Watch on YouTube
Download Your Hulu Catalog Data
While Hulu does not offer an official API for collecting public catalog data from (as Netflix once did), its mobile app makes use of an unofficial API to communicate to and from Hulu’s servers, sending back catalog data about what you’re entitled to view using your Hulu account. If we intercept this network traffic, we can download these payloads as JSON files and see the structured data behind your Hulu catalog that you can use for analysis. While this sounds complicated, it’s actually very easy to do using a modern web browser and the tools we provide on our website here.
HAR File Web Scraper
To “intercept” and download the raw data that Hulu sends to your web browser on the desktop version of Hulu, please check out our HAR File Web Scraper. This can be good if you just need a one-time scrape of a list of movies or shows available on Hulu.
1. Browse Hulu
To capture data, just begin recording your web traffic while logged in to Hulu (right click on the webpage and hit “Inspect”), then reload Hulu on your browser. Browse through the catalog data you want to scrape, and export the HAR file using the down arrow under the “Network” tab in developer tools.
2. Upload & Download Data
Upload the HAR file to the HAR File Web Scraper and we’ll parse it so you can download the relevant data as usable CSV files you can anlayze in Excel or any other spreadsheet program of your choice.
Don’t expect to get too much data out of the HAR scraping approach, as you’ll only be able to scrape what you visually see on the catalog which will just be image art URLs and titles on the homepage. If you need to scrape more details about individual items, you can click into them while recording network traffic and see what types of data you can pull out of the webpage. For example, if you use the HAR scraper on a Hulu show, you may be able to extract the full episode list, cast, etc…