Boxee has released an update that brings back Hulu support, but in limited way, and has added an app store, something we’ve been calling on Apple to do with it’s Apple TV for a long time.

Boxee is an open source “social media center”, designed to be a platform for Internet television.

Here are the details of the update:

• Boxee has added an RSS reader optimized for video that lets you access videos from Hulu, YouTube and other sites. The RSS reader supports Google Video, Yahoo!, YouTube and feeds from many other websites.
• App Box – this is a first take at an application “store” that makes it easy for users to install new apps and plugins. There is also native support for 3rd party repositories, so you don’t have to rely on boxee as a gatekeeper for what goes into the official boxee app store.
• Auto Update – this will automatically check for new versions of Boxee and help you update it.

Boxee’s not ready for prime time – the new release is still early alpha – but it’s leapfrogging Apple TV and introducing features that could make Boxee the iPhone of Internet television.

Update: Boxee has announced that Hulu is blocking access to its feeds:

we just found out that Hulu blocked the boxee browser from accessing the Hulu site. this is a disappointing development since their RSS feeds are publicly available, and our browser, while optimized for a great 10 ft video experience, is no different in how it accesses this content than Internet Explorer, Firefox, Flock, Opera or any of the other browsers out there.

to our users: if you choose to use boxee as your media browser to view legal and publicly available content on the internet, we will do everything we can to ensure that you can access it, no matter what the source.

we’ll keep you updated as things happen here and via twitter (@boxee). and while some of the best things in life are free, sometimes you have to work hard to get them…

UPDATE:
hulu is back working. over the weekend we will make an update to the user interface that will show a status message indicating whether Hulu is currently working or not.

[if you’re in NYC on March 24th then you should come to the boxee meetup. we will release a new alpha version during the event and share some concrete plans for the beta.]