Watching Hulu (Or If You Want to Hide Your IP Address)

Let’s say, hypo­thet­i­cally speak­ing, you wanted to watch the lat­est episode of 30 Rock but didn’t know where to turn because your VCR (VCR? What’s that?) is bro­ken and you haven’t been able to fig­ure out the whole down­load­ing tv shows off iTunes or any­where else on the inter­net (*cough*). You’ve heard of this web­site called Hulu but any­time you go there it gives you this message:

It should be noted there can be issues with unin­stalling Hotspot Shield (detailed a bit on Apple’s sup­port forum and remov­ing the ads it uses from Safari). Install at your own risk.

How does it know where you are? Well, your IP address gives you away. With­out get­ting too geeky, your IP address is basi­cally your address on the inter­net — sim­i­lar to your house address in the real world. Hulu, and other sites, can tell where you are com­ing from in the world by your IP address. They can’t nec­es­sar­ily drill down to your exact phys­i­cal loca­tion in the world, but they can know that your IP address is given out by a inter­net ser­vice provider in, let’s say, Canada. (For more on IP address ter­mi­nol­ogy, visit wikipedia) What you need is a way to fool Hulu into think­ing you’re not from Canada but actu­ally in the US.

There’s a sim­ple lit­tle pro­gram called Hotspot Shield that can man­age this for you. Hit up a href=“http://www.hotspotshield.com/”>their website and click on the Down­load the lat­est ver­sion link on the right hand side:

You’ll get a file that down­loads and should mount on your desk­top and present you with this image in the finder:

As the image sug­gests, just click and drag the Hotspot Shield appli­ca­tion to the Appli­ca­tions folder. Then browse to your appli­ca­tions folder and dou­ble click Hotspot Shield appli­ca­tion. You’ll have to enter your pass­word to install the appli­ca­tion. Once installed it will launch a web page where you’ll have to click ‘Run Hotspot Shield’:

After a few sec­onds it will reload the page with your newly minted IP address located some­where in the US:

After a few more sec­onds the page may reload with a bunch of adver­tise­ments, which you can close. You’ll also get an icon in your menu bar at the top-right of your screen:

With these options:

Now try hit­ting up Hulu and view­ing that episode of 30 Rock you missed. There’s a whole ton of con­tent on there includ­ing movies, clas­sic Sat­ur­day Night Live videos and more.

When you’re done watch­ing, you can click the menu bar icon and choose dis­con­nect to stop hid­ing your IP address.

One rea­son to not keep it run­ning con­stantly is that it does insert adverts into your reg­u­lar brows­ing. There’s also some web ser­vices that you use that stores data/cookies (in a good way, IMHO) for you based on your IP address.

All this is, of course, hypo­thet­i­cally speak­ing. There are legit­i­mate rea­sons to block/hide your IP address includ­ing secu­rity reasons.