blinkBox Wants to Be the European Hulu

blinkBox didn’t get very far up the wow-o-meter the first time we saw it. Using authorized clips of movies as web greeting cards? Whoo-hoo.

But the greeting cards were actually a sort of Trojan horse for the company, blinkBox CEO Michael Comish told us last week. According to comScore, the site now has 400,000 uniques per month, all from the UK — which is actually not so bad there, considering the size of the population. “Clips is a way to get 1 million users, not run a business,” he said. “Our model is free clips, free TV, and paid-for films.”

Now that blinkBox has deals to distribute content in Europe from nearly all the major Hollywood studios, Comish is planning to launch later this year an expanded ad-supported site for “catch-up TV” with the goal of becoming the European Hulu. The company hasn’t announced all its partners yet, but the public ones include Warner Brothers, Universal, Paramount, FremantleMedia, Aardman and Discovery. All the deals allow for sampling, personalizing and embedding, said Comish. (Surfing the site from the U.S. I frequently ran up against this cute little geo-blocking error message: “Argh! We’re sorry but because you’re not currently in the UK you can’t watch this right now. The weather’s probably better where you are though.”)

First up for London-based blinkBox, naturally, is the UK, where competitor Kangaroo — a joint Internet venture between BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4 — has to wait till January on a ruling about whether it is an unfair monopoly. blinkBox, which has an undisclosed amount of funding from Arts Alliance, Eden Ventures and Nordic Venture Partners, then plans to launch Hulu-like sites in France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Of course, Hulu — which currently restricts almost all of its content to U.S. viewing, but broke into the top 10 most-trafficked U.S. video sites less than two months after launching — has its own designs on international expansion. But it’s Comish’s somewhat logical view that Hulu will go to Australia and South America first, where it can more easily use its existing connections at News Corp. and NBC to get content rights.

Comish, meanwhile, says because there’s currently not that much video inventory in the UK, blinkBox can command extremely high CPMs — in the neighborhood of £30 ($53) — for the time being.

Sounds like a nice alignment of circumstances for blinkBox, but also a delicate one, and nothing close to a sure bet. If the U.S. is any example, it took a bizarre and unforeseen business pairing to get the Hulu joint venture off the ground. Can a little venture-backed startup replicate that success? We shall see.