Both Hulu and BBC’s iPlayer are popular video services where you can watch all your favourite TV-shows. But if you’re not from the United States (Hulu) or the United Kingdom (iPlayer) it can be very difficult to watch anything because both services will block you. They check your IP address and if it’s not in their particular country you are not being allowed to watch any video. In this article I will offer some solutions how to work around this.

145px-hulu_logosvgSo what is Hulu? Hulu distributes video both on its own web site and syndicated to other sites. In addition to NBC and FOX programs, Hulu carries shows from other networks such as Comedy Central, PBS, USA Network, Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, SPEED Channel, Sci Fi, Style, Sundance, E!, G4, Versus, Noggin TV, Nick Jr., PBS KIDS Sprout, Disney Channel and Oxygen.

Hulu offers full episodes and segments from over 400 different TV shows, some no longer on the air, some in syndication, and many currently shown only in the United States. The TV content on Hulu is provided by NBC, Fox and their TV production subsidiaries Universal Media Studios and 20th Century Fox Television, respectively, as well as the aforementioned cable networks and other TV studios such as Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros. Television, MGM Television and Lionsgate Television. Hulu allows users to share or edit these clips. Shows that get the most traffic on the site include The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Battlestar Galactica, The Simpsons, Naruto, Bones, House, Arrested Development, Prison Break, Family Guy, The Office, Saturday Night Live, American Dad! and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.Hulu  als offers over 100 motion pictures that range from classic to modern films. The movie content is provided by studios such as Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Lionsgate Entertainment and Sony Pictures among others. Hulu also offers trailers for new and upcoming movies. R-rated and TV-MA content is available unedited but only for registered users.

In simple terms all the favourit shows on which we spend rediculous amount of money in buying DVD’s are now available on Hulu.com and you can watch it for free of cost. Hulu provides content directly from the network’s so the content is copyright protected and for legal reasons they have restricted its access around the globe, if a Family Guys Episodes is aired on Tv in USA it should only be accessible to the internet users from USA. They check this via our IP address.

200px-bbc_iplayer_logoAnd what about the iPlayer? The BBC’s streaming version of iPlayer, which makes use of Adobe Flash software, launched on 13 December 2007. iPlayer offers replays of programmes broadcast on all BBC TV channels during the last seven days. Programmes available are those from BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, CBBC, CBeebies, BBC News, BBC Parliament, BBC Alba and BBC Wales programmes shown on S4C. Due to licensing agreements, international and some privately-produced shows or movies are not available on iPlayer. The fact that BBC TV productions are paid for by the UK television licence fee, as well as rights agreements with third parties mean that BBC iPlayer TV programmes are only accessible in the UK. TV programmes can be accessed using a UK based proxy server. These issues do not, however, affect radio programmes, which are available from outside the UK.

The main solution on how to watch Hulu or BBC’s iPlayer outside US or UK are proxyservers and VPN tunnels. Now finding fast UK or US based servers or setting up a usefull VPN can be quite a hassle. Some of you probably won’t even know what i’m talking about. So here are a few easy solutions that will work:

How to trick Hulu restrictions and watch Hulu outside USA

So far there are two solution to bi-pass restriction to watch Hulu :

  1. The easy way to bipass hulu is throught HotSpot Shield , its a free internet security suit that encrypts and hulu-restriction-screenprotects inbound / outbound Internet traffic (email, instant messaging, VoIP calls, web surfing, etc.) by creating a virtual private network. Thus hiding your actual location to a USA based IP as HotSpot Shield is its self for USA only. So after installing HotSpot Shield, run it and you will see a small icon on the task bar right click it and connect a window in IE or Firefox will open and will show the status if it gets connected then refresh Hulu and enjoy the kool episodes.
  2. Second option is to use Ultrareach UltraSurf is the flagship software product from UltraReach Internet Corp. for Internet anti-censorship. It enables users inside countries with heavy Internet censorship to visit any public web sites in the world safely and freely. It automatically connects to the fastest possible US proxies. You can also set it up to route only one browser (IE for example) or tunnel other traffic such as BitTorrent
  3. AlwaysVPN is a free VPN (virtual private network) that runs on Windows XP, Vista, Max OS X and Linux. It creates an encrypted link between your computer and their servers and then forwards all of your internet traffic through this link. AlwaysVPN is very similar to HotspotShield. Just install, connect and you will get a US IP address. There are 2 ways to connect to AlwaysVPN, TCP and UDP. UDP is faster because there is no form of flow control or error correction. As for TCP, it is slower than UDP but reliable because it offers error correction. Try both to see which would give you a better result in watching videos from Hulu.

Now all solutions have slight disadvantages, HotSpot Shield has a 8 GB bandwith limit and Ultrareach will probably make your antivirus software go mad. I have tested Ultrareach and altough it has the capability of breaking trough your firewall it definitely is no virus. There are only 2 cons about using the free AlwaysVPN. The first one is not all service are supported because AlwaysVPN only allows web traffic on port 80, 443, 110, 143, 587 and 8080. But Hulu will definatly work. The second is it shows advertising at the top of web pages that you view while you are using the AlwaysVPN network. AlwaysVPN is still in very early beta and released yesterday but it works without problems on my side. Do try it and give feedback to AlwaysVPN if you found any problems so that they’ll improve it better.

How to trick iPlayer restrictions and watch iPlayer outside the UK

Step 1: Download and install the latest stable release of Tor using the default options. You can uncheck Privoxy in the install if you like. We will be using another proxy tool. (Tor is a tool that allows you to browse the web anonymously by routing your requests through various servers/proxies)

Step 2: We now need to ensure that the last server your request is routed through is a server in the UK. Go to https://torstat.xenobite.eu/. Click on the pulldown next to “CC:” and select “GB” and hit “search”. Now click on the “>” under “Exit”. You now have a list of servers in the UK that are allowed to be used as Exit Servers. Take note of all the nicknames of the servers except those marked Unnamed.

Step 3: Go to Start Menu and open All Programs -> Vidalia Bundle -> Tor -> torcc. This will open the Tor config file. Scroll all the way to the bottom and enter the following lines:
StrictExitNodes 1
exitnodes <list of the names you found in step 2 separated by commas>
An example of the second line above would be:
exitnodes anonion,anotherlink,colinwillsdorkyahoo
Save the file and exit notepad.

200px-bbciplayerscreenshotStep 4: Run Vidalia. After a few seconds, it should say “Connected to the Tor Network”.

Step 5: Install the Foxy Proxy addon for Firefox.

Step 6: When you install Foxy Proxy, it’ll ask you if you want to add a Tor proxy to it’s settings. You’ll want to set up the Tor Proxy to have the following 2 patterns: BBC iPlayer pattern – http://*bbc.co.uk/* and Tor Check pattern – http://torcheck.xenobite.eu/*

Step 7: Check that you’re exiting through a UK server by going to http://torcheck.xenobite.eu/index.php

There you go – now, when you have Vidalia and Foxy Proxy running, whenever you go to the iPlayer site, you’ll be able to watch videos. Note, that you’ll probably have to repeat step 2 and step 3 intermittently, as the same UK servers don’t always exist.

An other solution which reportedly worked for a lot of people but didn’t for me is the following:

  1. Highlight, right click and copy the code in this text file
  2. Click on a video link, and wait for it to open and display error
  3. right click in address bar, paste copied code and hit enter
  4. video should start playing

or

  1. Highlight, right click and copy the code in this text file and make a bookmark in your browser pointing to this code
  2. Click on a video link, and wait for it to open and display error
  3. click the bookmark you just made
  4. video should start playing

If you know of any fast UK or US based yourself, please share them in the comments, and you can set these directly in your browser settings by doing the following. By doing so you’ll also be able to watch video’s on both servivces:

Proxy Settings in Internet Explorer 5.X – 6.x

  1. Click “Service” \ “Internet Options”;
  2. Click “Connections”;
  3. If you use Dial-Up connection, choose your connection and click “Settings” button.
  4. if you use LAN connection, click “LAN Settings” button in the “Local Area Network (LAN) Settings” group box;
  5. Enable “use a proxy server”;
  6. In fields “Address” and “port”, type proxy name and proxy port;
  7. If nessesary, enable “bypass proxy server for local addresses”;
  8. Click “OK”;
  9. Click “OK” to close IE settings.

Proxy Settings in Opera 5.X – 7.x

  1. Click “File” \ “Preferences”;
  2. In “Category” choose “Network”;
  3. Click on the button “Proxy servers…”
  4. Set proxies for following protocols: HTTP, FTP, etc.
  5. Enable proxies for corresponding protocols by enabling options “HTTP”, “HTTPS”, etc.
  6. Click “OK” to close preferences

Proxy Settings in Mozilla Firefox

  1. Click Tools->Options;
  2. “General”, “Connection Settings”;
  3. Select “Manual Proxy Configuration”;
  4. Enter proxy IP and port to appropriate fields;
  5. Click OK to close Connection Settings;
  6. Click OK to close Options;
  7. Reload browser.

Let me know if a solution mentioned above worked for you and if so, where you’re from.