- If you have a Roku device of any kind,
you have a ticket to free entertainment.
As much as you want, really.
And that's the whole point
of cord cutting, right?
You wanted to save some money.
So today I'm gonna give you
the top 10 free apps on Roku,
or at least my top 10 free apps on Roku.
The ones that I think
if you have a Roku,
you should have these ones downloaded.
And if you have these apps,
it's not that you'll never
pay for anything ever again,
maybe you wanna grab Netflix for a while,
or Disney Plus or whatever.
But the thing is,
you won't have to.
So now I will give you the gift
of entertainment freedom.
Let's dive in.
(upbeat music)
Hey everybody.
Craig here from reviews.org.
Hopefully this video is helpful to you.
I mean, hopefully
it's also entertaining in some way.
If so, don't forget to give it a like,
subscribe to the channel,
and we'll be back for more stuff
just like this.
All right, let's get into it.
The top 10 free apps.
Now on my Roku,
on the left side you're gonna see
there's a bunch of menu options
and then the apps are all over on the right.
Now, if we go down here
there is something called "Featured Free."
I do want to talk about this,
but I'm going to save it.
This is something that Roku does
that your others don't.
Your Fire TV, your Chromecast, whatever.
You know, Roku organizes things
a little bit differently.
And I was tempted to count this as an app,
but it's not quite, okay.
So we're gonna go back to our homepage
and actually talk about the top 10 free apps,
then I'll come back to that
and how you can use it to find more apps
and more content to watch
than even what I'm giving to you
today here on this video.
All right, so let's pop over.
We're gonna go past all of the paid stuff,
past the Netflix and the Hulus
and the Prime videos,
and start with YouTube.
And we're not gonna spend
a lot of time on YouTube.
But yeah, it's kind of important.
Says the guy you're watching
on YouTube right now, right?
Now, on this device I haven't signed in.
You can sign in or not.
It's usually helpful
if you have a Gmail account to sign in
so you can kind of keep track
of your history and all that stuff.
But I'll skip that for now.
I'll just bring up YouTube
as kind of the perfect catchall
when it comes to on-demand, live,
user-generated, premium content.
YouTube has it all.
So you come over here on the Roku app,
over on the left side,
this is where you're gonna do
a lot of that navigation
toward the type of stuff
that you want to see,
whether you're subscribed to things
or you prefer checking out some music,
maybe you want to rent
some movies and TV to watch,
they have that capability on YouTube these days.
One of my favorite things to do on YouTube
is actually to come down here to "More"
and go over to "News".
This is an excellent news app,
with a lot of live feeds and a lot of clips,
you know,
whether from recently or from further back,
so that you can kind of keep up with your news.
Yeah, right here on YouTube, it's great.
All right, let's go back to the homepage.
And after YouTube-
Okay, here come five apps that are-
I'm gonna lump these all together.
The Roku channel, Pluto, Tubi,
Filmrise and Freevee.
I will tell you more about them individually,
but as a group,
if you have these five entertainment apps
basically what that means is, again,
you'll never have to pay for anything again.
They're all commercial-supported,
most of them do on-demand and live stuff.
And between the five of them,
you'll never run out of things to watch.
Ever.
But let's start at the top of the list here
with the Roku channel.
When Roku debuted the Roku channel
a few years ago,
it was pretty good.
It's gotten a lot better since then, though.
It's a really great app,
whether you're looking for live TV,
you know, you prefer things
on that kind of timetable grid.
They've got a lot of that.
Obviously, this isn't gonna be
the same cable channels
that you were watching,
but it will be kind of offshoots
of a lot of those things.
And then outside of live TV
they have a lot of on-demand stuff as well.
Roku has even gotten into
the Roku Originals game, okay?
So this is something that some apps do,
not everybody is able to do it.
But Roku is producing,
or at least licensing their own originals.
So for instance,
if you remember the stories about Quibi
from a few years ago.
Quibi was a streaming service
that was pretty ill-conceived
and it kind of evaporated
after about six months,
but some of the content was pretty good.
Roku bought that.
So on the Roku channel,
you just press left
or the back button,
and it will open up this left side menu.
Come down here to Roku Originals,
and there's some pretty good stuff on here,
"Swimming With Sharks" was good,
"The Newsreader" is a program
that they licensed out of Australia.
