Move over OPENhulu, here comes TVparadise

by Brad Linder on December 17, 2007 at 09:00 AM

TV Paradise
It looks like the folks at OPENhulu aren't the only ones taking advantage of the Hulu's embed-friendliness to create a clone of the NBC/FOX online video site. While OPENhulu continues to add Hulu videos to its site, TV Paradise seems to host pretty much every Hulu video available. There are a couple of other things that make TV Paradise more attractive than OPEhulu at the moment:
  • You can watch videos in full screen mode without opening a pop-up ad first
  • The embed code for each video is listed right below the video (although you can also grab the code by clicking the menu button inside the video window)
  • So far there are no ads at all on TV Paradise (we kind of expect that to change)
TV Paradise is new enough that the site doesn't even have a logo, let alone a business model. The site looks slightly more Hulu-like than OPENhulu does, except for a short disclaimer at the bottom of the page which points out that the site is not affiliated in any way with Hulu.

The biggest problem with both of these sites is that they're both going to become useless the moment Hulu sheds its invitation-only beta status and opens its doors to the public. There's no reason to go to a Hulu-clone when you could just go to Hulu.

As for the larger question of whether these sites are legal, we haven't heard anything from Hulu yet. But after Digg banned a user for submitting a link to OPENhulu, the site's founder had a conversation with someone at Digg about Hulu's terms of use. The end result: Digg, at least believes that OPENhulu is not violating any laws. Not that Digg has any real authority in the matter.

But there is at least one reason why Hulu, NBC, and News Corp honestly might not care about these clones: each video includes advertising no matter where you watch it. And since the embedded videos are all still hosted on Hulu's servers, the company can easily count the the number of hits each video gets and charge the appropriate advertising rates.

Tags: hulu, openhulu, tv-paradise