It's not Flash that restricts access to Hulu.com to US residents, so any failures of this aspect exist now as well with Hulu or any other site.



I'm not sure exactly what Hulu has deployed in its streams, but generally speaking, Flash is only going to stop someone from directly saving (downloading) the content. Are their streams even encrypted?

Without Flash, one could create a Javascript player to accomplish a similar feat. Without anything fancy like encryption or purging the playback buffer, it would be as trivial to save the streamed video file as it would with Flash.

Moving to a paid model, Hulu will want to deploy something new anyway. We'll have to see how it all plays out. Hulu may not be able to make the transition at all.