Sweet: Hola lets you use Hulu, Pandora, Netflix, CBS, Fox, BBC iPlayer TV, and iTV from any country

Hola is a new service that claims it can let you access videos on Hulu, Pandora, Netflix, CBS, Fox, BBC iPlayer TV, and iTV from any country. To try it out, download the extension for Google Chrome or the add-on for Mozilla Firefox. Windows users who aren’t using either of those browsers can download the standalone client, which offers a bit more features.

Back in November I wrote about a service called Media Hint that lets you use Netflix, Pandora, Hulu, and Rdio from any country. In December, I heard about Hola but a quick check showed me it wasn’t anything new: it unblocked the same services minus Rdio, so I told the CEO to let me know when his company expanded to more services. Hola co-founder and CEO Ofer Vilenski got back to me today, so it’s time to put Hola to the test.

I’m based in Canada, but I’ve already used Media Hint to access Hulu. As such, I wanted Velinski to tell me when I could get access to BBC iPlayer TV, since whenever I visit the site and try to view a video, I get this annoying error message:

Since I’m using Chrome, I installed the extension by clicking the blue “Add To Chrome” button, and was rather pleasantly surprised at the list of seven services I could now access:

In fact, the mentions of CBS and Fox were a surprise to me at the time since the extension’s official description doesn’t include them:

Access blocked content from any country in the world, free.
Surf to websites that are blocked by your country, company or ISP, right now:
✔ Hulu
✔ Netflix
✔ Pandora
✔ BBC iPlayer
✔ iTV
✔ … More coming soon!

Hola is absolutely free & ad free, and will stay free! Learn more at hola.org

I didn’t even have to restart Chrome. All I had to do was refresh the BBC iPlayer TV page I was already on, and voilà:

Just like Media Hint, Hola works as advertised. Since I covered it, Media Hint has since run into some problems with the Chrome Web Store and now requires a bit of a workaround to install. I don’t really mind though, as Hola unblocks more services anyway, though I won’t be surprised if it meets a similar fate.

For more information about Hola, check out the FAQ.

Image credit: Carlos Patio