Are you a fan of Heroes, House, 24 and can’t wait for the next episode to come on TV the following week? If yes, there’s now a better way that will reduce your pay TV subscriptions and money spent on DVD box sets that you only watch once. These are ringgit-stretching times folks.
The alternative is to watch it on Hulu.com. Hulu.com is free, safe and streams all the latest shows that are airing on US free-to-air channels (US version of NTV7, TV3 etc). You can also go to the network’s website and watch their “catch-up TV” and they make their episodes available online within hours after they are aired. I personally prefer Hulu because you do not need to download the video player from some networks. If you want to download it, it’s fine too. The pro is that, a lot of the shows from the networks are in HD format. If you have an HD monitor, you’ll love it.
Videos on Hulu, unfortunately, are only available to US residents. You can watch it too but you need to go through a proxy or a VPN (virtual private network). Here are the cheapest ways to do it. No hardware is required and it works on both PCs and Macs. You will still need streamyx or any of the local ISPs but don’t worry, the video stream should be pretty smooth through a VPN.
The free way: Hotspot Shield
Hotspot Shield works like Anonymizer(a proxy service). When you activate the proxy, you’re actually surfing through their servers and your IP changes from a Malaysian IP to a US IP. In layman terms, it looks like you’re logged on to the net from the US. You’re still using slow ass streamyx so expect your video stream to be laggy. One way around it is to click on pause and let it buffer to the end then hit unpause and watch.
Pros: Free
Cons: Slow video stream
The paid way: Subscribe to a VPN service
There are two types of VPN service. One charges based on days and the other charges based on bandwidth. BolehVPN who offers packages by the day is my preferred choice with packages starting from as low as RM3 for 3 days to RM100 for 125days. AlwaysVPN is the other service that charges based on bandwidth starting from US$8.50 for 5GB to US$47 for 80GB.
Pros: Very smooth video streaming
Cons: Small fee and configuring the VPN may be a little challenging for the computer phobic (it was easy for me though).
So there you go. Hulu hacked. I’d like to thank a few people who responded to me when I crowdsourced for info on twitter: @andrewkjs and @mikefoong. Special thanks to Reuben Yap also. He’s one of the co-founders of BolehVPN for his assistance. He offered to help me set it up through Teamviewer but I told him I wanted to try doing it myself. I don’t know Reuben until I registered for the service.
