- Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition
of one of our favorite things to do
here on this channel.
And that is the best free streaming apps on,
in this case, Fire TV.
I do these about once or twice a year
for every platform.
And I thought with 2022 coming up,
now's a good time to revisit Fire TV.
So we're gonna talk about the 11 best
free streaming apps on Fire TV. Let's dive in.
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Hey everybody. Thanks for joining me today.
Don't forget to like, and subscribe
if you like this video.
Now, let's get into it.
Today I'm talking about my top free apps on Fire TV.
My audience for this,
my intended audience for this,
is beginner cord cutters
or people who are brand new to Fire TV.
Maybe they'd just unboxed something.
They wanna make sure
they get all the best apps out there.
So this is not breaking any new ground.
I'm not finding hidden gems
that nobody's ever heard of before.
We're gonna be talking about the ones
you must have going into 2022.
So, if you are new to Fire TV,
let's take a look
at how to download these apps, okay?
So, here on my home screen,
I'm gonna go over here to Find,
and then right down here,
there's the App store, okay.
So when I click in there, yeah,
it's gonna have all sorts of apps
that I can go through.
You can search by category,
you can go through their featured ones if you want.
Yeah. There's lots of apps there.
The other way is let's say you find something
that's interesting to you, let's say WIRED.
Okay. So you wanna get the WIRED app.
If you find something that is interesting,
go ahead and click down a couple notches,
and you'll see some related apps.
So if you like a certain category of thing,
then this is a good way to find apps
that you might not find otherwise.
But back to the ones you must have,
these are going to be free streaming services.
So no Netflix, no Disney Plus,
nothing that you'd have to pay
a monthly or an annual fee for.
This is all going to be free entertainment.
So if you've got a Fire TV
or a Fire Stick or whatever,
you may never have to pay
for your TV or movies ever again
if you're okay with the offerings
that are on this list.
Streaming is pretty great that way, wouldn't you say?
All right, let's get into the list.
On my Fire TV, if I hit the Home button,
it takes me to my home screen here
and you can see the featured apps.
And this is my list of featured apps, okay?
So we're gonna start right here with IMDb TV.
This is actually owned by Amazon.
Amazon of course owns Prime Video,
but since that's paid,
it's not going on our list here.
So IMDb TV is the free version of that.
And if you click into that, then yeah,
you're gonna get lots of things to watch
that are going to be commercial supported.
And that is the watch word for today,
commercial supported.
Almost everything we look at
is going to be commercial supported.
That's how they stay free.
So you can see in IMDb TV they have a guide grid,
similar to what you would have had
with Cable or Satellite,
where they have it laid out
in a live TV format, okay.
Now these shows that you're getting on here
are going to be similar
to what you would find elsewhere,
which you can go up to the top and find in Discover.
So if you go to Discover,
then you get a grid layout
like you would see in Netflix
or something like that
with all of the thumbnails and icons.
And yeah, there's not much more to it than that.
You can surf through here,
see if there are movies and TV shows that interest you.
And again, it is all going to be commercial supported.
The nice thing about IMDb TV
is that they have a better library
than most free streaming services.
You'll run into a lot of free streaming services
that have, shall we say lackluster libraries?
IMDb TV is not that way.
All right. Going back to our home screen,
let's go back to this row here
with the featured apps,
you'll see Twitch here.
This is one that I like recommending,
especially to anybody who enjoys video games.
There is other content on Twitch,
but video game content is the big stuff.
So whether it's pro tournaments
or somebody streaming a game that you love,
or you used to love,
or you wish you could afford to buy,
there's a lot of that stuff here on Twitch.
Twitch is definitely a niche service,
but if it's up your alley, it's a must have.
All right, continuing on our list
is an interesting one, the Roku Channel.
Hang on a second, we're on a Fire TV, right?
What's the Roku Channel doing here?
Well, the Roku Channel, yeah,
it is available on Fire TV.
And the Roku Channel is more
than you might have expected
if you've never really dived into it before.
So, let's go look at the Roku Channel.
It's got a ton of on-demand content,
a ton of live content, lots of news.
