Best Free Streaming Video Services

Previously called IMDb TV, Amazon Freevee is an ad-supported service that offers a mix of live channels, on-demand classic TV shows and movies, and some original content. The company says it now offers more than 400 live channels. You’ll find shows such as “Schitt’s Creek” and “The Librarians,” alongside older classics like “Bewitched,” “Columbo,” and “All in the Family.” Movies currently available include “Serenity,” “Mortal Engines,” and “Baby Driver.” Licensed content rotates in and out from month to month.

Original shows include “Judy Justice,” starring Judge Judy Sheindlin, “Modern Love,” and “Bosch: Legacy,” a spinoff of the popular Amazon Prime series. But “Judy Justice” is jumping from streaming to broadcast TV later this fall. Last year, Freevee started showing content that was once exclusive to Amazon Prime Video subscribers, such as ““Reacher” and “The Wheel of Time."

Amazon also announced plans to license some of its Prime content—including “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Hunters,” and “All the Old Knives”—to other streaming services and cable companies. It’s not clear whether those deals will keep these shows and movies off the Freevee service.

Freevee recently added 18 new live channels, including local Fox News in a number of markets, plus TMZ.

Check out Amazon Freevee.

Amazon Fire TV Channels is a special option exclusively on Fire TV devices. This service aggregates free, ad-supported content from a range of popular sources, including MLB, Fox News, ABC News, CBS News, CBS Sports, NHL, Fox Sports, NASCAR, and more.

Amazon Fire TV Channels is adding extra sports coverage from beIN SPORTS by launching beIN Sports Xtra and video-on-demand content.

Earlier, Amazon bumped up its offering with content from Variety, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and TV Line from Penske Media Corporation; GameSpot, Honest Trailers, and TV Guide from Fandom; Looper, Slash Film, and Nicki Swift from Static Media; along with Funny or Die and Outside. The service offers content from more than 400 different providers.

To find this content, ask Alexa to “Play Fire TV Channels” to open the app and browse free content. Or navigate to Fire TV’s Your Apps & Channels screen and click on the Fire TV Channels app.

Check out Amazon Fire TV.

Billed as the first and only Black-owned streaming service focused on Black American family entertainment, BLKFAM launched with a content library that includes more than 20 syndicated series, 1,000-plus hours of new animation titles, dozens of new animated characters of color and diverse gender experiences, and hundreds of hours of original music-driven content. Ten original live-action and animated series are in development and will premiere on the platform throughout the year.

BLKFAM’s content spans investigative journalism and news, fitness and wellness series, Black history, children’s and adult animation, sitcoms and reality shows, and music programs—all through the lens of Black experiences.

BLKFAM was founded by Larry Evan, a former WarnerMedia executive, with an equity investment by Whoopi Goldberg.

Check out BLKFAM.

Crackle, which used to be Sony’s ad-supported streaming service, hosts a library of mainstream titles that include popular older TV shows such as “Dark Shadows” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show” as well as popular newer series including “Hell’s Kitchen” and "Line of Duty." Movies include “Gaslight” “Night of the Living Dead,” and somewhat more recent fare, such as “The Last Blockbuster” and “Bel Canto.”

Crackle is now owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul and is part of a bigger brand called Crackle Plus, which operates several ad-supported and subscription networks, including EspañolFlix, FrightPix, Popcornflix, and Redbox (see below).

Crackle’s original content includes “Outbreak,” a series about containing a dangerous virus; “Les Norton,” a 10-episode series starring Rebel Wilson; “The Uncommon History of Very Common Things,” an entertaining and often irreverent history of everyday objects; and season two of “In The Vault,” a suspense series set at a fictional college. Crackle also has a limited number of original movies.

Check out Crackle.

If you have a library card, Hoopla and Kanopy might be your ticket to free movies, music, audiobooks, and comics. Getting started is pretty simple. Just go to the site, find your local library, and create an account with your library card. You check out TV shows and movies as though they were books, using your library card.

The main difference between the two services is that Hoopla tends to focus more on popular entertainment than Kanopy does. It also includes media beyond videos, such as audiobooks, comics, e-books, and music.

