TV Paradise Down, OPENHulu Not Updating

What’s up with the Hulu clones? TV Paradise, the site created by an anonymous French guy so people outside the U.S. could watch Hulu, has vanished and a similar effort called OPENhulu has fallen behind in updating its site with new content. We weren’t able to get definitive answers from TV Paradise, or OPENHulu, or even Hulu itself, but this is what we are seeing right now.

Both TV Paradise and OPENhulu were somewhat sketchy to begin with, as they just copied the embed codes and made all the content from Hulu available on their sites. OPENhulu even crammed its site full of ads to make a little scratch off the endeavor. But with Hulu coming out of closed beta this month, both sites were living on borrowed time anyway. Heck, OPENhulu had already received a cease-and-desist letter from Hulu.

TV Paradise is currently just a blank page, and has been all day. Perhaps Hulu didn’t appreciate the site making The A-Team available to foreigners and had it shut down. At the very least, TV Paradise most likely violated Hulu’s terms of service when it modified the embeds to enable full-screen play.

OPENhulu seems like it’s trying to go legit, in a manner of speaking. Founder Matt Schlicht said the site pulled in $5,000 in its first month, and the site’s not updating now as it goes through a redesign. Schlicht also mentioned trading equity in the operation in exchange for work being done. That’s a head-scratcher, exactly what that equity is in, we’re still trying to dig up, but perhaps those scamps are going all corporate.

UPDATE: TV Paradise finally got back to me and the site’s operator said he believes Hulu has changed its embedding system. Here’s what he wrote:

But the videos are in fact not working at this time. Hulu has changed their embed system (displaying a message : “This video is no longer available at this site, but you can view this and other Hulu videos at AOL, Fancast, MSN, MySpace, Yahoo”), and I have yet to find a way to retrieve the new embed codes (other than copy/paste manually).

A Hulu representative said that Hulu had not been in communication with TV Paradise.

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