WE WERE ALERTED Tuesday to this site, Canulu.com, by the University of Ottawa’s Michael Geist.
It appears to borrow part of the logo from, and the site looks a lot like, Hulu.com – the U.S. video portal owned by NBC, Fox and Disney – and says it will let Canadians get around the geo-blocking of American sites, including abc.com, nbc.com, pandora.com, fox.com, cbs.com, hbo.com and others. Hulu, too.
And, despite the fact all these sites are free-to-view Stateside, Canulu says it will charge Canadians $11.95 a month for the work-around (btw, a web search will show any Canadians ways to get around geo-gating, and for less than 12 bucks a month).
And right now, because NBC Universal, Fox, HBO et al, sell their programming to Canadian broadcasters, the Canadian broadcasters supposedly own those rights in Canada, across certain platforms, so its unclear how Canulu.com can offer its services legally, as the site claims.
Cartt.ca contacted Hulu, Canwest, CTV, NBC Universal and Pandora for comment on Tuesday and while a Canwest spokesperson said it would be best to contact the American brands, Pandora suggested we contact the Canadian Copyright Board. CTV, Hulu and NBCU did not get back to us immediately.
So no word yet on whether or not the content owners on either side of the border plan to take any action.
Nothing on the Canulu site says who is behind it and while we did drop an e-mail to one of the generic e-mails on the site, we have yet to hear back from it.
And since we’re a little dubious of its claims, we didn’t try to sign up either as we’d like some more information before giving up any credit card details, even just to take a peek.
Stay tuned as we track this story.
– Greg O’Brien