They have their own originals
that they bought from Quibi
when Quibi went under the last year.
And once again,
this is going to be commercial supported stuff.
One thing to note with the Roku Channel,
is that it is all encompassing.
You get kids' content, you get adult content,
tons of stuff on here.
So if you don't want the adult stuff
showing up next to the kids' stuff,
then you can set up parental controls.
You're going to have to do that online though,
and it'll direct you to this URL.
You go there and you set up your parental controls,
then you don't have to worry so much
about what's showing up on the Roku Channel.
If we continue on our list to Tubi,
there's something interesting I wanna show you.
You may have noticed this already,
but if you go over to Tubi and then scroll down,
then it's going to show you
some featured stuff on the app
so that you don't have to click
all the way into the app and then surf.
You may be able to find
what you're looking for right away,
just here on this front page.
But anyway, if we do go into Tubi,
you're going to see that this is much like Netflix.
It's basically what I call
a commercial supported Netflix, okay.
So there's not much more to it than that,
except that the library is going to be different.
Tubi is kind of the original
when it comes to commercial supported Netflix knockoffs.
Okay. So Tubi is really, really good at it.
They've got a good library.
Aint not gonna say it's an awesome library
compared to something like Netflix
or compared to HBO Max,
but it is a very good library.
You'll never want for something to watch.
That's for sure.
Next up is Fire TV's news service.
So if I click over here,
again, you'll see that they have
some featured apps below,
or some featured channels within this.
But I really, really love the Fire TV news app.
I'll show you why.
You log in, and essentially what it does
is it gives you access to every streaming news service
that you could get elsewhere.
So all these apps like Reuters, Newsy,
CBS News, Bloomberg, et cetera,
these are all available as standalone streaming apps,
but Fire TV has brought them all into one place,
this news app.
So if we come up here,
you can set your favorites under My News,
you can go to your local news.
It'll ask you where you live,
so it'll pull up your local news.
And then yeah, you come over here to Channels,
and you can see there's a ton
of different options for you.
Everything from CBS and ABC News
to Newsmax and Yahoo
and SportsWire for heaven sake.
And they even have a Spanish language channel
with Estrella News.
So yeah, there's a ton of stuff on here.
It's all brought into one place.
So you don't have to worry
about where you're gonna go
to find a good streaming news source.
It's all laid out right here.
Last up on our featured list here is Peacock.
Now Peacock is a premium streaming service,
but it has a free tier.
Now the free tier comes
with about half as many titles as you would get
on the premium version of Peacock.
So you're not getting everything that it has to offer.
And what you are getting is commercial supported
if you sign up for the free version.
But hey, this is a premium streaming service
that is free to use.
So you can pop in to Peacock and bounce around there.
They do have some high quality originals.
They do have some good content here for you
to peruse even in the free version.
And if you do end up liking it, yeah,
you do have the option to pay for it,
but you don't have to.
One thing that I hear constantly
in the comment section
is people signing up for Peacock
because of the WWE content.
This is one of the best places to go,
maybe the best place to go if you enjoy WWE content.
So if you're a wrestling nut, yeah,
Peacock is a must have for sure.
All right. Now let's talk again about this featured list.
I have six of them here and as you know,
I have more channels to talk about.
So if I come here to view all my apps and channels,
then it will pull up this screen here.
Now you can see the top row is the same apps
that were featured on that front page.
So if you have apps
that you keep coming back to over and over again,
you can always come down here,
long hold on the Select button,
and then you can move it up here into that row,
wherever you'd like to place it,
you can place it there.
So I'm gonna keep these ones down here,
and we'll talk about these from here.
Next up is Pluto TV.
Pluto is massively popular with cord cutters
because it's the best
free Cable and Satellite emulator out there.
So this is not Cable or Satellite service per se,
but it is free TV.
The difference here is that with Pluto TV,
you're not getting the same channels
that you got on Cable or Satellite,
you're getting the little brothers
to those channels, if you will.
But with that being said,
the content on here is not bad.
And it's largely the same kind of stuff
that you would get on Cable.
It's just, you're not getting it all brand new.
