I’m going to be talking about the best channels that you can find for free on Roku. So, if you are a brand new cord-cutter, this video is going to be a treasure trove of great information. If you are an experienced cord-cutter, if you’ve used Roku for a while, hopefully there’s something on this list that will jump out to you as a little bit of a surprise. With that said, let’s dive in. Like I said, hopefully, there’s something here that’s helpful to you. Now let’s go ahead and dive in. I have my Roku pulled up here. I’m skipping past the things like Netflix and Disney Plus because those aren’t free, right? So let’s move to our first entry in our list of the top 10 free channels on Roku. And go on and smash that notification bell to get updates whenever we put out a new video. So, the Roku Channel and a lot of the ones that are going to come right after this are basically aggregators of content that is free and usually commercial-supported. In the Roku Channel you’re going to get a lot of that. You can watch some good TV and movies that they’ve pulled together, commercial-supported. The thing about the Roku Channel is that what they’re trying to do here is actually not necessarily free. A lot of the stuff you’ll get here is free, but then you can also pull in premium subscriptions from HBO, MGM+, Stars, etc., so that you can watch all of that stuff here in one place. They’ve got good organization for their content here, and you can take a look around yourself. I think that the Roku Channel, of all of the free TV and movie channels that I’m going to show you here today, if it’s not the best, it’s right there at the top. You’ve got Recommended, Most popular, etc. You do have a category, Not on Netflix, which I appreciate, and when you click on these it opens it up. The only difference here is that it is commercial-supported, unlike Netflix. You know, you pay for Netflix so don’t have to watch the commercials. With Tubi you do. So, again, not much to talk about here other than their method of categorization, which I’ll come back to again and again. Not talking a ton about the content that you do get on here because it’s constantly shifting and everybody has different preferences so what might jump out to me might not jump out to you. There are things that you’ll have to log in for, like this Watch Later Tab. You log in and then it’s going to save that profile. So if you want to save stuff to watch later, unfortunately, it doesn’t save it to the device you have to log in so that they can save it to a profile. So, again, you don’t have to log in, but you can. Yeah, there’s plenty of stuff for you to watch either way. You’ll notice a lot of these things are shared between the services. You’ll see Bewitched quite a bit, you’ll see Third Rock From The Sun on several services because they all kind of get those really cheap or free licenses to get you that content. The Filmrise Free TV version does have movies. I don’t know why exactly these two are separated out, but once you come in here, again, it’s going to be a little bit similar to something like Tubi, where you can look through it, just like Netflix. You know, again, you’re going to have to watch commercials unlike Netflix, but there’s a lot of good stuff on here. The one thing that I will mention is I like the way that they have organized TV, movies, and recently added. This is a nice feature on Filmrise because the content on these services, like I said, is constantly shifting and you lose titles, you gain titles. So if you are jumping in, and you find yourself scrolling and seeing the same things over and over again, you go to the Recently Added Content and you can look by letter because they’ve conveniently got it sorted alphabetically. This way you can see the stuff that is more recently added so that you’re not looking at the same thing that you saw six months ago, or whenever the last time that you logged in was. Pluto is getting more and more popular and for good reason. There’s a lot of great stuff on here for you to go through and you can go through categories as well. So if you want to watch news or movies or what have you, you can go ahead and sort that so that you can find the stuff you actually want to watch. Here’s a great example. So you’re not necessarily going to get Comedy Central, but you can get the Comedy Central version that they put on Pluto TV for free, right? So it may not have their absolute best programming, but it’s going to have some pretty good stuff on there. Comedy Central standup, right? All stand up, all the time. Pretty sweet. The other ones are good too, but if I’m choosing my favorite news app that I turn to most often, it’s going to be Newsy. It’s not because they have better stories necessarily, but I do like that it feels more like a classic or an old school network TV news hit where they’ve got three to five-minute segments, just kind of giving you the facts of the day. Newsy Channel does have a live stream, if I go down here, they do have Newsy Now, which is live TV. That is not free, they want you to pay two bucks a month for that, but all the rest of it is free and they even have some good short little documentary series. Earlier today I was watching Why Video Games Are Looking More Like Movies, and it was a really fascinating little four- or five-minute segment on that subject. I really enjoyed it. So Newsy is a fantastic choice if you want that kind of content or if you just want to stay in the loop with a free channel on Roku. Once you’re in, you can access either PBS for yourself or PBS Kids for your kids. And they have all the PBS content that you could ever possibly want to watch. It’s all right here and it’s all going to be based on your area. Because PBS stations are a local affair so you have to sign in so that they can get you the local stuff that you are looking for. YouTube obviously has millions, maybe billions of hours of great content out there now. Now it’s not as easy to search on your TV as it is to search for content on your PC or on your phone, just because it’s a pain to type things out, but they do still have their great recommendations. I definitely love coming in here. If I need 10 or 20 minutes to kill and I want to watch something that YouTube is going to suggest for me, I’m going to find a lot of stuff in the app itself. It’s nice if maybe you’re doing chores around the house, maybe you’re working in the kitchen and you’ve got the TV there and you don’t really want to watch it, you just want to listen to something. Spotify on your Roku is a fantastic free channel choice. So once you’re into Spotify you can find your playlist, you can search for something, or you can have Spotify find playlists for you. And yeah, there’s not really much to it. The only thing I would say here is that if you have a terrible TV, then it might not be as much fun to listen to it. I would definitely recommend if you are going to be listening to quite a bit of music with your Roku then go get a nice soundbar or I’ve got the Roku speakers hooked up to my TV, and those are fantastic. I really highly recommend them. Again, if you watch a lot of movies and you care about sound or if you’re going to be listening to music, then yeah, invest in a good pair of speakers.
