you.

In the span of two months, Boxee has gone from obscure start-up to an irritant or worse for the TV business.

That’s because Boxee, which makes it easy to sort and play video you grab from the Web, symbolizes a real threat for the established players: That one day, many consumers will consume most of their TV via video they find on the Web. And then they’ll cut TV networks and cable operators out of the picture.

That’s a long way from happening, but just the notion of it seemed to be enough for GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, which apparently forced their Hulu joint venture to stop working with Boxee last month.

Now Hulu and Boxee are in a cat-and-mouse game, whereby Boxee’s engineers try to find ways to get Hulu’s stuff onto their browsers and the Hulu guys try to stop them. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

Ronen isn’t optimistic that this is going to change anytime soon. He also says the past few months have taught him how little he knew about the media business prior to starting Boxee in 2007. Had he known how entrenched and complicated the relationships between broadcasters, programmers, cable networks and cable operators are, he says, he might never have tried to get the company going.

But Ronen still figures he’ll thrive in the long run. He notes that some big media companies that aren’t NBC and Fox–Netflix (NFLX) and Disney’s (DIS) ABC, for instance–have been happy to work with Boxee, or at least not to complain about the service.

I’ll let him explain why, and lay out Boxee’s future plans (which included a beta launch this summer and Boxee-enabled devices next year) in this video interview.

And if, like me, you’re going to be in Austin for South By Southwest on Saturday, you can ask him yourself, at a panel discussion where he’ll share the stage with College Humor’s Ricky Van Veen and B.J. Novak of “The Office.”

And Boxee, a start-up that makes it easy for you to plug your computer into your TV so you can watch Web video, doesn’t care.

Got it?

Here’s where we are: Early this morning, Boxee rolled out a workaround that let Boxee users watch Hulu shows again, which they haven’t been able to do since last month when Hulu pulled its shows off Boxee’s browser. Late this afternoon, Hulu squelched that workaround.

And as of now (8:51 p.m. EST), Boxee CEO Avner Ronen tells me, his team has made another series of tweaks that will let you watch Hulu shows on Boxee yet again. Ronen says he’s not quite sure about the technical details, but argues that his service has every right to let you watch Hulu on your television, since Hulu is a free Web service that anyone (in the U.S.) can access.

But he is sorry that he’s now playing cat-and-mouse with Hulu, a joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox. “It’s not a very productive way to spend our time,” Ronen says. (News Corp is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

Confused? There’s more background here and here. But the important takeaway is that Hulu, or more accurately, Hulu’s TV progammer owners, are signaling to their partners–the big cable companies–that they’re willing to pull back on Web access to their shows. And Boxee, which has $4 million in financing from Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, is signaling that it’s willing to dig in and fight.

[Image credit: Library of Congress via Flickr]

That’s because Boxee has rolled out a software upgrade that lets users grab most any video that’s syndicated via RSS. So as long as Hulu, a joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, pushes out its content using that open feed, you’ll be able to get it onto Boxee. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

A victory for technology in the battle against dated business models and walled gardens? Sort of. But not a resounding one.

The point of Boxee was to make getting video to your big screen easy and seamless, and this RSS end-run doesn’t do that. If Boxee is going to succeed as a mass-market play, it needs to be plug-and-play simple–otherwise, there are plenty of other clunky ways for users to get Web video on TV.

The good news, says Boxee CEO Avner Ronen in a blog post, is that big media are not a faceless monolith that hate their customers:

“While we don’t come from an entertainment or cable background, we are learning quickly. It is a complex business. our meetings with Hulu and their content providers reinforced that point. The fact that it’s becoming easy to consume Internet video on a TV brings into question many of the industry’s business models that developed before the Web. That’s part of the reason why Hulu asked to be removed from boxee. Our meetings over the past week weren’t able to change that. But the people in the industry ‘get it’. They are users. They read the blogs. They talk with users. They are trying to adjust to a new reality, but they need time.”

The bad news: The TV guys aren’t in a hurry. For them, Boxee is bit player in a much more important drama–high-stakes negotiations that pit TV and cable networks against cable operators.

Right now, for instance, NBC Universal is renegotiating its carriage agreements with Comcast (CMCSA), the country’s biggest cable operator, which will determine how much Comcast pays NBCU for the rights to its programming. (Answer: A lot).

I certainly don’t get the impression that Comcast is terrified of a wave of Boxee users dumping their cable subscriptions to watch TV via broadband. But they’re certainly happy to use Boxee’s existence as a bargaining chip with NBC, which may or may not be why Hulu ended up pulling its stuff off of Boxee.

Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Hulu/Boxee situation left unresolved until NBC finishes up its talks, which could take a while.

But if I were the TV guys, I wouldn’t wait too long: The longer they keep their stuff off of legal Web services, the more incentive they give Web surfers to try out illegal ones. Just ask the people who made pirate site MegaVideo.com the 10th most popular video site.

As in the day’s other Hulu news–when the service pulled its video feed from CBS’s TV.com–Hulu is being vague about what happened. But at least the company is being apologetic about it.

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar has an extensive, thoughtful blog post explaining that he’s doing this at the behest of unnamed “content owners”–and acknowledging that the move sucks for Boxee’s small but ardent user base. Boxee CEO Avner Ronen has his own post, in which he explains that he’s been pleading with Hulu for the past two weeks to keep working with his company.

I’m speculating here. But I’ve got a good hunch why the unnamed content owners–recall that Hulu’s JV partners, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC, are also the site’s two biggest content owners–pushed Hulu to drop Boxee: They did so because the big cable companies want them to. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

That’s because, as I noted before, it’s the cable TV providers that have the most to lose from cable bypass plays like Boxee: If you can get all the movies, TV shows and other content you want for free on the Web, why are you paying Comcast (CMCSA) or Time Warner Cable (TWC) for a cable TV subscription?

This isn’t a theoretical problem: Compensation for Web programming weighed heavily in the December dispute between Viacom (VIA) and Time Warner Cable. One of Time Warner Cable’s complaints was that it was paying Viacom for programming Viacom was also running on the Web, without getting a cut of any of the revenue the cable network made.

And last month executives from a major cable network told me they had no intention of putting most of their programming on the Web. That’s because they’d been told by their cable partners, who pay them a hefty fee for each subscriber that gets their shows, that putting that same stuff on the Internet was a lousy idea.

When I talked to Ronen about this impending showdown with the cable guys last month, he essentially shrugged (see video below): The cable guys are going to get passed over whether they like it or not, he said, so if they’re smart they’ll figure out a way to participate. Maybe. But I wondered aloud if they might not try flexing their considerable muscles instead. And perhaps that’s just what happened.

No need to go on about my lack of interest in this forced marriage, which the consumer electronics business has been trying to make work for more than a decade (see the 1993 Time cover to the right). Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has done it for me. If you’re pressed for time, the title will do: “I don’t want my Web TV.”

Here’s what I do want: The ability to use my TV to watch all the great video the Web makes available–actual TV shows and movies like “The Office” on Hulu, “Lost” on ABC.com, “No Country For Old Men” on Netflix’s (NFLX) on-demand service. Which is where Boxee comes in.

The New York-based start-up makes elegant software that cobbles together offerings from all of those services, plus many more–with whatever media you have stored on your hard drive–and serves it up to you on your big screen, with a minimum of fuss. Right now it’s a niche product–it only works on PCs running Linux, or Apple’s (AAPL) Mac mini and AppleTV boxes–but that should change soon.

It’s slick stuff, and when you get a chance to watch it in action, it’s the first time that all those anecdotal stories about people dropping their cable TV subscriptions and just watching Internet video finally make sense: Why pay for cable stations you don’t want when you can watch just about everything you do want, on demand, for free?

This is also why I’m not sure how long the big cable companies will allow Boxee to operate unfettered. As the recent dispute between Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Viacom (VIA) illustrates, the cable operators are increasingly dismayed about paying the cable networks big fees for their content, only to find them giving it away online. And with Boxee providing customers with a real opportunity to drop cable TV in favor of a broadband connection, I worry that it’s a matter of time before they find some way to throttle the company.

Technically, the cable guys (and the telcos, who are also in the TV business) aren’t supposed to be able to do anything about Boxee. They’re just supposed to act as a dumb pipe serving up high-speed Internet access and keep their mouths shut. In the real world, I don’t think that’s going to fly. See: The many bandwidth caps the cable guys are starting to experiment with, which are aimed at heavy Web video users.

Boxee founder Avner Ronen disagrees, of course. He thinks the cable guys will want to work with his company (he plans to make money by licensing his software to gadget makers and extracting fees from content providers like Netflix, but that’s all down the line). And maybe he’s right: When I dropped by his CES booth on Friday, he was being swarmed by emissaries from CableLabs, the cable guys’ tech consortium. They were the third group of cable execs to visit the company that day.

I’ll let Ronen make his case in the video below; and I’ve also included a brief demo video from the company. But that clip doesn’t really do Boxee justice. Ask one of the 100,000 super-early adopters who are using the software themselves. Or any of the nervous cable guys who saw it last week.