Monday, April 14, 2008

Watch Hulu outside the US


I've always been a sucker for American tv shows and movies, and therefore when Hulu was launched I was pretty excited. For those of you who are struggling to keep up, Hulu is a website much like YouTube, but is owned by News Corp and therefore carries copyrighted material. This means you can stream not only clips, but full TV shows and movies.

Hulu hosts shows from NBC, Fox, USA, Bravo, FX and Sci Fi amongst others, which means you get access to Arrested Development, The Office, 30 Rock (Milf Island!), Battlestar Galactica, House, Nip/Tuck and lots of others! If you're not a TV buff, the site is packed with movies as well, and if you take a look around you'll notice the tons of great material lying around. And the best part is there is no registration necessary, no spam, no commercials, it's legal and it's free!

Unfortunately, Hulu blocks everyone that doesn't have an American IP adress, and if you're not in the states, all you get while trying to access the content is an annoying errormessage letting you know you're not wanted.

I've been waiting for it to open worldwide, but it doesn't look like that's happening any time soon, so I did some googling looking for a back door to get in.

The trick is to use VPN software, which basicly acts as a middleman between your non-US internet connection and Hulu, making it look you are surfing in the states. While this all sounds über geeky and complicated, it's actually dead simple.

All you have to do is download and install HotSpot Shield, fire it up, and head for www.hulu.com. It didn't work the first time I ran the software, but after I reconnected it worked like a charm and I've seen 3 episodes of The Loop without any glitches.

Update


This method should in theory work with www.pluggedin.com as well. Although I haven't been able to verify this yet (I just read about it at school and don't have my HotSpot Shield available). Pluggedin.com seems like a cool new site trying to be the Hulu of musicvideos. You can read more about it over at TechCrunch.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hot Spot shield is now detected and blocked by Hulu. Too bad; it was working fine last week. < May 5, 2009 >

Unknown said...

If you guys are having any problems watching HULU... Since now the free hotshield doesn't work any longer.. Just buy a simple vpn account, there are tons of providers. The one I decided to go with was www.hidemynet.com. They have one of the lowest fees at only 5$. So far so good, no hicups or problems with video play back. It's HIGHLY recommended you pay for a VPN instead of trying to cheap out with limited free services!

Unknown said...

The link I posted didn't work!!

www.hidemynet.com

Anonymous said...

hye guys I just used hotshield on HULU and it works fine

Ann said...

HotSpot Shield does not work anymore because Hulu blocks their IPs. I use usa vpn account to watch Hulu. It works perfect now.