- Today we're talking about the top 10 free apps
on Apple TV.
The idea behind this video is once you get your Apple TV,
you never have to pay for content again.
You may want to.
Okay, so yeah, you can fork out 15 bucks a month
for Netflix or HBO Max or whatever.
But if you want unlimited entertainment,
you don't have to pay for it.
You can use these free apps to get all the content
you can possibly handle.
So let's dive in.
(upbeat electronic music)
Thanks for joining me today, everybody.
Don't forget that I do live streams every Friday afternoon,
2:00 p.m. Eastern, and next Friday on December 10th,
I'm going to be announcing the winner of our dream job
and doing a bunch of fun giveaway stuff,
so make sure you're there.
Now then, the top free apps on Apple TV.
Just for reference sake,
I am using the new Apple TV device that came out last year,
but even if you have a somewhat older generation model,
you should be just fine.
You're gonna be able to get all of these apps
on the older models as well.
No problem there.
First things first,
let's talk about how to find apps on your Apple TV.
So if you already know how to do this,
then you can go ahead and skip ahead a few seconds
from this portion.
But essentially what I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna come to my home screen here,
come to the App Store.
There it is.
And once I get into the App Store, yeah,
I can go to Discovery.
That's where they're gonna show me
your kind of recommended apps.
You're gonna find a lot of these apps in Discovery,
or you can browse through other categories.
Maybe you're looking for games, whatever.
Once you find one that you want to download, let's say,
okay, I want the MLB app, go ahead and download that.
It might ask you for a password
depending on what your settings are,
but once you input that, you'll see it's downloading.
And then once it's done, we can go back to our home screen.
And there it is right there.
Once we have it, I can long press on that select button
and I can move it wherever I want on the screen, okay?
So I've taken all the free apps
and put them in a folder right here.
Free stuff, great.
So let's get started on those free apps.
Now, once I open up this folder,
you'll see that it shows me nine at a time.
I just scroll right to my next screen,
and it's got a few others there.
Okay, so let's start with the most obvious one.
You're probably watching me on YouTube right now.
And you can get the YouTube app on your Apple TV,
and you absolutely should.
Now YouTube is going to be great because a lot of the things
that we'll talk about today,
as far as live TV, on demand shows and movies, news,
all of that stuff, you can find it here on YouTube,
not all the same stuff,
but the same kind of categories, okay?
So if I go over here on the left-hand menu,
you can see anything from gaming and music to news.
Yeah, it's got a lot of live news feeds,
really a great resource for all of these categories.
YouTube is becoming a fantastic catch all
for all of this stuff.
Make sure you've got it.
Next up is Peacock.
This one's kind of a hybrid.
It's actually a premium service
that moonlights as a free service.
So if you're not familiar with Peacock,
this is NBCUniversal's streaming service.
And once you come in here, you'll see,
it's got a very extensive library.
Obviously NBCUniversal,
they've got a huge library of stuff
and you can come in here and check that out.
Now the trick is,
not everything is going to be available to you
on the free tier.
Peacock comes with three tiers.
The most basic one,
the free one has about half of the library available.
So if you come down here
and you see something with the peacock feather on it,
that means that yeah,
you're gonna need to be a premium subscriber
if you wanna watch that.
That in mind, there is a ton of good content on here
for a non premium subscribers for the free folks out there.
The other thing to note about Peacock is that yeah,
they have a great library of free content, movies, TV shows,
and whatnot, but if you come over here to the WWE category,
if you are a wrestling nut, then you've got to have Peacock.
It is the streaming hub for WWE content, highly recommended.
All right, moving on to Pluto TV.
This one is what I call a cable or satellite imitator.
Okay, so if you're just cutting the cord
and you're used to having that guide, that channel guide,
the live TV set up,
then Pluto TV is gonna be a great way
to ease yourself into the cord-cutting genre.
Here in Pluto TV, I get that same kind of guide.
And it's even a little bit better, I think,
than a lot of the guides, the satellite and cable guides,
because it's sorted very well into different categories.
So if I prefer movies,
if I wanna watch nothing but Christmas shows,
whatever, whatever the case may be, you wanna watch news,
you're gonna find those categories there on the left,
and then you find your live channels over here on the right.
The other thing that Pluto TV does
is it has an on demand collection.
So on demand meaning, you can watch it whenever you want to.
It's not according to some live schedule.
So if you come in here to the on-demand section,
then you're gonna notice that a lot of the titles
that you get in the live sections
are gonna be available here on demand.
So you don't have to wait for them to show up
in the live section.
So for instance,
there's an entire James Bond channel on Pluto,
and here are the movies
that you can watch right here on demand.
So the live TV section, I think is really nice
especially if you're just looking for noise
in the background, kind of a thing,
like having the TV on for that.
But if you're sitting down to watch a movie
and you don't necessarily
want to schedule yourself that way,
then the on-demand section is fantastic for that.
If Pluto TV is a cable and satellite imitator,
then Tubi and Crackle are kind of Netflix imitators, okay?
We're gonna have a few of these,
but let's talk about these first.
Tubi is the original Netflix imitator,
and it's probably the best one honestly.
When you enter Tubi, you'll see these categories.
Again, it's a lot like Netflix.
They have horizontal categories
and then you can scroll through those
and see if there's something that catches your eye.
Now, a couple of things to note with a lot of these apps
is that first they are free,
which means they're gonna have to make money somehow,
and that means their commercial supported.
So all these movies you see on here,
you're going to watch a few commercial breaks
during that movie, okay.
So a price to pay for having the content for free.
The other thing to note is that the library
doesn't have necessarily the caliber
that you would find on something like Netflix or HBO Max,
or even Peacock.
