Confused? Of course. So was I, when I checked out Hulu’s new “Desktop” app, launched today as part of the video service’s new “Labs” collection of experimental offerings.

Basically, it’s downloadable software that makes it easier than ever to watch Hulu’s shows and clips in the same way that you’d watch TV–on your sofa, remote in hand. But Hulu wants to make sure you don’t actually think it replaces TV.

Note how the company describes it: “A lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer” that will work on Macs and PCs with “standard Windows Media Center or Apple remote controls”–but not with Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Media Center machines or Apple’s (AAPL) AppleTV boxes. And it also isn’t designed to work with any other Web-to-TV software or boxes, like Vudu.

To spell this out: I’m writing this post from the “cave” that the All Things Digital team has set up for the D7 conference, and it’s full of gorgeous 22-inch and 30-inch Mac displays that are much nicer than anything that sits in my cramped Brooklyn apartment. Hulu is saying that they’d be A-OK with me watching Tina Fey and crew, via their service, on those monitors. But they don’t want me trying to get that show on an actual television.

Isn’t a screen a screen? Nope. Not to Hulu’s owners: GE’s (GE) NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, and soon, Disney’s ABC (ABC). To them, it’s important to make the distinction between TV programming, which generates significant ad revenue and/or cable subscription fees, and online video, which generates very little at all. That’s why NBC CEO Jeff Zucker reiterated his opposition to Boxee, the software that makes it easy to move Web video like Hulu to TV sets.

Now all he has to do is convince tech-savvy entertainment consumers to play along. Good luck!

UPDATE: Several readers have suggested to me that Hulu and its owners aren’t as dumb as they seem, and that they do indeed intend to use Desktop eventually, as a Boxee-like product of their own–that is, they will use it to let people watch Hulu on TV. If so, that means that Jeff Zucker wasn’t being honest when he declared that “right now we’re committed to Hulu being an online experience, and that’s where our vision is today, and I think that will continue.”

But for what it’s worth, whenever I’ve talked to anyone at ABC, Fox, NBC or Hulu, all of them have been consistently mindful about not trying to disrupt the existing value chain that supports the cable and broadcast TV business–“the ecosystem” is the euphemism they prefer. So I don’t find Zucker’s comments so far-fetched.

Anyone want to weigh in? If you use your real name you can sound off in the comments below. Or you can drop me a line at  peter@allthingsd.com.

That’s what finally allowed Disney (DIS) to join up with GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox in Hulu, the fast-growing Web video site.

The deal, which was finally announced yesterday, has its roots in a November 2007 meeting between Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and Disney’s executive team where Kilar demoed a private beta of the service on Disney CEO Bob Iger’s computer. But the two sides didn’t really start talking in earnest until mid-December of last year.

Since then, people who were involved in the negotiations tell me, the discussions were a long slog, complicated by the fact that there were essentially five parties in the talks. But at no point did the deal ever look to be in jeopardy, I’m told–even though everyone from Google (GOOG) to Comcast (CMCSA) was trying to convince Iger not to go forward.

In the end, Disney essentially agreed to the same terms that NBC and Fox first used when put the site together two years ago. The main components:

• A two-year guarantee of exclusive third-party access to ABC’s online TV inventory, as well as a smattering of Disney cable shows.
• Marketing money, to be spent buying market-rate air time promoting Hulu on Disney TV properties. NBC and Fox handed over $50 million each, doled out over two years, when they formed Hulu; I’m told Disney has committed to a similar amount.
• A cash investment in Hulu itself. I’m told that NBC and Fox kicked in a total of about $30 million to get Hulu off the ground, prior to getting Providence Equity Partners to pony up $100 million for a 10 percent stake. Given that NBC and Fox took on substantial risk when they contributed their stakes, it’s likely that Disney ended up paying a larger sum.

At least as important as Disney’s contribution, though, is NBC and Fox’s decision to re-up their exclusivity arrangements for another two years. Some executives at NBC and Fox I’ve talked to have downplayed this part of the deal, arguing that their companies would have kept working with Hulu even without renewing their exclusives, which were expiring.

But the reality is that if NBC and Fox had not renewed, it would have been a signal that the networks were no longer committed to their joint venture, a question that’s been whispered more and more often in recent months. There are also some practical effects when it comes to dealing with the cable guys (see below).

The deal still needs regulatory approval, and you may hear the likes of Google and Comcast murmuring loudly that a partnership between three of the four broadcast networks violates antitrust statues. But assuming it does go through, here are some of the ripple effects:

CBS: The broadcaster is on a lonely road, which is not where entertainment companies like to find themselves. It may well be that the Web strategy CBS has been pursuing–don’t put too much of your stuff online, but syndicate the stuff you do put out there as widely as possible–is the right way to go. But if CBS CEO Les Moonves ever changes his mind, he will have a hard time climbing aboard the good ship Hulu.

For the record, Kilar is enthusiastic about bringing on CBS: “We’d love to see CBS jump into Hulu,” he says. We’d love to see Time Warner (TWX) jump in to Hulu, too.”

