I previously wrote about how to work around content restrictions on viewing television shows from outside of the US using anonymous proxies and VPN services. Unfortunately, those measures no longer work for Hulu, the largest free online site for viewing TV shows.
TechCrunch reported yesterday that Hulu is now blocking VPN services and anonymous proxies in addition to their other blocks on non-US based IP addresses. If you try to access the service using a VPN like Hotspot Shield, you now get the message:
Based on your IP address, we noticed you are trying to access Hulu through an anonymous proxy tool. Hulu is not currently available outside the U.S. If you’re in the U.S., you’ll need to disable your anonymizer to access videos on Hulu.
If you’e lucky enough to have a private or corporate VPN in the US, that should still work, but this move effectively shuts out most of the major public VPN providers.
In a bit of positive news, the Financial Times reports that Hulu has been signing international deals for content. This could lead to an global roll-out of its services, though there is no estimated time frame for this. Looks like we’ll go back to using Miro and BitTorrent until someone realizes that content cannot really be controlled anymore.