14 DAY TRIAL // While Hulu continues to gather users and content in the US, Fox, one of the three major networks backing the video site, has launched its own video-on-demand site in Latin America, called Mundo Fox. The new site offers content from Fox's Latin American Channels with more than 800 hours of content already available. Since its launch on June 16 the site has attracted 1.5 million viewers and has seen 2.5 million page views.
"We're proud to expand our online video offering to include premium and long-form content particularly as demand from consumers and advertisers grows throughout Latin America," said Pablo Silva, vice president of global online publishing of Fox International Channels. "This is not about just publishing videos online," he added. "Our long-term goal is to become one of the most popular and profitable video destinations in our markets, propelled by our flagship TV properties and brands as well as platforms such as Brightcove."
The site will feature content from Fox like popular shows 24, Family Guy, My Name is Earl, The Simpsons and others localized for the region as well as videos from the News Corps local ventures like Utilisima, BienSimple, Fox Toma 1 and Fox Telecolombia. Mundo Fox also bears a great resemblance to Hulu, despite having no association with the service aside from the fact that Fox is involved in both of them, with many interface and design features being very similar. Still, Hulu has proved a success in the US but Fox probably wanted to play it safe in the rather young, and still unproven for some, online video-on-demand market.
The site is powered by white-label video platform provider Brightcove, which recently announced it had become profitable in the highly competitive and very crowded market. The announcement somewhat validated the market though it remains to be seen how many companies can make a living with this business model especially now that Joost decided to change from video hosting service to white-label provider.