But executives at his partner networks–the same guys who forced him to cut off Web upstart Boxee, remember–says that the door is shut for CBS, at least in terms of the equity deal ABC just got.

If CBS (CBS) does want to make a deal with a big Web distributor, it may well end up doing something with Google’s YouTube, which already distributes snippets of CBS shows on its site. You won’t hear CBS bragging about this out loud, but I’m told partnership has worked out very well for the network to date.

The cable guys: Note that there’s very little of Disney’s premium cable stuff on Hulu–just a smattering of SoapNet and a few shows from the Disney Channel, but nothing your kids care about. And there’s zilch from ESPN.

That’s because Iger doesn’t want to freak out cable operators that pay Disney billions a year for cable programming. So that stuff will stay offline. (Meanwhile, it may get increasingly hard to find some of the NBC/Fox cable programming on Hulu, for the same reason. Good luck watching the most recent episode of FX’s “Rescue Me,” for instance).

But the Disney move, along with NBC and Fox’s commitment to re-up their exclusivity arrangement, just complicated efforts by the likes of Comcast and Time Warner to push an “authentication” arrangement. That’s where cable subscribers–but only cable subscribers–get access to a wealth of TV on the Web.

Without the exclusivity clause, the cable guys could demand that the networks hand over their best stuff directly to them for their online efforts. Now, at least for the next two years, they’ll have work through Hulu, on Hulu’s terms.

It may be that the cable guys are so far away from making their authentication plans a reality–I’m told Comcast’s test will launch this summer with just a few thousand subscribers and will add something like 50,000 subscribers a month after that–that this might not mean much. It’s possible that by the time the cable guys are ready to really talk shop with their programmers, the two-year deals will be long expired.

Bonus: We get to see new Hulu ads, starring actors from ABC shows. I’m hoping for one featuring Jorge Garcia, who plays Hurley on “Lost.” For now, here’s the newest one in the current campaign, featuring Dennis Leary from “Rescue Me.”

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.

So this can’t be good: Cable giant Comcast (CMCSA) turned in a fourth-quarter report card this morning that beat Wall Street’s revenue and earnings expectations. But it lost more basic subscribers than analysts had expected, and added fewer higher-end digital subs than expected.

Also out the window: Guidance for the year. “There’s a bit less visibility in the business than usual,” Comcast Chief Financial Officer Michael Angelakis told The Wall Street Journal. ”We intend to grow the business in 2009, but we are very focused on expanding our conversation with our investors and shareholders instead of just providing a couple metrics that everyone focuses on.”

The numbers: Excluding a $600 million write-down on Clearwire, Comcast posted earnings of 27 cents a share on revenue of  $8.77 billion; Wall Street had been looking for 22 cents a share and $8.63 billion.

The problem: Comcast lost 233,000 basic cable subs; analysts had been expecting something closer to a 150,000-sub loss. More worrisome, the company added only 247,000 high-priced digital subscribers, which is less than half of what Wall Street was expecting.

And it wasn’t as if Comcast’s customers were ditching HBO and MTV and programming their own TVs via Web services like Hulu and Boxee, either: The company only added 184,000 high-speed data subscribers; Wall Street was looking for 250,000.

So why didn’t I embed a clip of the sketch from NBC.com or Hulu, the joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox? Because NBC didn’t have permission from whoever actually owns the rights to the theme song, NBC confirms. (News Corp is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)

Bummer! Especially since the clip was one of the show’s “Digital Shorts,” which are designed to be viewed on the Web, à la “Lazy Sunday.”

You can still find versions of it on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, though NBC’s lawyers are busy hunting them down–don’t be surprised if the following clip doesn’t work by the time you get to it:

If you can’t see it, don’t despair: These music clearance issues have tripped up “Saturday Night Live”/NBC before, and the clip in question–Andy Samberg and the dude from Maroon 5 doing “Iran So Far”–eventually made it back on the official Web.* (Another reason not to despair, at least in my humble opinion: The Doogie clip isn’t going to make you laugh outloud, anyway.)

The bigger point: Even when TV/Hollywood “get it,” they still can’t always serve up their best stuff to Web viewers because copyright laws and digital distribution still don’t synch up.

And much more often, the people who make TV shows and movies aren’t interested in serving that stuff up–legally, for free–anyway. Hulu was only able to show one full episode of “Mad Men,” AMC’s much discussed but little watched show about advertising. And it’s only going to be able to show “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia,” a cult sitcom from FX that owes some of its success to the video site, for a few more weeks.

So maybe that’s a cautionary tale for companies like Boxee that envision a future where you get all your TV shows and movies from the Web with the support of the TV networks and Hollywood. Or more likely, a cautionary tale for TV and Hollywood, which still aren’t ready to let their customers watch their stuff when and where they want to see it.

[UPDATE: As I'd hoped, NBC legal worked it out. See below]

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.