Yesterday Betabeat ran down some of the growth stats being shared by Hulu CEO Jason Kilar. This morning we woke up to find Netflix (NFLX) has snagged exclusive rights to stream seven seasons of Mad Men at a reported $1 million dollars per episode.
The boom in these streaming video services is paying off for the hardware players who make the set top boxes that bring Hulu and Netflix to people’s TVs.
An estimated 2 million folks have cut the cord to cable in the last few years, switching over broadband video services.The big cable players keep insisting that this isn’t happening, but the independent research says otherwise.
The result is a doubling in sales of standalone set top boxes like Boxee, Roku and Apple TV from the third to fourth quarter of 2010, according to the folks at Infonetics Research.
Boxee, like most tech companies in New York, is struggling to keep up with the growth. They got turned away from a recent job fair, but are fighting back with schwag, offering a free Boxee unit to folks who refer a qualified resume.
