In the Hulu Subscriber Agreement, the company says regarding the topic of account sharing, “Unless otherwise permitted by your Service Tier, you may not share your subscription outside of your household. ‘Household’ means the collection of devices associated with your primary personal residence that are used by the individuals who reside therein.” How does Hulu determine which devices you stream from are included under that designation, though? That part remains unclear unless you have a Hulu with Live TV plan.
In that case, you must set a residential network as your home location, which Hulu then uses to figure out “which streams are considered ‘in-home’ or ‘out-of-home,’ where relevant to the requirements of your subscription,” according to the company’s policy. You’ll need to sign in to your Hulu account from that home network at least once every 30 days to keep everything operational. This requirement isn’t in place for on-demand subscribers who don’t have the Live TV add-on, however.
So, how does Hulu know whether you’ve shared your account with someone else or are simply streaming on your phone while connected to a different Wi-Fi network? The company doesn’t go into details about that, but it likely boils down to whether your account is being accessed from a known mobile device versus being used via a smart TV app at a location other than the one you typically stream at. Hulu’s updated subscriber agreement says, somewhat ominously, that it may occasionally analyze how your account is used and, if it decides you’re breaking the account-sharing rule, suspend it.