That was pretty darn good.
And of course,
there's the "Weird: Al" biopic.
It's, you know,
obviously a comedic non-bio biopic,
but it is hilarious.
And that is a Roku-produced original.
Really good stuff.
All right, outside of Roku,
let's talk about Pluto TV.
Pluto TV is the original cable imitator.
Okay?
So Pluto TV started as
a free live TV streaming service.
Again, the channels that they have
are not the same
as you're gonna get
on your cable subscription,
but kind of offshoots of some of those.
So I'll show you what I mean.
If I click on guide here,
it'll open up my guide,
and I'm gonna go over here immediately
to the left-hand side
because they've got 200, 300 channels,
it's a lot of channels, you know,
it's a lot to kind of wade through.
So I'm gonna come in here
and look for what category
of thing I want to watch.
And this is where Pluto
is really brilliant,
is with these categories.
So do I wanna watch a movie?
Do I wanna watch, you know,
a holiday show?
'Cause as I'm recording this,
it's the holiday season.
Do I wanna watch news, crime,
reality, whatever.
You can see they've got
all these different categories.
So they sort things really well
so that you can find what you wanna watch easily.
Now, Pluto TV, like I said,
started as this kind of
live TV streaming service,
but it didn't stop there.
They have since added an on-demand service.
So again,
I go over here to the left,
further over to the left,
and click on "On Demand",
and it's gonna bring up
the Pluto TV on-demand library.
This is gonna be a lot of the stuff
that is on that live TV grid,
but now you can watch it whenever you want.
So, you know,
people have their differing styles
of how they want to consume their entertainment.
If you prefer the on-demand, you know,
I wanna watch it on my schedule,
then this is here for you.
And again, we have the same
kind of categories over here on the left
to find the things that you wanna watch.
And I hope it's clear
as I'm quickly scrolling through here
that Pluto TV has a really great library.
All of these are gonna be commercial-supported,
so if you wanna watch "John Wick,"
yeah, you're gonna have to watch
commercials while you do it,
but for some people, that's fine.
Others, you know,
they'd rather pay for it.
But hey, we're here for the free stuff,
and that means, yeah,
we're gonna watch commercials.
But if you scroll through it
you'll see that,
yeah, they have a lot of titles
that are actually things
that you're gonna wanna watch,
which is similar to our next app.
Okay, let's go from Pluto over to Tubi.
Tubi is the original free streaming service
that started as sort of a
Netflix-with-commercials competitor.
And when you log in, yeah,
it kinda looks a lot like Netflix
as far as having the different categories
and the titles arranged
the way that they are.
Yeah, it doesn't look exactly the same,
but I'm just saying it, you know,
kind of feels reminiscent of that.
And again, similar to Pluto TV,
Tubi does a great job of pulling in titles
that you're actually gonna want to watch.
You know, this isn't
bottom of the barrel stuff,
this is really good stuff.
And with Tubi,
I often pair this one with Pluto TV
because they feel like opposites to me.
Pluto started as a live TV streaming service
and added on on-demand stuff later.
Tubi went the exact opposite way.
And so this one started
as an on-demand streaming service,
meaning you can watch it whenever you want,
and eventually added on, voila,
live TV.
So kind of a similar vibe.
You're not gonna get all the same channels
from one service to the other.
When it comes to live TV
I think Pluto is the better option,
but that's not to say
that the options that you get here on Tubi
are not good.
They may not be quite up to
the Pluto TV standard,
but yeah, there's still a lot of
really, really great stuff here
on the live TV side of things.
Now, for my money,
I think Tubi probably wins
most of the time
on their on-demand library over Pluto.
But that's why they work so great together,
is that they kind of feed off of each other
and which style of TV you want that day.
Now we're rounding out
those five entertainment apps
that I told you about
with these two.
Filmrise and Freevee.
Let's do Filmrise first.
Filmrise, I'm not gonna spend
a lot of time on this,
but I will say that,
like the others,
it has a fairly strong library.
You know, this one may not be quite as a-list
as the libraries that you get
on Pluto and Tubi,
but it's pretty darn good.
And the thing that Filmrise does
better than any other free app that I know of
is categorization.
So, let me show you what I mean by that.
If I scroll down here,
you'll see Popular Categories:
Western, True Crime, and so on,
and so on and so on.
