Its no secret that people living outside the U.S. rely on VPNs to bypass geographical restrictions placed by popular music and video streaming services. Hulu did not announce publicly that it was going to make this move, but now it has started blocking VPN users in a bid to keep foreigners out. While it may be successful in this mission Hulu is also going to block U.S. residents who rely upon VPNs to protect their privacy, thus forcing them to browse without protection.
Those who are using relatively smaller VPN providers might be in the clear as Hulu is primarily blocking IP-ranges of all major VPN providers. When someone connected to a major provider tries to access Hulu they’re shown a notice telling them that Hulu isn’t available outside the U.S. and it also tells U.S. citizens to “disable your anonymizer” to access videos on the service.
Its possible that Hulu is making this move to please movie studios and TV networks which provide bulk of the content available on its website. In most cases that content isn’t meant to be streamed outside the country.
Private Internet Access, one of the aforementioned major VPN providers, is currently in talks with Hulu and is trying to find a solution. Though given that shared VPN addresses make it easy to spoof location its quite possible that Hulu might not budge on this.
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