The PlayOn Blog

It’s easy and legal. In fact, that’s what PlayOn Plus does – it lets you record Hulu shows, then download them to your iPad. Then you can watch them any time, without ads, without Wifi. It’s like TiVo+ Dish’s Hopper for streamers. And what you get is like an episode you’d buy from iTunes and download…only way cheaper!

Here’s how: Just get PlayOn Plus on your PC and find something you want to watch and hit the “record” button:

I like to create series recordings for the shows I like to watch (just hit the Subscribe button for that) – then PlayOn automatically records them when they come out:

While you’re recording, download the free PlayOn app to your iPad.

When your recording is complete, you click on the “Send to iTunes” link and then sync it to your iPad:

Then, when you want to watch, open up the PlayOn App on your iPad and you select the show you want, and hit Yes to the Skip Advertisements? dialog box.

How do we do it? Well – that’s kinda complex. PlayOn browses to the free content on Hulu.com on your behalf (there’s LOTs of free content) and locates the show you want. Then it opens an invisible browser window on your PC and starts streaming that show, and records while it streams – just like a cable DVR/TiVo does for broadcast shows. That results in an MP4 video file which can be easily transferred to an iPad/iPhone via iTunes (just like as if you had purchased that show from iTunes and download it to your iPad). The PlayOn player iOS app has the AdSkip logic in it – so when you play back the recording, it knows to skip right over the ads. And just like TiVo and the Hopper are legal – so is PlayOn.

And yes – it also works for Netflix and 100 other streaming channels…and you can download and AdSkip on Android devices as well.

Try it out and spread the word!