There are few web services hotter than Hulu these days. It’s about to surge into the number two web video position (behind only YouTube) and it just signed a deal with Disney to give it even more great content. It’s all great — if you live in the U.S.
Outside of this country, if you’ve wanted to access Hulu, you’ve either been out of luck, or had to use a proxy server workaround. For several months, there were quite a few options that would work to trick Hulu into thinking you were trying to access it from within the U.S. even when you were not. But Hulu got smarter and started doing geo-checks at the streaming level. But still, a few virtual private network (VPN) creators like Hotspot Shield would get the job done by making your IP anonymous. Not anymore.
Hulu has once again tweaked its detection methods and is now blocking anonymous proxies. If you try to access it with something like Hotspot Shield, you will 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.
Ouch. Hulu has been making a habit of cracking down on unwanted access to its service. There is still a back and forth going on between it and the online media center startup Boxee. Boxee allowed users to access Hulu content from within its service, which the content providers behind Hulu saw as a problem because the content wasn’t be run directly through Hulu.com. Even though advertisements were still being shown during these streams, Hulu blocked Boxee, igniting a firestorm among Boxee fans. Boxee struck back by using Hulu’s RSS feeds to get some of the content back, but then Hulu blocked that too. So Boxee made a new web browser based on Mozilla, to make Hulu think it was running on something like Firefox.
The message is pretty clear: People want access to Hulu, but Hulu’s isn’t interested in letting others work around its limits. While it’s annoying for users outside of the U.S. not to have access to the great content, considering that many of the proxy servers also blocked advertisements, you can on some level see where Hulu is coming from on that. Of course, those users are now probably just going to use a service like BitTorrent to find and download the content for free anyway.
And if you happen to be using one of these VPNs for, you know, actual security reasons — no Hulu for you!
It makes sense, hulu only wants traffic they can monetize.
wikipedia has a project to stop all those editing from anonymous proxies. Anybody can copy from their database.
I hear that the ad rates for most countries outside the US (aside from several industrialized nations) are very low. But they can often be the fastest growing demographic for many webservices (like Facebook.) As a result, the costs to deliver the service usually exceed the ad revenues.
So from a purely businesslike standpoint, good for Hulu. Also, I don’t think their content providers allow for distribution outside the US.
Completely agree. Instead of making inflammatory headlines like this maybe the author can realize that Hulu probably gets the content from the studios on the condition that it is viewable only with the US.
I am from germany and I would love to use Hulu (and I do with the boxee trick). I don’t understand why Hulu cares if an US citizen or a European sees the ads. It is one more user who sees ads for mostly multinational companies. I just don’t see a reason to block it.
The funny thing is that many of us will be happy to pay for access to the service. I can somehow understand why they don’t want us to use their ad-supported content for free but content providers don’t even allow us to buy their stuff.
And you know what? I’ll end up paying rapidshare and private BT Trackers for a subpar experiencie just because this douchebags at hollywood and cupertino don’t want my money.
totally agree with you.
This is not about traffic but the so XX century licenses schemes. Just like movies, tv series goes all the way down the distribution chain
Premier in the US -> Premier in Cable Worldwide -> Syndication (repetitions) in the US -> Syndication in the rest of the world -> DVD release in the US -> DVD release in other parts of the world where DVD is still profitable (europe maybe?)
This scheme has been threatened mostly by the torrent networks and more recently by sites like justin.tv where you do not even have to wait for someone to post it but watch it live.
the practive of squeezing money from each segments is (imho) not going to be sustainable in the future as a few days old content is not as desirable (thinking in ad terms) than a worlwide premier (with locally targeted ads in between)
The industry push to limit this type of services will only hurt them. We now live in a connected society. We daily interact with people from all over the world. The industry wants to go global on their terms. But guess what. You can’t have one thing without the other. People don’t care if you guys need to localize stuff or not. We want access to content fast and without hazzles. We want all releases to be available at the same time. Many of us don’t even care if we have subtitles or not. We want to use your services. Were willing to pay watch ads or whatever but we need a quality service. If you keep putting barriers everywhere you leave this generation no other chance than getting content by other means. Frontiers are getting old. And so is the music and movie industry business model. Adapt or die.
It sucks, but looking from Hulu’s perspective it had to be done. If they attracted a huge amount of traffic from outside of US, advertisers would lose interest.
This has nothing to do with ads – it’s all related to content rights.
have you hear of targeted advertisement, they could find other advertisers outside the us (europe for example). Like it’s been said is not about ads but licensing
For the record, http://www.worstpizza.com does not block proxies from our videos!
dude, stop spamming
Bookmark and share all your favorite hulu videos on http://www.myvidster.com/
The hos got mighty big thighs tonight.
