Digital Home Thoughts: Hotspot Shield Grants Hulu Access For Everyone? Sort Of...

"Public networks (both wired and wireless) are great. After all, what would life be without connecting while at airports, hotels and coffee shops? However, the danger to your personal data exists even if you connect to a fee based open network. Your passwords, credit card numbers, and any data you send can be seen and associated with you personally. Standard antivirus software won't protect you as this threat is on the network, not your laptop or iPhone. That's why AnchorFree is pleased to offer Hotspot Shield. Our application keeps your Internet connection secure and anonymous on public networks."

I heard about about Hotspot Sheild last week as a method for watching Hulu content outside the USA - it's a free VPN solution with servers located in the USA, so for all intents and purposes, your browser is inside the USA when accessing online content. The installation does a couple of somewhat concerning driver installs that pops up a scary-looking warning from Windows Vista, but I was installing it inside a virtual machine so I didn't particularly care. I'm not a security expert, but Windows Defender didn't flag anything, so I suspect the program is safe.

After I got it installed, I gave it a test and could definitely tell my connection was being routed through another server. With Hulu specifically, I saw frequent buffering problems, but it did work. Switching Hulu to the high-quality stream made things much worse, and strangely enough pausing the show to let the buffer fill up didn't work - the buffer would fill up, then go back to zero bars. I don't know if the fact that I was running this inside a virtual machine had any impact on the performance, but it's possible. So while Hotspot Shield might work well for basic Web browsing, as a soultion for Hulu, it doesn't seem to be a good solution. Are there any VPN solutions out there, either free or low-cost, that work well with streaming media sites like Hulu?