Free streaming apps, and how to find something good on them

Below the big names, every country has its own. In Canada, CBC Gem has a free tier with ads. In the UK, BBC iPlayer (which needs a TV licence), ITVX and Channel 4 are free. In Australia, ABC iview and SBS On Demand are free, and 7plus, 9Now and 10 Play are free with ads.

Yes. These are not the pop-up-riddled “free movie sites”. Tubi belongs to Fox, Pluto TV to Paramount, the Roku Channel to Roku, YouTube to Google. They license films from studios and sell the ad breaks, the same deal broadcast TV has always run on.

A quick test for anything else: the legal ones are in your TV's app store under a name you have heard of. A site that wants you to install a “player” or click through three pop-ups is not one of them.

For Tubi and Pluto TV, no. Open the app and press play. An account only saves your place and your list, which is worth having if you watch series.

None of the free tiers ask for a credit card. If one does, you are being signed up to a free trial of something else.

You will still see both on “best free streaming apps” lists. Neither exists any more.

Crackle shut down in July 2024, when its parent company, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, was liquidated. Freevee was Amazon's free service until Amazon folded it into Prime Video. The Freevee apps closed on 3 September 2025, and its shows now sit in a free section of Prime Video.

This is the real problem. Tubi alone had more than 40,000 films and shows in early 2023, and its home screen is built to keep you scrolling, not to find you the one good film.

Three things work better than scrolling.

Filter by rating. JustWatch has a page for each free service in your country. Filter it by IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes score and release year, and you get the good films on Tubi, Pluto TV or Plex as a list instead of a row of thumbnails.

Start from your own list. If you already know what you want to watch, check which of it is free. That is what the Free filter on Watchlist Boosted does. (Disclosure: I run it.) Save your list there and it marks every title that is free in your country right now, with a button straight to it. Free services count for everyone, so there is nothing to set up.

Use our free page. Watch free tonight lists titles our members have saved that are free in your country, each with a mood and a short take on what it is like. It is small, and it only covers the countries our members watch from, but every title on it is one somebody wanted to watch.

And for background TV, Pluto TV's channels beat on-demand. You do not pick anything. You leave it on.

“Pluto TV is good for having something on in the background.” Proud_Importance4800, r/AndroidTV

YouTube has a “Free with ads” tab in its Movies & TV section, with studio films that come and go. JustWatch tracks it in the US and the UK.

Separately, plenty of old films are on YouTube and the Internet Archive because their copyright has run out: in the US, films from 1930 or earlier, and some later ones whose copyright was never renewed, like Night of the Living Dead. The Internet Archive's copies are on our free page for every country, with a link straight to the film.

If your library offers Kanopy or Hoopla, that is the other free option: no ads and a more interesting catalogue, in exchange for a monthly limit. How Kanopy and Hoopla work.

Each app licenses films country by country, which is why Tubi in Canada and Tubi in the US carry different films. A VPN can make an app think you are somewhere else, but their terms generally do not allow it, and they look for it. Our guide to catalogues by country covers the trade-offs.