Licensing outside of the US is a whole other beast…and a whole other source of revenue. Smart.
why do countries need hulu outside of US when they have p2p and can watch all this great content on mobile devices (psp,itouch,western digital media player), commercial free.
only the US needs Hulu.
I’m an american in Japan and I want to watch my American TV shows but I can’t. I’d happily pay to watch these shows on Hulu. I’d rather not go through some shady IP anonymizer like HotSpot Shield, but I don’t even have that option. This is pretty cruddy for me and all those like me out there. I don’t want to go to BitTorrent and download illegally, I just want to watch my shows!!!
hopefully you might go back to your country and demand all the trade barrier disappears, isn’t the s a free market, uh no I guess not…
Just big media using technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity.
Come on Hulu ! In Europe, we like good videos too !
“we like good videos too !
LIES! I’ve seen the UK version of The Office!
Yes, it’s comedy gold. The US version had to be dumbed down for the vast majority of viewers…maybe that’s why you love it so much?
Better get that checked at jeweler, looks like fools gold to me.
But hey, at least the show is great for making me fall asleep.
Oh my god, you mean theres actually a world beyond the us, and americans arent the most superiorly intelligent creatures on earth???
Well it was apparently good enough for the U.S. to make a version. So your point would be?
NBC is desperate. They were bad off enough to show Supertrain and Misfits of Science and they are desperate enough to have shown Kath and Kim.
If it weren’t for Tina Fey and our election Parks and Recreation wouldn’t be here.
Scrubs and My Name Is Earl were brief lapses in the corporate memory and I never got much out of Chuck. Every 10-20 years NBC gets on this classic book kick and it dies quickly.
Will Kings survive? I don’t think so, but Heroes was so left field who knows?
Don’t call me Rona.
I wonder about TOR?
oh, there goes the free party
This is to bad. I watched Hulu every night, specially Dollhouse, Family Guy, House and more. I would actually pay a monthly fee for it. To bad they haven’t figured out a way to monetize traffic outside the US. Oh well, I guess I’m off to thepiratebay.org to download them.
You donut, this has nothing to do with monetization. Hulu does not have content rights outside of the US, that IS the issue.
It’s nice being American. There are still some perks to it.
Hulu and guns.
Hulu, guns, and world reserve currency.
Euro?
Guess you haven’t taken a look at how much Gold the Chinese are buying (you know, the dudes you have a $2 trillion dollar debt towards).
High-speed drunken death on the highway.
Shame on you for missing that.
That’s Russia my friend
They could monetise it the same way the monetise traffic inside the US.
With adverts. It’s dumb. So instead I create a VPN to my friend’s office and watch the shows that way. Block that Hulu.
so that method still works?
Not the same amount of money to be made outside US.
Also how many people can do the whole VPN thing. it s more about making it more and more difficult than impossible.
They just haven’t found a way to profit from traffic outside the US. Useless traffic will turn advertisers off. Can anyone say subscription.
the wonders of a dedicated server and RDP.
Who wants to watch TV shows full of ads anyways?
About a minute of ads for every 20 minutes of content? It’s much better than what you get on network TV. I would pay for an ad free version if there was an official WMC plugin (rather than Secondrun.tv which is a bit of a hack, especially on Win7).
Yeah, and Hulu now has an option, to watch a 1-4 minute ad before the video, or 15-60 second ads at least 4 times in the video, I usually do the full ad in the beginning, mute the ad, then browse other things, come back in the time it told me that the video was going to start and enjoy a full 23min show with no ads or anything, that’s the power of Hulu
sux2bu
As an insider to the industry, there’s a misconception by both the author and the commentors. Monetization internationally is not an issue, as the model used in the US would be very similar as that used abroad. The issue is far more complicated that this, and it comes from distribution rights.
While NBC/FOX/ABC/etc hold the distribution rights for content domestically, it does not mean that those same distribution rights apply outside of the US boarders. If you are in Germany or France or Japan, there would be no ABC/NBC affiliate to watch Lost or Heros on. The distribution rights for that content are negotiated with media companies in those countries, giving them the right to distribute and monetize that content. These negotiations are not necessarily done through the broadcast networks here, but some times through the studios who have actually produced the show. That means that Paramount Television or Fox Searchlight would go and make a distribution deal with ZDF in Germany for their series, not NBC Television or ABC Television.
