http://www.unblock-us.com/ lets you access American Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, ESPN3, etc etc. I'm not affiliated with them, but been using the service the past couple of months and it works amazingly. In fact I'm using American Netflix on my Xbox 360 as we speak. $5/month is a heck of a lot cheaper than moving to the states and I get to keep the free health care.
Perhaps Canadians can lobby their MPs to institute a national system providing every Canadian with a United States IP address. The Single-Payer-Proxy-System – or in French, Proxy Système à Payeur Unique (SPPS-PSPU). There's really no reason for the nation to stand for this sort of Canadophobic discrimination. Indeed, where are the national and provincial Human Rights Commissions on this important issue?
I'm not sure what those are or whether nafta was supposed to reduce them or what. Maybe its simply regulatory. Maybe everything has to be duplicated. Maybe Canadian companies like it the way it is.
The UK one doesn't support OSX, so I run them both from within a separate Windows VM if there's some restricted service I want to access. That way their VPN software doesn't get in the way of my other activities, and I only get ads injected within the VM.
My brother has a business DSL line, and that was enough for Hulu to decide that he's using a proxy and block him. They've repeatedly called support and support repeatedly told them to "stop using your proxy" (despite the fact that they are using no such thing.) So Hulu isn't at all afraid of false positives, and that kind of blanket ban should be effective unless unblock-us has a deal of some sort worked out.
UPDATE: Just signed up. They do actually seem to redirect the traffic from domains like hulu.com/pandora.com/... to IPs that run a squid proxy. My guess would be that they just redirect the queries for the geo-localization to their squid servers and allow you to pass those that way
In general, I'm surprised such services stick around at all. You'd think the MPAA etc. would contractually require Hulu, etc. to routinely get accounts with such services, use them to sniff out the IPs and block them. I guess that means proxies aren't (perceived) a big enough threat. Yet.
After spending too much time trying to figure it out, I decided to just spend just $55/year and use StrongVPN. Added bonus, I can use StrongVPN on my iPad/iPhone!
On the other hand, things like this make me slightly amused. It's good to see the corporations run into self-imposed problems from the same institution they otherwise typically profit from and prop up.
A few ppl I know international did this to great success
There is a weekend project + app in that for someone if they want to automate it for tasks that require an inbound US #
disclaimer: I'm a founder there