Watch Hulu Plus outside of the US

by Anton Belodedenko

This guide explains how to watch Hulu Plus outside of the US, using your own virtual server hosted in The Cloud for under $10 USD per month.

The approach is broadly the same as the one I've described in my previous post Watch HBO Now in the UK for free*, except rather than using DigitalOcean to host the virtual server, I am using DreamHost. This is due to aggressive blocking of DigitalOcean IP ranges by Hulu[n4].

So in short, at the time of writing May 2015, the following works:

  1. Create your own US mail drop address (e.g. ShipTo)[n1].
  2. Create iTunes US Store account with your US postal address.
  3. Purchase iTunes US gift card (e.g. OffGamers).
  4. Load your gift card onto the iTunes account.
  5. Head to Github for instructions to build your own smart DNS proxy.
  6. Change DNS server on your PC and point it to the IP given at the end of the build script[n2][n3].
  7. Enjoy, binge, whatever..
Notes
  1. Optional, but now you now have an official (and legal) US postal address to use for correspondence.
  2. Better option is to selectively forward *.hulu.com DNS requests to your proxy, rather than everything. Normally if you have a more advanced router/firewall, they can be configured to do this.
  3. Tested to work on a Mac OSX, iPhone, iPad with AirPlay to ATV. Does not work on a ChromeCast because it does not currently support SNI or if using the native Hulu Plus Apple TV app.
  4. At the time of writing, this also works if using Amazon EC2 with Elastic IPs (VPC). If you plan to use AWS to host your smart DNS proxy, you'll have to tailor the steps appropriately.