Well it looks like our trusty Hotspot Shield solution for getting onto Hulu from outside of the United States is no more. You see, Hulu - the number two video site on the web, carrying a huge range of legal TV/Movie content only for those in the United States - has now started to block anonymous proxies (which is how HotSpot Shield got around their defences previously) according to TechCrunch. If you’re in the US, you’ll need to disable your anonymizer to get to Hulu - the rest of us can just let go of the dream for now.
What do you think it’ll take to get around these crazy media “borders” and why are they there in the first place? You’d think we’d be beyond that, given that the internet is essentially borderless.
And here I was just about to snip the cord on the cable…
Yeah.. this is one reason why I setup my own US proxy. A $8.95 / US a month charge offers more value that adding content on demand to my existing cable subscription.
@John: Still lots of other way to get content, though, and Hotspot Shield should work fine for the US network sites. Just sucks that Hulu is imposing these restrictions so fervently.
@Syd: Cool - I’ve heard of people doing this (I have a friend who has gone in with a group of people to share the same kind of thing). So what are the steps to setting something like this up? I’m sure the decabled folks would love to know!
Hulu just released a desktop app, you probably saw it trending on Twitter yesterday http://www.hulu.com/labs/hulu-desktop.
Yeah, would love to see what the Hulu desktop looks like but, again, no access for non-US users, which is a real shame. Kinda strange (although I can imagine why) that they don’t really gear this up to watch on your TV, too
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Thanks for the update Bumpershine!
With virtual private servers so cheap now (Linode.com has some great plans), one could just set up a server down in the US as a VPN endpoint & connect that way - much better than a proxy!
Hi Jeff. I used the setup from this site to help me set up the VPN client. http://howto.landure.fr/gnu-linux/debian-4-0-etch-en/install-and-setup-openvpn-on-debian-4-0-etch