The networks thought they had Web distribution figured out—until they met Boxee.

Leigh believes laptop makers like Dell and HP will soon emphasize the ability to connect laptops to flat-screen TVs. "The little notebooks are $300," he says. "They have the video processing power to do this. Internet video on the TV is going to happen anyway."

Ronen says he'll soon meet with Hulu's content partners to make his case for Boxee. He'll use the thousands of fervent comments from viewers pleading with them to restore access. He'll also argue that Boxee is not trying to get around Hulu's advertising or rights agreements. But more importantly, he should use an argument like Leigh's to point out the futility of cutting off access now, when users are embracing a legal path to content.

If Leigh is right, users who connect laptops to TVs are going to run one of two types of programs: They'll run something like Boxee, which, like iTunes, changes the old business model in a necessary if imperfect way. Or they'll run BitTorrent, which, once connected to a TV, could be the Vishnu-like destroyer of worlds that Napster was to the recording industry. "If it becomes easy enough for consumers" to get content illegally, Ronen said, "it becomes very hard for content owners to offer solutions that are paid-for models or advertising supported models."

Boxee users have already taken things into their own hands, restoring Hulu to Boxee by means of a simple hack the day Hulu was supposed to disappear. The fix is to download and overwrite one simple file—something your average grandmother could do—negating Hulu's power play for any Boxee user with a pulse in a way that is probably still legal and within the terms of service.

Meanwhile, Ronen says that Boxee's splash at CES has sped up the timetable for the company's next phase. He aims to partner with "hopefully more than one device maker sometime next year" to put Boxee onto a set-top box, where it will be a true competitor to cable. (It's pure conjecture to point out that, according to Ronen, Apple employees at CES expressed their delight about the version of Boxee that runs on a hacked Apple TV set-top box.)

Comcast is working on its own Internet video plan, called On-Demand Online, which would be available only to its cable subscribers. The service would benefit paying customers who want to watch shows on their laptops, but it would still do nothing for users who want a Boxee-like service to unhook them from the expensive and increasingly irrelevant way in which cable companies deliver content to their TVs. Of course, as a monopoly, the demands of your customers are largely irrelevant, at least as long as you can keep squashing even nascent competition.