So what does that mean for HULU? HULU only has distribution rights, through the broadcast networks who claim distribution rights in the US, to make content available only domestically. Basically, they legally are not allowed to display the content in other countries. In order for HULU to do otherwise would be, at this point, extraordinarily difficult as they would have to negotiate with both domestic and international partners. And for the same exact content!
This isn’t a problem specific to HULU. This is also a problem for the individual networks. Trust me, if was simply an issue with monetization then that would have been dealt with some time ago. In any case, I hope this sheds some light on the reasons “why” it is the way that it is.
Exaaaaaactly.
It’s not about monetising. It’s about content rights. The networks don’t have them from the studios. The studios on a lot of older shows don’t neccessarily even have them from the actors and writers. And even if they do, they’re usually sold on an exclusive basis to international broadcasters for fifty times what advertising will ever bring in online.
It’s that simple.
Why the eff don’t they make deals with the actual content products (the studios) instead of intermediaries. That makes tons more sense.
This part you can’t quote me on, but I would surmise that the networks already hold full distribution rights within the US. Take for instance ABC – they don’t simply hold the broadcast distribution rights for Lost, but the digital distribution rights within the US. This means the iTunes store, Amazon.com, mobile, internet, etc. Before HULU could do a deal with the studio, the studio would have to first renegotiate their deals with the networks. And that’s not just domestically, but internationally, as well.
From a consumer experience, though, you are probably right. I think, though, that the biggest hurdle is understanding the changing dynamics of IP-based distribution. And believe me, it’s only going to get more complicated as time goes on.
For the record, Disney owns ABC (US, not Australian) and ESPN and could place them any way they wished that did not violate an existing agreement.
Exactly, has to do with content rights, just like cable tv. LTA has regional channels (Sony ET, HBO LA, Warner, etc) that get the licenses for, say, all of South America, so they buy the shows they want to retransmit (plus subtitles) from the networks and the networks promise not to let people watch their US signal there. What these channels do is stock up their signals with advertising that will be shown in, let’s say, 15 countries by 400 or so million consumers who at the end buy tons of american made or american branded products.
So at the end most of us either buy a large enough dish, with a forwarding address from the US, and get all the channels; or just dowload the favorite shows from torrent sites.
They do – in fact Hulu is *owned* by the content providers (FOX and NBC each own 30%… Disney now owns a significant portion as well). However, those companies have permanently assigned the international distro rights to their content to other parties and consequently it’s out of reach of Hulu for the time being.
It’s true. When a series is picked up a contract gives distribution rights. It does NOT necessarily specify syndication or home video or duplication rights for retransmission. Other companies can buy the rights for other markets. The creator may not actually own the product, it may be produced for the original network source. In any case the network might actually own all rights. They have the right to license the property as they see fit.
That’s what I understand, which may be hooey.
It’s still a big fat PITA.
Exactly! And lack of advertisers for international markets is a reason why Hulu wouldn’t try very hard to get rights for other markets.
Yes distribution rights. But the thing is most of the shows are produced and distributed worlwide by the same channels. NBC created Heroes, FOX created Prison Break and so on. They’re both the content creator, publisher and so on. If someone in Europe wants distribution rights, they buy them from NBC for Heroes, FOX for Prison Break. But in fact that isn’t the all story. If that was the case than Fox could not distribute Prison Break in their cable channels in Europe. The fact is in practice for most shows they maintain the distribution rights independent of territory. Both Fox and NBC in the states and Fox and NBC here in Europe showcase their productions. Hell a person may even get said tv channels by using a sattelite dish.
For me this issue is just about stupidity and an old business model that doesn’t count on the new technologies and the way the societies have evolved in the past decade.
“Free” Entertainment is always advertising based. The advertisers need to target people that will buy their product. If no one is buying the product, none of the businesses will advertise. No advertisement, no TV.
The next option is subscription based.
I’ve been traveling in the U.S. for the past year and highly enjoy watching shows and films on Hulu at my leisure.
It’s going to be rather annoying going back to my home town of Sydney, Australia, in June and not having that luxury.
Hulu says it wants to expand to other countries. They better get on that soon, or I’ll just have to find other ways to time-shift my TV viewing.
Also, many free podcasts are just as good — if not better — as some of the TV I watch.
What are you worried about Aussies are the Biggest users of Bittorent to access US TV series .
Luckily for me I’m a Aussie that live in the US
Its like a battle between Hippies and The Man.
Why? Did you bring the acid?
It’s so odd that Hulu (a site I love BTW) is so intent on blocking out non-US traffic. Yes, advertisers I sort of understand, but hey, they have to be able to come up with something, right?
Next thing you know…Hulu is going to patent the word “video”
The Greeks invented that word before goat cheese…Sorry!
