I recently had an issue with a new BluRay player on my home network that could play everything from Netflix, Amazon Instant Streaming, etc, but every time I would try to play a Hulu Plus video, it would attempt to load and play the video, and then when attempting to play the first video I would get the error “The Network is Down” Retry | Cancel. It would never work.
Trying to browse through the internet and contact support, I had a revelation…the router on my network (Untangle) has Ad Blocking features enabled. I love it because it blocks annoying ads on websites from loading…but in this case, it was blocking the servers that Hulu Plus was trying to access to display it’s advertisements.
As a result, I have added my BluRay player’s local network IP address to the ad blocker’s “Pass List” allowing all ad requests to go through, and whala – Hulu Plus now functions as normal.
On a side note, I discovered that using Hulu Plus via my PS3 and the Ad Blocker being enabled allows me to watch completely ad free viewing on Hulu Plus…though hopefully they don’t discover that loophole for a while <fingers crossed>!
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