They do a really great job
of separating their library
into these categories
in a way that makes it easy for you to peruse.
In fact, Filmrise is so dedicated
to sorting their content in this way,
that you can actually get
several different Filmrise apps.
So, what I mean is,
this is Filmrise,
just kind of generic Filmrise.
But if what you really want
is westerns,
or you're really into action movies,
well then you can go
into the Roku channel library
and get the Filmrise action channel.
They separate these all into various apps,
so that if that's all
that you're really interested in,
you don't have to worry
about the other stuff
kind of cluttering up your feed,
you can really zero in, focus in.
But you can do that within this app as well.
Okay, so if I really want
just action stuff,
then yeah,
I pull this down and there it is.
Filmrise action.
And there we go.
Because, honestly,
who doesn't wanna watch
Danny Trejo as a zombie hunter?
Let's be honest.
And last up in that group is Freevee.
I, again,
won't spend a ton of time on Freevee.
I'll just say that
this one is an Amazon owned app,
and you can think of this as Prime Video,
but with commercials.
And it has an excellent content library.
One thing you're not gonna find in Freevee
is that live TV section
that all those others have had.
Freevee does not bother with that.
This is all on-demand content.
So that might actually be a plus for you
if you don't actually wanna worry
about live TV-style streaming.
All right, let's round out
our top 10 with a few more.
Let's talk about Plex.
Plex is a unique option out there,
and one that I really love.
If you use Plex,
what you're doing is setting up something
that will allow you to watch your own media
on your streaming device.
And here's what I mean by that.
If you sign up for Plex,
you go online, go to their website,
sign up, create an account,
it will allow you
to upload your own content to the cloud
where you can then stream it
on your streaming device
if you're logged into the same account.
So if you have a whole bunch of DVDs,
if you have family photos,
if you have a music library
that you've cherished since the 90s,
and you'd love to have that
on a streaming service,
well, this allows you to do that.
This is kind of your own streaming service.
So you can see on here, you know,
if I go down here to movies,
I've uploaded a few things.
My copy of "The Last Starfighter"
or the 1984 "Dune",
I had those on Blu-ray
and I wanted to upload those to the Cloud,
so I did.
Pretty awesome capability, honestly.
And I can do the same thing with my music.
You know, for instance,
this is a great example.
Here's an album that I bought
when I lived in France for a while,
but it's not available on Spotify.
Ah, it drives me crazy.
But now that I have it on Plex
I'm able to stream that anytime I want.
And of course, like I mentioned,
I can do this with my own photos as well.
Okay, now Plex also has a live TV service
and they have on-demand movies and shows.
They even have music on Tidal,
like it says down here.
Now, I'm not gonna spend much time
talking about this
because Plex's library of titles
is weaker than what you would find
on those other five that I talked about.
That's not to say it's terrible.
There are definitely some decent titles on here,
but on average, yeah,
it's not up to the caliber
of what we would expect
from those other ones.
But it's there.
It does exist.
I wanted to bring it up.
But it's definitely not
the selling point of Plex.
Plex is all about
creating your own streaming service,
not counting on them for theirs.
Does that make sense?
Heading back to the homepage,
let's talk about Spotify.
Yeah, I was disappointed
that there was an album
that's not available on Spotify
so I had to use Plex,
but for the most part,
when I'm streaming music,
I'm doing that through Spotify.
Maybe you use another service,
you can sub that in for this one.
There's a good chance
that there's a streaming app
for whatever service you use.
But with Spotify, yeah,
it's great to be able
to stream my music on my TV
when that is appropriate.
Peacock is a great option,
but it is a slightly tricky one.
Okay, if we come into Peacock,
the trick here is that
Peacock is a premium streaming service,
but it's also a free one.
Okay, now why is that tricky?
Well, it's tricky because
it has three different tiers of service,
and you have to choose which one you want.
Do you want to go for the free service
and watch some commercials
and only have access to half the library?
Or do you want to pay some money,
you know,
get access to the whole library,
and maybe, maybe not watch commercials as well?
We're not worrying about the paid options,
we're just talking about
the free options right now.
But the reason Peacock does kind of drive me
a little bit crazy sometimes is that, yeah,
if you're on the free version
you're not getting access
to their entire library.
I think it's about, what?
60% of their library,
something like that,
don't quote me on the number,
but it's something like that.
So there is quite a lot
that you're missing out on,
and you'll be constantly encouraged
to go ahead and sign up for premium.
That being said,
there is one thing that Peacock does
that I absolutely love.
If I come over here to movies,
let's select a random movie,
doesn't matter what it is,
we're not gonna watch it,
'cause I don't want the copyright strike.
But let's go over here to "Nope".
Okay, so I'm gonna watch now,
and this is something that I love.
Peacock will,
when you start a movie,
sometimes, not always,
but oftentimes you'll see this.
Watch the following messages,
then enjoy your movie ad-free.
And you could see there was about
two-and-a-half minutes of ads,
and through the magic of editing
I'm already halfway through that,
we're almost done,
and then I get to enjoy the movie ad-free.
So that's pretty great, honestly.
The other thing that has to be called out
anytime you talk about Peacock
is WWE content.
Okay?
So this is exclusive to NBC Universal,
and that's their streaming service.
And so if you're into wrestling,
you've gotta have Peacock,
and they do have a lot of great,
free wrestling content on here.
Lastly, something for the kids,
okay, let's talk about the Lego channel.
Now, I could call out
a few other kid-friendly apps out there
like PBS Kids maybe,
and my kids really like that one,
but let's talk about the Lego channel instead.
Because this was quite the find for me,
and it has become a real hit at our house
over the last year or two.
So with the Lego channel,
it's exactly that.
It is a channel full of Lego content.
Now, hang on a minute you might be saying,
how much Lego content could there really be?
A lot. There's a lot.
If I look here on the screen,
you can see it's kind of sorted into categories
right at the beginning.
What do you wanna watch today?
Right when you log in.
Well, you can scroll all the way over
and skip this screen,
and then it kind of gives you
that Netflix-style tile layout
with all of their stuff.
So there's gonna be
the animated series that Lego puts out.
There's gonna be people talking about Legos,
people building Legos, or Lego,
whatever the plural is.
I don't know, I don't care.
What I do care about
is that my kids have a lot
of really great, safe content
for them to watch.
When it comes to Lego,
I mean this entire thing
is a commercial, right?
The whole app is a commercial.
So there is that to consider,
but, you know,
hey, at least they've got something fun to watch.
All right, so there you go,
10 free apps.
Hopefully there's something in there
that you can add to your library
so that you can have as much free content
as your heart could possibly desire.
But I do also want to point out,
over here on the left-hand menu here on Roku,
if you come down here,
there is a "Featured Free" section.
So if I come in here,
it's going to pull together
a bunch of the content
from a lot of those apps
that we've already talked about.
Now obviously,
because this is a Roku device,
they're going to lean heavily on Roku content,
but it's not just the Roku channel content
that you're gonna have on here.
For instance, I go right down here,
"Holiday Classics by Fawesome."
That's another app
that we haven't talked about.
And if you come down
and scroll through some of the titles
that they have available,
you'll see right up above that title
it'll show the app
that you would be watching that on.
So this is just kind of a sorting house
for a bunch of different titles
that you can watch across multiple apps,
some of which we talked about today,
some of which we didn't.
But without a doubt,
my absolute favorite thing
is that if we come down here
to "Adrenaline Rush"
and scroll over just a little bit,
we have "Murder, She Wrote"
on the "Adrenaline Rush" category.
So okay, maybe the categories aren't perfect,
but there's a bunch of content on here
for you to check out.
All right,
but the last thing I want to point out is,
if we come back here to the homepage,
and come down here to "Streaming Channels,"
then I do want to point out
that you can come down here
and look for free movies and TV.
Okay?
So if you're looking for more apps
along the lines of
stuff that we talked about today,
then come down here to the free section
in the channel store,
and you'll find a bunch of options.
Not everything is on here,
this is their "top list,"
but it is a great place to start.
So there you have it.
Let me know in the comments
if you have any questions,
any comments,
any apps you feel like
I missed out on mentioning,
go ahead and throw 'em in the comments below.
I'd love to hear about 'em.
In the meantime,
don't forget to like and subscribe
If this video was helpful to you.
Good luck with your Roku
and your journey toward
the cheapest possible content,
including a lot of free stuff.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
I'll see you next time.