- If you've got an Apple TV,
then you can buy all sorts
of premium paid apps.
But if you wanna stick with the free stuff,
I can help you with that too.
So let's talk today
about the top 10 free apps for your Apple TV.
Let's dive in.
(upbeat music)
All right, thanks for watching today everybody.
If this video is helpful to you,
then go ahead and give it a like,
and don't forget to subscribe
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Okay, so the first thing that we're gonna do
before we get to the top 10 free apps
is show how to download them.
If you're new to your Apple TV,
this is gonna be helpful.
If you've had your Apple TV for a while
or if you've used Apple devices before,
this might look pretty familiar.
So, feel free to skip it if you want to.
But we're gonna go up here to the app store
and we can search for whatever we want
or we can check out the apps that they recommend.
We wanna go into this app category.
They're gonna give you a lot of great options
for you to explore.
But a lot of those are going to be paid.
So, if you know that there's a free option that you want,
and you just want to bypass all this,
just go to the search and you can find whatever you want.
I'm just gonna randomly pick a letter.
(chuckles)
And yeah, you can see there's plenty of options
for stuff that you can search for here on the Apple TV.
When you find something that you do want,
let's say you wanted to download this one.
You just get to this page, hit get,
and then depending on your settings,
you might have to put in a password
or fingerprint or whatever
and you'll be able to get that app.
All right, so let's go back to our homepage now
and talk about the top 10 free apps.
You can see I've actually got an entire folder here,
labeled free apps.
These are the ones that we're gonna talk about.
But the first one I'm gonna point you toward
is actually here with my premium apps.
And that's because Peacock is actually a free app.
Peacock is the NBCUniversal app,
the streaming app that debuted last year.
The thing about it is,
they've got the premium paid tiers,
but they've also got a free tier as well.
So you don't have to pay for Peacock.
And even if you don't pay for it,
you're gonna get a lot of really great content.
So, I highly recommend that you check this out,
I'm not going to go through the entire interface here,
I've done a review on that.
So if you'd like, I'll throw the link
in the description below,
you can check out the full review of Peacock there.
But for now, let's go back to our front page.
All right, the other one that I'm going to mention
that isn't in that free folder is NewsOn.
You can see there's a lot of options for free news
and national news,
but this one here NewsOn is the one
that I recommend for news junkies
or just people who enjoy local news broadcast.
Because with this one, you can see it searches
for local stations based on my location.
So I'm here in the Salt Lake City area,
and it's gonna have,
oh, somewhere around here
it'll have Salt Lake City stuff,
but the, oh yeah here we go right down here,
stations near me.
But it's also gonna pull in stuff
from other local markets nearby.
So stuff from Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, whatever.
So wherever you live,
it's gonna have some cool local content.
And not only is it gonna have your stuff
but you can go up here to by location,
and you can search pretty much every state
and every market within that state,
it's gonna have some affiliates from those markets.
So if I go over to, oh I don't know, South Carolina.
I've got Charleston, Columbia Greenville
and it's got affiliates from each
of those markets that you can tune into.
When you pick one, let's pick the ABC affiliate here.
Not only are you going to be able to watch live feeds
from these stations,
but you're going to have on-demand feeds
from previous broadcast so I can see yesterday's stuff.
I can see today's stuff.
When it's done, it gets uploaded here
and you can watch it here on NewsOn,
It's a fantastic app, highly recommended.
But let's get to the other stuff,
the entertainment stuff.
All right, so this is where we're going to get
into a few different categories
of things that you should know about.
The first one I'm going to talk about is STIRR.
STIRR, and we'll get to Pluto TV,
it's gonna be pretty similar,
but these are your cable and satellite imitators.
So these ones, yeah,
they've got some on-demand content,
and we'll talk a little bit more about that with Pluto TV,
but what it also does is right up here at the top
you've got a channel guide,
and that channel guide is going
to look and smell and feel a lot
like your cable or satellite
channel guide that you had
when you had cable and satellite.
The only difference here is
that the channels themselves are different.
So we're not talking about the
the channels that you're used to with,
you know, you don't,
you're not going to get TBS and TNT,
USA and HGTV, whatever else you were used to,
these are going to be the stepchildren
of those premium channels.
I call them premium channels.
You know what I mean.
Anyway, so they do have a lot of really good content.
It's just not the content that you're used to
but that doesn't mean it's not worth watching.
So check out STIRR for that sort of thing.
And I also mentioned Pluto TV.
It's going to be very similar,
just with a different selection of channels.
And I would argue a slightly better one,
but it's also going to have
that on-demand stuff that I was talking about.
So the on-demand section,
I'm pointing this out on Pluto TV specifically
because they actually have a really good on-demand section.
Oh, whoops.
Here we go.
Okay. So if I go on-demand,
then they do have a lot of really good titles.
Not as many as you would find
obviously on like a Netflix or Hulu, what have you,
but definitely some notable titles here.
With all of these free apps,
the watch word here is going to be commercial supported.