A lot of the content that you find on these free apps
is cheaper for the services to license, okay?
So that means it's not going to be necessarily the newest,
the best, the shiniest, the brightest, whatever.
But that being said,
that doesn't mean there isn't good content.
I'm just talking about overall,
the quality of the content may be less
than what you would be hoping for on a premium service,
but nevertheless, plenty to entertain yourself with.
Crackle operates very much the same way that Tubi does.
Crackle does have crackle originals
that you can check out,
with that you're not gonna find anywhere else.
And the other thing that I'll say is that, even though, yes,
it is very, very similar to something like Tubi,
their libraries are different enough
that you should have both of them
just for the sake of variety.
If something isn't on one streaming service,
it very well may be on the other.
If you like to browse around,
you're gonna find different things
to browse through in both libraries.
So make sure you get both Tubi and Crackle.
Let's move on to news.
A lot of people hang onto their satellite
and cable subscriptions
because they don't wanna give up their news services.
Maybe they have a favorite news channel.
Maybe they just wanna keep up to date.
And it's really simple with cable, right?
Well, it's even simpler I think with Haystack News.
So if I pop into Haystack News,
you'll see it's sorted
into several different categories up top.
When you log in for the first time,
it'll ask you where you live,
what topics you're interested in, that sort of thing.
And it will create the my headlines category for you.
Now, the nice thing about this is
you can watch little segments here
instead of entire newscasts, okay?
So you don't necessarily have to sit through the stories
you're not so interested in.
So once I create my headlines category,
then once I watch a story,
when it gets to the end of that story,
it's going to simply play the next one.
I don't have to babysit this service
and keep pressing every two or three minutes
to watch a new segment, it'll just pull up new ones for me.
And of course, if you wanna dive into a specific topic,
then yeah, you can scroll through the categories up top
and go through those.
Now, Plex is a very interesting one.
This one does the same thing as our Netflix imitators.
It's even got a live TV category.
So we can check out live TV channels,
we can check out movies and shows on demand.
That's all great.
But the real strength of Plex
is that it allows you to take your own digital library
and upload it to the cloud so that you can watch it
as though it were on its own streaming service.
'Cause it kinda is.
Okay, so I went into more detail
on how to do this in another video.
So I'm not gonna do that here,
but suffice it to say
that you can set up your own Plex server,
you can take your DVDs, rip them onto the cloud,
and now you can watch them here.
So whether it's movies,
I uploaded "The Last StarFighter" and "Dune 1984" obviously.
Maybe it's your music library, maybe it's your photos,
whatever it is that you want to be able to view on your TV,
media wise, you should be able to do that through Plex.
So it's really convenient that way,
especially if you have
your own large physical library of content.
FilmRise is the last of the Netflix imitators
that I wanna talk about.
But I'm pulling this one out a little bit separately
from Tubi and Crackle
because FilmRise does one thing that I really, really like.
First of all, when you get in here, yeah,
you're gonna see the same kind of thing
that you did with the others.
The horizontal categories that you scroll through
to see what you wanna watch, et cetera.
But if you come down here a little ways,
you'll see popular categories.
This is what FilmRise does really well,
where they curate certain collections based on the category.
So whether it's Western, true crime, action, whatever.
Whatever your particular flavor is,
maybe you're a big horror fan.
Then you click on the horror category
and it's almost like its own streaming service
where everything is categorized by that genre.
So if you know,
I'm really into watching a horror movie tonight,
you don't have to scroll
through everything else to get there,
and you just come to this horror section
and it lays it all out for you.
Very, very well done.
Next up is Spotify.
Spotify is the world's biggest streaming music service.
So you probably already know what it is,
but you may not have known
that you can get it on your streaming devices,
including the Apple TV.
So if we pop into Spotify, yeah, there's not much to it.
It's Spotify.
It's your library.
Everything that you're used to right here on your TV.
So whether you're putting on music for a party
or maybe you're doing dishes
and you can't turn around to watch the TV.
So you just wanna put on some music or podcasts or whatever.
Yeah, it's nice to have Spotify here on your TV.
So those are our top nine.
I'm gonna click to the right and see, yeah,
there are a few more.
We're not gonna talk about all of these.
Yeah, you should get PBS, maybe PBS Kids,
Stirr and Classics.
Maybe we'll talk about those another time.
But the last thing I'll highlight is Twitch.
Twitch is a niche streaming service,
but with an awfully big niche.
If you enjoy video games,
this is the streaming service for you.
So when you come into Twitch, you can create your profile,
follow certain games,
or you can browse around for other games,
whatever it is you enjoy watching a video game wise,
you're gonna find it here on Twitch.
So really popular streamers, tournaments,
that sort of thing.
Whatever your flavor is,
yeah, definitely go into Twitch
and check out what they have to offer.
So there you have at the top 10 free streaming apps
on your Apple TV.
Now there's one glaring omission.
If you are an experienced cord cutter,
you may have noticed I don't have IMDb TV on there.
I usually do include that in these lists.
However, it is not available on Apple TV.
So sorry about that.
It is a great streaming service,
but if you're hunting around for it, as of right now,
as I'm filming this,
you're not gonna find it on Apple TV, too bad.
But hopefully that helps you out.
This is a lot of free streaming content.
Like I said at the beginning,
you never have to pay for your entertainment ever again.
You may still want to,
maybe you want Disney Plus and Netflix and HBO Max,
and that's fine,
but there is enough content on these free streaming apps
for you to entertain yourself forever.
You'll never run out of things to watch
even with these free streamers.
So go out, enjoy, download them, let me know what you think.
And if you think I missed any,
hit the comments below and let me know.
Thanks for watching everybody, and I will see you next time.