Hulu Takes Another Step to Break Non-Browsing Viewing

Posted 04/02/2009 at 7:00am | by Paul Lilly

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According to Hulu's television ad campaign, the company is run by aliens in an evil plot to turn everyone's brains into a cottage cheese-like mush for easy consumption. Everyone, that is, except for Boxee's viewers and those accessing Hulu content through non-traditional browsers. That's because Hulu has begun encrypting its HTML code at the source and then decrypting using JavaScript on the client.

TunerFreeMCE's Martin Millmore posted an example of what Hulu is doing to restrict its content, which at first meant that "no new programs will be added to Hulu in TunerFreeMCE at the moment." However, Millmore was quick to update the Vista MCE add-in to version 2.6.7, which he says works with Hulu's new encoding, albeit while running a fair bit slower.

According to Engadget, Boxee will also have an update available for Windows and Linux users before long with a workaround in place. Once that happens, it will be interesting to see how Hulu responds, who some feel is at the whim of its content providers, and not evil aliens (if such a separation exists).