With either service, once you’ve signed up you can browse by title or genre, or get recommendations based on what you’ve previously borrowed and what’s popular. With Hoopla, you have 72 hours to watch a movie. (Your library sets the limit on how many movies you can borrow each month. In my case, it recently jumped from four to eight.) Your movie will start streaming once you’ve made a selection.

If you access Kanopy through a library membership, you may be able to watch a limited number of titles per month. But members of educational institutions get unlimited access.

Check out Hoopla and Kanopy.

Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service, had a free, ad-supported tier of service, along with two paid tiers ($5 per month with ads and $10 per month without), but is no longer offering it to new subscribers. But anyone who already had the free tier can continue to use it.

Pluto TV, owned by Paramount, has about 250 curated channels, drawing content from the company’s Paramount properties (BET, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Paramount Pictures), plus networks such as Bloomberg, Cheddar News, CNN, NBC News, and Fox Sports. Pluto TV also has a decent library of on-demand content, including now classic movies—“Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Top Gun”—and newer fare such as “Mean Girls.” TV shows run the gamut from “The Andy Griffith Show” and the original “Gunsmoke” to “The Twilight Zone” and “Criminal Minds.”

In addition to genre-based channels, Pluto TV has added channels powered by other providers, including CBS (“NCIS,” “FBI”), AMC Networks (“The Making of the Mob,” “NOS4A2: Ghost”), and Showtime (“Dexter,” “Billions”). It recently added 14 channels from NBCUniversal, including Bravo Vault and NBC Sports, as well as Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk channel. It also now has 25 channels dedicated to movies.

There’s now a Pluto TV Latino service, with over 45 curated Spanish- and Portuguese-language channels covering categories including comedy, movies, music, reality TV, sports, telenovelas, and true crime.

Pluto will get the full previous season of select Paramount series before the newest seasons arrive on the premium Paramount+ service. 

As part of a “Programmed by Humans” branding message, Pluto is touting its dedicated team of curators to help program for the platform.

Pluto recently introduced a new Home section within the main menu, which offers recommended, recently watched, favorite, trending, and curated content all in one place. The company has also started reorganizing its content categories to make it easier for users to navigate the service. The first new categories include drama, sci-fi, and true crime, with additional categories to be added through 2024.

You can set your favorite channels to appear at the top of the channel guide and add programs and movies to a watchlist for viewing on demand later, provided you sign in. A preview mode shows trailers and more info about each title.

Check out Pluto TV.

Best known for its rental kiosks at grocery stores and shopping centers, plus a newer video-on-demand streaming rental and purchase service, Redbox now has a free ad-based live service as well, which gets some of its content from Xumo Play. 

Thanks to the Xumo Play partnership, Redbox’s free service includes Magnolia Pictures’ CineLife ad-supported channel, which features top-rated independent films and award-winning documentaries from the Magnolia Pictures catalog.

Redbox is owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul, which also owns Crackle. The company says that for now, the streaming service will continue to run as a separate entity.

You can access the content by clicking on Watch Free and then either Free Live TV or Free on Demand. The service is relatively light on blockbuster-type content, though there are about 100 channels. (Redbox offers a much larger catalog of movies you can rent.) Its live TV comes in the form of genre-specific channels that run 24 hours a day, with shows such as “The Price Is Right,” “Unsolved Mysteries,” and “The IT Crowd.” Genre categories include news and weather, action, sci-fi and horror, movies, sports, food and design, comedy, classic TV and movies, and kids and family.

The on-demand titles are available only for a limited time because of agreements with programming providers, and the service gains and loses shows and movies each month. Earlier this year the company announced that it was adding programs across eight new channels from Fremantle, Revry, and Love Stories TV to its free live TV service. 

Check out Redbox Watch Free.

Thanks to a rapidly expanding roster of programming, you can watch free shows and movies via the company’s ad-supported The Roku Channel, which is now available outside of Roku streaming players and TVs.

The Roku Channel has a lot of licensed TV shows and movies, plus some live channels from ABC, AMC, Fox, NBC, Hallmark, and others. It has more than 350 live channels and tens of thousands of free on-demand movies and TV shows. One big focus going forward will be Roku Originals, which will roll out 50 new shows over the next few years. Current Roku Originals include “Kevin Hart’s Muscle Car Crew,” “Meet Me in Paris,” “Malpractice,” and the movie “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” a biopic based on the life of Weird Al Yankovic that stars Daniel Radcliffe.