Actually, it’s Latin. It means “I see”. :/
Goat cheese is good, though.
i’ll just download my shows from bittorrent now then.
Let’s remember people, there really aren’t “countries” on the Internet. They can pretend and block things like vpn/proxies. Media and government needs to understand, the “old” way does NOT work any longer. Like the cat and mouse game China plays with it’s citizens.
If only there was a way to segregate US traffic by have-disposable-income versus hippie-freeloader… and then block the hippie-freeloader traffic like they do the International traffic, I bet the advertisers will be even more happy.
Hmm…. a business idea…
Hippies died out long ago. It’s just the cheapskates, the broke and the damned.
Vive le yeah okay
“It makes sense, hulu only wants traffic they can monetize.”
That’s right, the rest of the world doesn’t drink Coca Cola.
It’s simply rights management from the content providers, we have the same issue in the UK with the BBC iPlayer which is awesome but the rest of the world doesn’t get to see.
It has zero adverts though, which is sweet.
I don’t know why someone doesn’t come up with a company that offers local based ads videos that would play before and after the content videos and pay for the international viewers much like google does with search but apply to streaming video. I think this idea of blocking sites is only hurting the idea of video on demand in international markets and in the long run could hurt the concept in the long run. I mean it’s sorta like saying we are not going to do business with you right now so go away and come back later. but later never happens. people find another place to get what they want and once you upset a customer they don’t alwasy complain they just walk away.
I pay $15 a month for a US proxy which works awesomely well for me here in Australia.
I can confirm that it is not blocked through the service I use. I suspect that Hulu only blocked HotSpot Shield as it’s immensely popular (but slow as molasses)
link?
Sorry, no. You probably work for Hulu. I don’t want to lose it.
Google VPN though, and there are quite a few choices that show up in the text ads.
OK, I’ll take a punt – if you’ll pardon the spammage, here’s a post from a few months back comparing a few VPN solutions:
http://howto.vi...-Blocked-Videos
Ta
It will be interesting to see what this does to their numbers.
Hulu is just crippling the service more and more and excluding more and more people from their service. Plus, you know this will get worked around. In the meantime, though, they need to realize they’re on the INTERNET.. it’s a world-wide network. An open network of communication. USE that to your advantages.. don’t cripple it. Distribution rights my arse–why did they even put up an INTERNET web site to begin with if they’re going to code more and more exclusions to break it for everyone in general?
BT FTW.
If you’ve got money you can rent a real or virtual machine with “root” access and tunnel everything through it. If it’s IP is not known as a proxy, you won’t be blocked.
This really bugs me as a Canadian. I just want to watch what I want when I want…commercials I can handle. Guess it’s back to torrents for me as well…shame.
We need a bit more research on that for that article. Technically, if your VPN is well-configured, there’s no way they can know it is a VPN. So what are they doing: blocking the IP ranges of well-known providers ?
So…first the U.S. government succumbs to media lobbyist pressure and adds Canada to the 301 Watch List indicating that we are IP pirates on par with China, Russia and Thailand. It’s a joke, and everyone with any sense knows it.
Now the U.S. media lock us out of any moderately simple hulu access.
Guess they are intent on forcing us to the pirate bay so that we will begin to actually act in the fashion of which we have been accused.
Nice trick.
Love Hulu! even more so now that Disney is on board.
We’re ALIENS, see? We don’t want no fucking proxies on the Mothership!
It’s an interesting perspective that if a content licensee, like Hulu doesn’t make itself available to users outside the terms of its licensees, there is a moral justification to just go and source the content illegally. That’s like saying if the householder doesn’t leave the TV in the backyard for the burglar, he’s justified breaking into the house. There’s this naive assumption that any kind of licensing or IP law is somehow redundant. Running a business within the terms of the deals you do with partners is not control freakery. Also, I speak as a UK-based user who would love to be able to access Hulu.
Gus, your comparison is flawed. A more accurate comparison is this: A customer goes to buy a TV, the seller of TVs refuse to sell to this customer for some convoluted reason. The customer gets fed up and gives someone else money to get the TV. This someone else robs the seller of TVs to deliver the goods to the customer.
I wouldn’t claim that there’s a moral high ground here, but it is still undeniable that the seller could have gotten the money instead of getting robbed.
Instead of wasting resources working on how to keep the “pirates” out and how to keep certain customers from trying to buy, maybe a more constructive approach is taking a good hard look at all those rules and contracts that have been set up and try to work out something that’ll let the interested customers buy directly and thus creating huge revenue streams instead of losing revenue by sending customers to “black market” sources.
