Hulu.com is a great service for watching popular TV shows and movies as they stream to your computer for free… If you live in the United States, that is. International users unfortunately don’t get a slice of the Hulu pie, and it sure is one hell of a tasty pie with shows like Fringe, The Simpsons and The Office available for viewing, plus many more.

Don’t fret just yet, though, because there is an easy way to trick Hulu into thinking your computer is connected to an ISP in the United States, and it doesn’t involve any configuration or mucking around with network settings.The solution is to install and use an application called Hotspot Shield, developed by AnchorFree Inc. Its main purpose is to protect your personal data, particularly when accessing public networks where information can be open and vulnerable to people snooping over the network. It does this by creating a virtual private network between your computer and Hotspot Shield’s internet gateway.

For international users, a fortunate side effect is that it stops Hulu from detecting that your computer actually lives outside of the United States because your IP address is hidden, so it will just let the connection through and allow you to stream content to your computer.

The Hotspot Shield website states that the software is able to run on the following operating systems:

Windows Vista
Windows XP
Windows 2000
Mac OS X (10.5 Leopard)
Mac OS X (10.4 Tiger)

While Hotspot Shield does work, there are a few issues with using this method, making it a less-than-perfect solution.

Firstly, it isn’t an application you’ll want to be running all the time as it introduces advertising (mostly in the form of banners) on web pages. However, since Hotspot Shield is free to download and use, it’s quite forgivable. Plus, it’s easy to enable and disable the app’s VPN connection as it sits in the menu bar on a Mac or the system tray on a Windows PC. If you’re watching Hulu content through another application such as Boxee, this becomes much less of a problem.

Secondly, users have reported a hidden bandwidth limit of 5 to 10 gigabytes. Obviously, this isn’t good news for streaming video content, and how this affects you depends on how much content you want to watch.

Lastly, Hotspot Shield can slow down your transfer speeds quite a bit which is also not good news for streaming video. That said, I have seen it working very well with minimal buffering time, so it likely just depends on the content you’re watching and the amount of traffic at the time.

If you choose to use Hotspot Shield to access Hulu.com or other US-only websites, keep in mind that you’re doing so at your own risk and by your own choice.

Overall, this solution isn’t a perfect one, but it works and allows those of us outside the United States to access content otherwise unavailable to us.