Newer original series in 2023 include “Fight to Survive,” “Reptile Royalty,” and “UFO Cowboys.” The company also recently added second seasons of original food series starring Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse, part of production deals with Marquee Brands and Milk Street Studios that bring over 3,000 episodes of library content.

Recently, Roku (and Tubi) licensed hundreds of movies and TV shows, including “Raised by Wolves” and “Cake Boss,” from Warner Bros. Discovery. Other new channels include “Barney” and “Pickleball TV.”

In addition, Roku has a multiyear deal with Lionsgate that gives it rights to stream Lionsgate’s theatrically released films. Exclusive to Roku, it’s the first time Lionsgate titles are available free anywhere. Roku is also teaming up with a private equity company to acquire up to a 20 percent stake in the premium channel Starz, which was acquired by Lionsgate in 2016.

Roku also lets you access AMC Networks’ paid streaming services—AMC+, Shudder, and Acorn TV—through the Roku Channel’s Premium Subscriptions.

This past fall Roku teamed up with the NFL to create the NFL Zone within its sports section on the main Roku app, a centralized location to find live and upcoming games.

Check out Roku Channel.

Sling Freestream is a new ad-supported service from Sling TV. The service has been adding more content and now claims to have more than 500 free channels and over 44,000 on-demand titles, with genres ranging from news, sports, game shows, and crime dramas to sitcoms, home improvement, cooking, and more. Popular channels and programming include ABC News Live, CBS News, ESPN on Demand, FilmRise, “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Heartland,” “Forensic Files,” “The Walking Dead” universe, and “VH1 I Love Reality.”

Through Freestream, you’ll be able to subscribe to more than 50 stand-alone streaming services, including AMC+, Discovery+, and Showtime.

One interesting development: Freestream is now the first free service to offer a free cloud DVR.

Check out Sling Freestream.

This ad-supported service has more than 60,000 titles, including selections from the libraries of Lionsgate, MGM, Paramount Pictures, and Warner Bros., plus networks, including A&E, Lifetime, and Starz. The options range from old (and probably best forgotten) Chuck Norris films to classic indie titles (“Requiem for a Dream”) to somewhat more recent movies such as “Ford v Ferrari.” You’ll also find full seasons of TV shows ranging from oldies (“The Honeymooners”) to more current fare (“The Masked Singer”).

Recently, Warner Bros. Discovery provided 15 live channels and licensed hundreds of movies and TV shows, including “Batman Returns” and “Gotham,” to Tubi (and Roku). Coming in 2024 are “The Batman,” “Suicide Squad,” “Black Adam,” “Wonder Woman” and “Aquaman,” as well as the series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.”

Tubi now has more than 250 live channels and content from more than 450 partners. Tubi recently acquired the rights to BBC’s dramedy “Boarders,” which follows five talented Black inner-city London teens who get scholarships to a prestigious boarding school.

Now owned by Fox, Tubi is ramping up its original content with 100 new film and TV titles slated to appear over the course of this year. Tubi offers streaming access to many Fox shows, such as “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Lego Masters,” after they’re broadcast. It also has a lineup of newer originals, including “Prisoner of Love” and “Corrective Measures,” the latter starring Bruce Willis. These join other Tubi Originals, such as “10 Truths About Love,” “War of the Worlds: Annihilation,” and “Mysteries From the Grave: Titanic.”

Movies currently on the service include “The Blind Side,” “King Richard,” about the Williams sisters’ tennis-coach dad, and a few “John Wick” titles.

The service has several programs based on the Lego franchise, specials starring Garfield, and some Pokémon programs. The company also has a deal that brings eight seasons of “Barney & Friends” to the service. It has several live local and national news channels from outlets, including ABC, Black News Channel, Bloomberg, CBS, Cheddar, Fox, and NBC.

Tubi’s latest news is that it’s using an AI-powered search tool, called Rabbit AI, to help viewers find content they want to watch. Rabbit AI, found on the Tubi mobile app, lets you go beyond simple keyword searches and ask questions in a more natural, conversational manner.

Tubi also recently launched a new logo, with a purple-and-yellow color scheme. The design features a circle, meant to symbolize falling into a streaming rabbit hole.

