The Daily Background

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Okay, so NBC and Fox have partered together and made a spin-off called hulu.com, which has full episodes of dozens of popular past and present shows in an ad-supported streaming-flash format.

It’s currently in private beta and specific details are kind of hush hush, but that’s no fun so I’m going to tell you how to use a secret backdoor trick to score your own invite, and feel like one of the elite few with access to the free service, which is expected to go public later this year.

As far as NBC/Fox shows, they’ve got everything from Mary Tyler Moore to My Name is Earl (find a complete list of the shows they’re currently offering here). It even has some movies and shows from other networks as well.

They currently have a function on their homepage with which you can sign up to be added to their private beta when they feel like it. So let’s hack up our own invite instead!

Step 1: Sign up for the private beta. You’ll get a confirmation email, but no actual invite.

Step 2: Return to the hulu homepage and click the “Forgot password?” link. On the page which that brings you to, enter the email address which you just used to sign up for the private beta which they didn’t actually invite you to.

Step 3: You’ll be emailed a “reset password” which you can use to log in with on their homepage. From there, you’ll be able to fill out a profile and get access to the goods even though they haven’t actually invited you. Sneaky, huh?

Information wants to be freed. Feel free to spread this info on your own blog, but I’d appreciate attribution in the form of a link.

Update: This worked perfectly for me, it may not work as well for you since I originally signed up for an invite a while back (a few weeks ago). However, there may just be a delay in their database, in which case you should try retrieving the “reset password” a little while after originally signing up for the private beta if it doesn’t work for you at first. According to my profile on Hulu, my account was activated on October 28th, one day ago.

Update 2: Thanks to kiko in the comments who notices that hulu has mysteriously removed the “Forgot password?” link. I checked the actual url of the page it directed to, and it is in fact gone. Looks like hulu figured this little trick out, so props to them for being on top of things. Meanwhile, Mike in the comments says that some person claims to be giving out invites here. I want to stress that I cannot confirm that that page is real– in fact, I think it’s just something somebody fake put up to get people’s email addresses. The real hulu service does not allow normal users to invite anyone to it– I’ve checked. Further, I’ve requested an invite through it (using a throwaway email address) and it doesn’t seem to work.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog