It's not Flash that restricts access to Hulu.com to US residents. 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.
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.
Yeah. The Flash player just stops you from downloading and saving the content. The server side would be the part that refuses to let you stream if you're outside whatever country boundary that it cares about.
Flash has something called
SWF Verification to try to ensure that you're using whatever is the legitimate Flash SWF player for that site is though. The BBC enabled it for their Flash based iPlayer.
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