Check out Tubi.

ViX is a free, ad-supported Spanish-language service owned by Univision and formerly called PrendeTV. Unlike PrendeTV, which was exclusively a free, ad-supported service, ViX also has an ad-free subscription version called ViX+, which costs $7 a month.

Both the paid (ViX Premium) and free (ViX Gratis) versions offer more than 100 entertainment channels, including movies, sports, and children’s programming. (ViX+ also has a premium series and some exclusive live sporting events.) ViX has more than 20,000 hours of on-demand content, which includes shows from Univision, plus content from large media companies based in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. It also has deals with Disney, Lionsgate, and MGM to offer more than 150 films to viewers.

Other programming includes several soccer channels, nature and wildlife channels from Blue Ant Media, nine telenovela channels, and seven movie channels. There are also three family channels.

Check out ViX.

This new ad-supported service from Warner Bros. Discovery hasn’t yet launched. Details are slim, but it will likely leverage content from Warner Bros., including Max (HBO), Discovery, and Scripps. Warner Bros. Discovery recently licensed hundreds of movies and shows to Roku and Tubi, but those types of deals may end when the free service begins operation. So far, no launch date or content has been announced.

Xumo Play, a joint venture between Comcast and Charter, is an ad-powered streaming video platform that offers live and on-demand content from more than 290 channels across multiple genres, including sports, action and drama, news, kids and family entertainment, live events, comedy, lifestyle, and movies.

Content on Xumo includes news programming (ABC News Live, Bloomberg, CBS News Latest Headlines, LiveNow from Fox); movies from FilmRise, Hallmark, and Crackle; TV shows ranging from classics (“My Favorite Martian”) to kids (“Garfield and Friends”); and sports (CBS Sports HQ, Fox Sports). Movies also run the gamut from older classics (“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”) to modern classics (“Donnie Darko”). The service also has channels created specifically for Black and Latino audiences. 

Last summer it struck an exclusive deal with Magnolia Pictures to have Xumo Play stream a new Magnolia movie almost every month, with a three-month exclusive window. Xumo also has some originals (“The Killing of Billy the Kid,” “Andromeda”) and a few exclusives (“The Right Kind of Wrong,” “Alone”) that rotate in and out.

On a related note, Xumo is partnering with Element Electronics to launch a line of 4K Element Xumo TVs in the U.S. this year. Earlier, Comcast and Charter announced that they’d be rebranding XClass smart TVs as Xumo TVs. The Flex streaming player will be rebranded as the Xumo Stream Box.

Check out Xumo Play.

There are dozens of free ad-supported alternatives to paid streaming services. In fact, most smart TVs either offer their own free services or access to ones on this list directly from the set.

Here are some more options to consider:

• Fawesome.tv is a newer ad-supported streaming service, owned by FutureToday, that offers more than 250 free channels, with movies and series in HD quality across 25 genres, including action, comedy, family and kids, health and lifestyle, horror, and thriller.

• Google TV—available on Chromecast or Android devices or TVs that use the Google TV smart system—offers more than 800 free channels, from new providers such as Tubi, Plex, and Haystack News. They join an existing lineup of free, ad-supported channels from Pluto TV, plus Google’s own free built-in channels. Programming includes streaming news channels from all the major broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC—as well as more than 10 channels in foreign languages, including Spanish, Hindi, and Japanese. Like other so-called FAST (free ad-supported television) services, Google’s Live section uses an old-school cable TV-style menu with TV shows and movies that run at scheduled times, with ads that you can’t skip.

• Haystack News—formerly called Haystack TV—provides local, national, and global news from more than 400 content partners, including ABC News, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, and Yahoo Finance. The company says the service now provides more than 50 live news and weather channels, covering more than 90 percent of local U.S. markets. An expanded partnership with Hearst Television includes the company’s Very Local local news and information channels. A Newsline feature has an interactive news ticker with local news headlines, weather conditions, forecasts and alerts, and stock market data, plus top business, tech, and entertainment stories.