Okay. So you're getting a lot of reruns,
a lot of older stuff, stuff that previously,
before you cut the cord,
you might've been able to watch live
right when it came out.
But as you can see here, yeah,
there's a ton of different categories of content.
So whatever your flavor is, yeah,
you'll find some live channels
that air that sort of thing.
If you prefer on-demand content,
instead of live TV, then yeah,
you just hit the Back button,
and you'll see right up at the top of the screen,
Live TV On Demand.
I'm gonna skip right over there to On Demand,
and again, kind of like the Roku Channel,
kind of like Tubi though, that sort of thing.
You're gonna get a grid setup
unlike you'd see on Netflix with various thumbnails,
lots of categories, yeah.
You can make your way through here
and see if there's something you wanna watch.
And honestly, with Pluto TV, yeah,
there's gonna be something you wanna watch.
They've got a lot of good stuff on there.
Next up is Crackle.
Crackle used to be owned by Sony,
it used to be called Sony Crackle, it's not now.
But this is the last Netflix knockoff
that I'm gonna show you here.
The reason I have so many of these
is that they all have different content.
There is some overlap,
but each of them is going to have their own titles.
In fact, Crackle has its own Crackle originals.
So you may have some overlap with licensed content
on other streaming services,
but what you're not going to get,
is the Crackle originals that you can only get here.
One of the nice things about these free streamers,
many of them, the way that they're laid out,
is this list here on the left.
Where, on something like Netflix,
you gotta endlessly scroll
to find a category you might be interested in,
but with Crackle, yeah,
you just come right over here.
Yeah. I wanna watch a fantasy movie. Okay.
And then you can scroll through that category
instead of going all the way down
to the bottom of your screen
to try to find something.
All right, we're getting pretty close to the end here.
There are a few more that I absolutely recommend.
One would be Spotify.
If you're not familiar with Spotify,
I don't know where you've been,
but Spotify is the biggest
streaming music service out there.
And you can get these music services on your TV.
So you could substitute in something like Pandora,
if you use that instead of Spotify.
But I think Spotify being the biggest one,
that's the one I wanted to show you.
Now Spotify is Spotify.
You're probably pretty familiar with this.
There's a free version and a premium version.
Either way you can log in
and listen here on your TV.
Next up is Plex.
Now Plex is an app that I've done
a deep dive on before.
So if you wanna learn more
about this in its particulars,
then please check out that video,
I will link to that right up here.
So with Plex, it does a lot of the things
that we've already talked about
with other services.
It's got on-demand content, it's got live content,
but it does something else, very, very nice.
And that is it syncs your library
of your own content to your smart TV.
So again, I'm not going to teach you everything
about how Plex works,
but essentially you can set up a Plex server
on your computer,
and then you're uploading your content to the Cloud.
Whether it's your photos, your cell phone videos,
or movies that you own.
If you have a DVD and you're able to rip that DVD
and put it on your Plex server,
then you're able to access it
here in Plex, on your Fire TV.
And yeah, you'd better believe
I ripped "The Last Starfighter" and "Dune" 1984
to my Plex server. Oh yeah.
Lastly, we've got PBS and PBS Kids.
I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this.
I just wanna make sure that you're aware
that you can get PBS content
on your Fire TV device.
So especially if you have kids,
then PBS Kids is awesome.
So you get things like "Daniel Tiger,"
things like "Odd Squad,"
whatever it is that your kids like,
it's here on the PBS Kids app.
If you enjoy PBS content from the regular version,
then yeah, you can get PBS as well on your Fire TV.
And of course there's a million other free apps
that you can check out.
I showed you at the beginning of the video
how to look for these.
So yeah, go forth, find your favorite apps,
but make sure you have these ones
on your Fire TV and you'll be set.
Again, you may not ever have to pay
for streaming content ever again.
You may still want to, but you don't have to,
thanks to this list.
Thanks for watching everybody.
Again, don't forget to like and subscribe
if this video was helpful to you,
and join me every Friday at 2:00 PM Eastern
for the live streams
that we do here on this channel,
I would love to see you there.
We always have lots of fun.
So, thanks again. I'll see you next time.