author: programming

How to hide ip: How To Access Hulu.com From Outside The US

How To Access Hulu.com From Outside The US

Posted: 03 Jul 2011 12:13 AM PDT

Who doesn't dream of watching most of those US series right from their computer for free ? I do. I'm sure you do too. But for us who are living outside of the US, hulu gently reminds us that they can't allow us to access their service due to some legal constraints they can't control. Have you ever been faced to this deceiving window when going to hulu.com?

I am a great fan of Carl Lightman character from the serie "Lie To me", and guess what? Hulu has all the episodes available for watching for free- if only I were in the US. They also have movies, trailers, documentaries- well,they have enough to keep us awake late at night watching our favorite shows online (provided that we have good enough internet connection).

But how do hulu check if I am physically based in the US or not?

In fact, everytime you are using the internet, your computer, or smartphone, or whatever device you are using to access the internet is given an IP address which is unique. Your Internet Service Provider assigns this IP address to your device without you knowing it. The fact is: those IP addresses are so well assigned that they also give any computer on the internet an indication of where you are located in the world. Websites are now then able to track the IP address of their visitors (in fact, they know a lot of things about you, but that's not the point of this article). Back to hulu, whenever a visitor browse their wesite, hulu checks for the originating IP address, double-check it with a database of geo-located IP Addresses that is publicly available, then it can tell if your IP address is part of those who are based in the US.

So how do we circumvent this IP-location barrier so as to be able to watch series on Hulu.com?

Different techniques can be used, but the one I'm recommending is the use of a virtual private network (VPN) solution. A lot of solutions exist out there (I will write another post dealing with the criteria you should use for choosing a VPN provider). For the time being, let's just stick to choosing one provider that has a US presence (which means that once you fired up your VPN client software, your computer will use a US IP address). So for my case:

I launched my VPN client, chose to connect via a US-based VPN tunnel.
I use a publicly available service to check if my browser actually uses a US-based IP address. So I went to whatismyipaddress.com and here is what is shown for my current connection.

Perfect. Ain't that nice? The whole internet thinks that I am rich enough to go to Los Angeles for watching Hulu
Once we verified it, we can then launch our browser and go to hulu, and voilà. Long nights to spend online ahead.