• LG Channels is a free streaming service for LG smart TV owners, with content from both Xumo and Pluto TV. It has more than 300 live and on-demand news, sports, and entertainment channels, which you can access using an integrated program guide. It recently added several new channels, including Free Movies Plus, a 24/7 big-budget movie channel, as well as video-on-demand movies. If you’re using an antenna, free over-the-air channels and Channel Plus options appear together in the same program guide.

• Plex Watch Free is an ad-supported free streaming service from Plex with more than 50,000 free movies, TV shows, extreme sports films, music documentaries, Bollywood musicals, and more. It has deals for content from Crackle, Lionsgate, Magnolia, MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., and other studios. Live TV on Plex features about 300 channels across multiple genres. Plex recently started offering a $5-a-month upgrade, called Plex Pass, that works with an antenna to give you live local channels, plus a DVR, the ability to pause and rewind shows, and a program guide. You can also now rent movies, starting at $4

• Samsung TV Plus—a free streaming service available on Samsung smart TVs—offers more than 350 ad-supported channels featuring news, sports, and entertainment, plus thousands of movies and TV shows on demand. A strength is its roster of news channels, including ABC News Live, CBS News, Cheddar News, LiveNow from Fox, NBC News Now, and Newsy, among others. Samsung has also partnered with Bloomberg Media to launch Bloomberg TV+, a 4K business/finance channel, and it has a deal with Vevo for a music-video channel, and with FIFA+ for men’s and women’s soccer games. Last summer it added a Conan O’Brien TV channel, an exclusive deal that brings "Conan" to the platform. Newer content includes an A&E and Pickleball TV channels. All Samsung smart TVs dating back to 2016 are able to access TV Plus.

• Stirr is an ad-supported streaming service launched by local TV broadcaster Sinclair. However, early this year it was sold to Thinking Media, a startup focused on ad-supported content. Stirr offered local content, plus a mix of national news, sports, entertainment, and digital-first channels, as well as a library of on-demand video titles. It had over 100 channels and more than 5,000 hours of programming, but right now there are no longer any live local news channels.

• TCLtv+ is a new free streaming service from TCL that’s exclusive to its smart TVs. Although it’s billed as TCLtv+, on my TCL 6-series Roku TV it’s just called TV Channel. It includes more than 200 free, ad-supported channels and an on-demand content library offering more than 1,500 movies and TV shows. The library is buoyed by both independent and major studios, including Scripps Media, NBC Universal, FilmRise, Fremantle, Banijay, and more. The service is built atop an upgraded version of the IDEO platform, which offers interactive viewing options such as online meal ordering, personalized recipes from virtual chefs, and dynamic summaries and recaps of shows you’re watching. You can find your next binge using the voice-activated remote.

• TiVo+ is available only via TiVo devices, either a TiVo DVR or a TiVo Stream 4K. TiVo+ has more than 160 free channels. The service is powered by several services, including Pluto TV and Tubi. It includes more than 40 channels of TV shows and series, 12 live news channels, and 12 live sports channels, including Major League Baseball. TiVo is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Xperi, the parent company to home entertainment brands, including DTS and Imax Enhanced.

• Vizio WatchFree+, different from Plex’s Watch Free, is an ad-supported streaming service from Vizio and Pluto TV with more than 260 channels, including nine new streaming channels and 150 on-demand films from AMC. It has also added its own roster of channels along with ad-supported video-on-demand titles, so Vizio SmartCast users can now access thousands of on-demand titles, along with hundreds of current WatchFree+ live streaming channels, all with no subscriptions or log-ins. The big news, though, is that Vizio is being purchased by Walmart.

• Vudu’s “Free” section offers a growing selection of free, ad-supported movies and TV shows from a wide range of genres, including action, comedy, horror, kids and family, romance, sci-fi, and more. To access the free content, you’ll need a Vudu account, but you don’t have to provide payment information. The most recent news is that Vudu, part of NBC Universal’s Fandango division, is being renamed Fandango at Home, with the Vudu name going away.

• YouTube’s “Free With Ads” section, found under the Movies & TV heading, has free, ad-supported offerings that are different from those on YouTube Premium, which bundles videos, original movies, TV shows, and music as part of an ad-free plan that costs $14 per month or $120 per year. YouTube’s free TV roster now has about 100 shows, with almost 4,000 episodes in all. Like many of these services, the content lineup changes periodically.

If you need a new streaming player, consider one of these.