So when you see all of this free content,
whether it's the live stuff or the on-demand stuff,
just know that you are going to be watching commercials.
Okay. So let's go back
and let's get into,
now that we've talked about
some of the cable and satellite imitators,
let's talk about the Netflix imitators.
The first one that came up years ago is Tubi.
Tubi as you can see as I'm scrolling through here
looks and feels a lot like Netflix,
with the thumbnails of the different titles
sorted by category.
But again, this is going to be commercial supported
and they are going to have a different library
than you would find on Netflix.
So Tubi, like I said,
was one of the first,
and continues to be regarded as one of the best.
They do have a very good library.
The one thing that they are lacking is something
that you can find on another app that I'll show you here.
And that is Crackle,
also known as Sony Crackle
if you're trying to find it online or something,
but we can just call it Crackle these days.
Again, this is going to look and feel a lot like a Netflix
with the different categories and the different thumbnails.
But when we go into Crackle,
and whether we're sorting by shows or movies,
if we scroll down a bit,
we're going to come to Crackle Original.
This is something that Tubi doesn't do.
Crackle does.
They make their own shows,
stuff that you're not going to find anywhere else,
and stuff that's not going to cycle in
and out of the library here on Crackle.
Now it's not you know,
HBO level amazing premium content,
but that doesn't mean it's not good
and not worth watching and worth checking out.
So definitely do that with Sony Crackle.
Next up is PBS, there's PBS and there's PBS Kids.
This is kind of a twofer.
With PBS, once you log in,
it's going to pull content
from your local PBS station
and the nationwide stuff.
So basically if you can watch it on PBS where you're at,
you can watch it here on the app.
They'll have live stuff that you can watch
or you can scroll through and watch by category
whether you want documentaries or what have you.
Again, I'm located in the Salt Lake City market.
and so I get PBS Utah.
So anything that airs on PBS Utah,
I'm going to be able to watch here.
And it's the same thing with PBS Kids.
I just don't have that app right here, right now.
I use that on the Roku, in the house for the kids.
Similarly, let's talk about Kanopy.
There's actually, again, this is a twofer.
There's Kanopy and then there's one called Hoopla,
H O O P L A.
So Kanopy or Hoopla.
For me, it's Kanopy.
And what these apps do
is they pull in free content
for you to watch that is available at your local library.
So if your library has access to it,
if you could go down there
and rent the DVD.
Rent. (chuckles)
if you could borrow the DVD from the library,
then you can actually just go onto one of these two apps
and watch it here.
You can stream it here.
You just have to log using your library card,
your number for that.
And so once you get in,
you can see that there are some excellent, excellent titles.
Again, it's whatever is available at your local library.
You'll be able to get here.
All right, we're coming up on the end.
We've got just a few more to go through.
Let's talk about YouTube.
Obviously you're watching this,
well I should say you're probably watching this
on YouTube already, right?
That's where we upload our content,
so I know that you love YouTube
because that's where you get me, right?
No, but I want to point out YouTube
for a very specific reason.
Obviously, it's great,
depending on the YouTube content.
It's great to be able to watch it
on the big screen sometimes
but there's also something else that YouTube does.
And that's right up here.
You can see these categories,
recommended, news, music, gaming and so on.
If you go to the news section,
I already pointed out NewsOn,
which is going to be your go-to source for local news.
But if you want bigger national stories,
and you're not looking for the shout fest
that you just left on cable or satellite,
you know, the cable news programs,
then you can come in here,
and if there is something going on
if there's a big press briefing,
or if there's a, you know,
something like the January 6th
siege of the capital, or, you know,
some event going on and you want to keep up with it,
you can actually go into YouTube
and there will be live feeds
that you can tune into from those national news providers.
And you can check that out right here
on YouTube for free.
Not bad, right?
Spotify should be familiar to most people.
I think it's a big enough name now
that most people will know what this is.
Even on your TV here,
it's going to have your entire personal library,
all of your, all of your playlist,
all your podcasts,
everything there, you can get it on your TV.
So if you've got your TV on,
but you don't want to watch it,
maybe doing the dishes or whatever,
then you can listen to Spotify right from your TV.
The last one is Twitch.
I want to point out Twitch for all of the gaming fans
or people who have gaming fans in the house.
Twitch is streaming video games.
So anybody can go on
and start streaming themselves playing video games.
There is a little more than that
but that's what Twitch is famous for.
So you can come down here
and choose your favorite video game
or you can choose your favorite streamers
and tune into feeds for those.
So there you have it, the top 10,
or I think it was maybe 11 or 12,
goodness, bonus for you guys,
but the best free apps on your Apple TV
hopefully there's something here
that will really reach out and grab you.
I think there's a lot worth having
that you don't even have to pay for.
So good luck out there.
Happy streaming.
Let me know if you enjoyed this video
by hitting that like button, don't forget to subscribe
and hit the comments below with your suggestions
on free apps that you have enjoyed
if you already do on your Apple TV.
So thanks for watching everybody.
I'll see you next time.