Sunday, December 09, 2007

Foiled by GeoFiltering

I just arrived in Spain and had some time to kill. I flipped through the TV channels and decided that there is only some much CNN I can watch, and my 3 years of high school Spanish (that I took 20 years ago) has somehow failed to provide me with the tools I need to fully appreciate Spanish language programming.

So, I was excited by the prospect of logging into Hulu and catching up on a couple of shows I missed last week. Foiled!

Hulu - Geofiltering

Anyone know a good trick for getting around geofilters? I thought I could use Google Translate to trick it into thinking I was in the US, but that didn't work. Suggestions anyone?

3 comments:

timojhen said...

most geo-filtering is based on lookups of IP address -- if you have any type of VPN access, connecting to Hulu through a domestic (US) VPN connection should work.

(i.e. connect to your domestic VPN, at which point you'll look to Hulu like a US IP.)

Timojhen

duka said...

First of all, welcome to Spain!

And about your problem, perhaps you can try "Hotspot Shield", that is an usual trick we have to use since Pandora closed its doors to users outside US.

Sorry not to be more specific (it's sooo late), but I'm sure you'll find a lot of step by step instructions.

jherskowitz said...

Thanks Timojhen, unfortunately I don't have any VPN of my own, but as Duka pointed out, it looks like Hotspot Shield is just what the doctor ordered.

It looks like you can get the Hotspot Shield application from:

http://anchorfree.com/downloads/hotspot-shield/

and here is a link that I wish I had found a couple of days ago:

http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/27/use-hotspot-shield-to-access-us-only-websites-like-hulu-and-pandora