There’s no such thing as a free movie – OR IS THERE? – FOUR LEGAL WAYS TO WATCH MOVIES AND TV FOR FREE

I thought I’d do a change-of-pace post from consumer law to good old-fashioned consumerism. According to Fortune magazine, the cable TV bill for the average US household reached $103/month last year.  My family cut the cable 19 years ago when our cable bill reached the outrageous level of $25/month. It’s no big deal, between broadcast TV using an antenna, yes an antenna, the web, streaming video plus DVDs and Blu-Rays, we have more entertainment options than ever.

These days we splurge, spending about $30/month for streaming video on Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime, but we still pay less than a third of the average household’s bill. The truth be told though, even without the three paid streaming services above, there are several places to find movies and television programs legally for free.  This doesn’t even count Youtube where a lot of stuff that technically shouldn’t be there is.  I will list them in reverse order of quality.  By the way, if you have one to add, please comment at the end of the blog post.

#4 Yahoo Streaming Video

Once upon a time, Hulu had a free tier which included the most recent seasons of most of the television shows and a few old movies. Then Hulu went to $8.00/month and improved its movie and TV content greatly, but the free tier went away – well, partially, because a limited version of Hulu is still available free at Yahoo.com. Yahoo has a decent selection of recent and classic TV programs. Its movie selection is really bad.  





#3 VUDU “Movies on Us”

VUDU is Walmart’s streaming video site. It has a section called “movies on us” that surprised me with its quality when I checked it out. The “movies on us” have commercials, but that’s no big deal. The free movies include relatively recent movies such as “Slum Dog Millionaire” and some classics such as Clint Eastwood’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”.   Vudu “Movies on Us” is definitely worth checking out.  There isn’t much TV content here, but that is readily available elsewhere.





#2  CRACKLE

Crackle.com  is Sony’s ad-supported streaming service.    It has a solid line-up of both television shows and movies, though the content does tend to skew decidedly towards male tastes.  Older TV programs include “Seinfeld” and “Married with Children”  is heavy on action and adventure, plus a lot of anime but with comedies like “Animal House” and “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle”, I probably watch Crackle almost as much as the Netflix that I pay for.  






#1  YOUR PUBLIC LIBRARY – INCLUDING HOOPLA STREAMING

Almost all public libraries rent DVDs and Blu-Rays now and have for a long time. Typically, you can go online and reserve your discs and have them brought to your local library branch. The selection at my library is broader and deeper than any of the streaming services, and now many libraries offer streaming video to card-holders as well. There are a few different streaming services that libraries use. My library, Indianapolis Public Library, uses a service called Hoopla. (hoopladigital.com).  Hoopla has some differences from the services above. You can only “check out” 10 items per month, BUT you can download the movies to your device and watch them offline for 3 days, after which time they automatically expire. You may have to sign up for hoopla using your library card information at your public library website, but once you do, you may be surprised at the amount of stuff you can check out through Hoopla.  Hoopla’s collection seems more diverse than Crackle’s, but it isn’t outstandingly large.  It has a surprising number of newer titles and movies that are hard to find elsewhere.  For example, I just watched Michael Moore’s 2016 documentary, “Where to Invade Next” on Hoopla. It isn’t available on any of the free or subscription streaming services.  (It seems like Hoopla also has a lot of things that have rotated off Netflix.)  Hoopla by itself would not earn the top spot on this list, but Hoopla combined with the physical DVDs & Blu Rays easily makes the public library the top spot for free movies and TV.  






How do you find what you are looking for?  If you have an idea of what program or movie that you want to watch, but you don’t know where it might be streaming for free, try going to justwatch.com.  Using the search function on Justwatch, you can find which services have the program you are looking for, including the paid services.