I guess in their ideal fantasy world, the customers would just sit tight and be ready to shell out when the sellers decide they’re good and ready to sell, if that time ever even comes. And the customers will of course be happy to pay over and over again for the same content in different formats.
The media companies need to wake up and deal with the reality already. People WANT to support the content they love by paying money, watching ads, whatever. They know this means the content they love will keep on being produced. They WANT this. All that the companies need to do is make this EASY instead of piling on obstacles after obstacles.
Companies keep shooting themselves in the foot by making proper paying customers feel like idiots because they have to deal with DRM and ads telling them not to pirate. That stuff in no way makes it harder to get content illegally. In fact they severely cripple their own product and make the illegal competition appear more attractive. WAKE UP, media companies! People want to give you piles and piles of money, why must you make it so difficult? Why?!
*Pammy busts a vein and dies*
I am realling looking forward to have hulu or an hulu-look-alike in germany… maybe the market is different here
Not to be all “Information wants to be free, blah blah blah” but this is the WORLDWIDE web. There are methods to circumvent this limitation which still work, and I imagine some of them will come with a friendly UI wrapper soon.
Frankly, I find the notion that a content provider would apply such limitations on the web preposterous. Rethink your business model and start thinking globally.
If Hulu only want customers from the USA they should use “hulu.us” as their main domain. “Hulu.com” should redirect to “hulu.us” and not the other way around like now. Using “.com” for a US-only service is just rude.
Please argue that point with about a million local businesses who have own theirs for up to 20 years or so.
FLASH! The .us domain is not very old!
Pricks.
Boooo
In other news, thepiratebay.org doesn’t
Can one of the great scholars at TechCrunch read Daniel’s comment above about content rights? Then can you all write an ACCURATE article that highlights the challenges Hulu, TV.com, the Networks, and other content companies face navigating the rights and windowing process?
Thanks.
The way distribution rights are set up right now, I completely understand what they are doing (no matter how annoying I find it). How could they stream a show like LOST to the UK when Channel4 paid a handsome price for the rights + are a few shows behind?
Hopefully they’ll consider Hulu next time show distribution is discussed, but I suspect this will only happen once Hulu becomes a viable source of income, instead of just a “nice-to-have”.
very idiotic move on HULU, they should try to bring costs down and get distribution rights so they can air in every country and still make a profit (I mean that is the future anyway, might as well push hard now and get it done) All one now needs to do is google “watch tv shows” and get 10000000 new sites. So its not a major problem for Users, but HULU loses visitors (but then again they cant even profit from them)
Never fails how the customer is supremely screwed when the content overlords once again decide they need to bilk the world out of more money. I live in the states and was thinking of looking closer at hulu for my new online streaming home turf. But now, not so much.
Just liscense for the globe and attach ad riders for advertisers getting prime US realestate. Make them “subsidize” break even operations outside the US. Problem solved.
The domain name Anonymize.com is available for sale or development for anyone who has a better idea for how to execute an anonymizing proxy.
Also, interesting point for Hulu around the theme of identity. Users could potential have anonymous identity via single-sign-on (Identity.net) but still go through a proxy to ensure anonymity to anyone but the content host.
Markets like the Middle East and China have enormous traffic via proxies because their governments block the traffic. In many cases their citizens have no choice but to use a proxy. Surely there is a compromise — an anonymous proxy tied to federated identity? Why not?
Because it’s too easy to locate the source of the anonymizing and block it’s IP too.
IP, IP, IP
You can spoof all you want and some server is going to checksum your hind end and figure you smell funny. Ever look at email and Usenet headers?
PS that was supposed to answer one down, Peter Contardo.
No, I did that. Time for a bike ride.
@ Joao, agreed. As the Internet is getting us all connected and letting users share information with each other wherever they are, major brands (who are Hulu’s prime advertisers) are also becoming more and more international. Online video is a ‘liquid’ medium and it performs at its best when it can flow freely across the web and beyond. Hulu needs to find a way to let people watch its content wherever they are. It should also think about offering international ad rates. By doing so, it will help itself and its advertisers.
The only ‘liquid’ involving all the content owners and distributorrs would be contained in their trousers.
RSS does not exist in the entertainment business.
I’ve been blocking hulu from my desktop since they decided to block boxee (contrary to the lies in their “mission statement”). As far as I’m concerned, hulu is irrelevant. They have nothing I want to see that I can’t find elsewhere. They’ll make no ad money off of me.
Where else can you get streaming tee-vee at that high quality? Those Stage 6 / divx guess were great while they lasted, but to date no other streaming site comes close to the resolution Hulu provides.