Most of my TV happens on free, ad-supported apps. They run on my Samsung Frame sets in the main rooms, the TCL Roku TV in my basement, and my Hisense Canvas, and once I’d sorted out a setting buried in the TV that mattered more than any HDMI cable, the picture held up across all of them.
What I still hadn’t settled was which free app actually had the stuff I wanted to watch. So four got a month of real use: Tubi, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and Plex’s free tier. Anytime I wanted to watch something, I jotted it down and checked which app had it. One service ended up covering about 80% of that list. Tubi won, and it wasn’t close.
Tubi
The deepest free library I kept landing on
Tubi is where I kept landing, and it came down to catalog size. Nothing else came close in size. The on-demand catalog tops 50,000 movies and shows, and Fox keeps feeding it. Of the titles on my list that month, roughly four out of five were already there, ready to play.
The library leans into the stuff I actually reach for. Classic TV is stacked, with full runs of shows like Columbo and Sanford and Son. There’s a deep bench of horror, true crime, and cult genre films, plus a kids section big enough to keep mine busy. Licensing deals with Lionsgate, MGM, Sony, Paramount, and NBCUniversal keep real movies coming in, not just filler. You don’t need an account to start watching, and the ad load was the lightest of anything I tested.
The picture is where it slips. Resolution caps lower than the others, so things look soft on a big 4K panel, and brand-new releases aren’t here. Tubi’s been creeping into live events, though, with a 4K Super Bowl LIX stream and World Cup matches lined up for 2026.
- founded
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2014
- number of users
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100 million+ monthly
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Pluto TV
Best when I didn’t want to pick something
Pluto TV plays a different game. It’s built like cable, with a scrolling channel guide and more than 250 live channels organized by genre. You feel the Paramount connection fast. MTV and Comedy Central are here, Nickelodeon too, alongside 24/7 marathon channels chewing through Star Trek or CSI, and a CBS News feed that’s genuinely good. Pluto was what I reached for on nights I didn’t want to decide anything. Drop onto a channel, set the remote down, and let it run.
For background TV, ambient news, and nostalgia binges, nothing else I tested matched the lean-back feel.
Where it fell short was the thing this whole test was about. Pluto’s on-demand library is the smallest of the four, and it’s so thin that the service measures it in hours rather than titles. The ad breaks were the heaviest here, too, and recent movies were nowhere to be found. When I went looking for a few specific films, Pluto usually didn’t have them, which is why it never seriously challenged Tubi.
- founded
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2013
- number of users
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80 million+ monthly
The Roku Channel
Originals and channels the others didn’t have
What got me about The Roku Channel is that you don’t need a Roku to use it. I pulled it up on Fire TV, on an Apple TV, on Samsung sets, in a browser, and on my phone. There are more than 500 free channels and a deep on-demand shelf behind it. It’s quietly become the most-watched free ad-supported service in the US.
The real draw is the stuff you can’t get elsewhere. Roku Originals live here, including the old Quibi catalog Roku scooped up and rebranded, and new channels show up constantly. Lately, that’s meant classic MGM films, Warner Bros. titles, even a standalone BBC News channel. If you like digging, there are also plenty of Roku channels worth watching that never show up in the store.
The catch is overlap. A lot of what’s here also sits on Tubi or Pluto, the ads don’t skip, and the on-demand movies rotate more than they stay put. It filled gaps when Tubi came up empty, but it never became my first stop.
Plex free tier
Great live TV, if you keep it separate from the server stuff
Plex’s free tier needs one thing cleared up first. The free, ad-supported movies, shows, and live TV have nothing to do with Plex’s personal media server. All those changes you may have read about, the Plex Pass price hikes and the remote streaming that’s now paywalled, landed on the server side, and not here. The free streaming library stayed free.
On its own, that free library is strong. There are 50,000-plus on-demand titles in it, pulled from A24, MGM, Lionsgate, and others, and another 300-plus live channels. The live TV grid was the part I kept coming back to, and it held up well against Pluto’s.
Two things held it back for me. The ads ran a bit heavier than Tubi’s. And the layout drops paid rentals right next to the free stuff, so I kept almost tapping a movie that wanted my money. The catalog is good. It just didn’t have the specific titles I wanted as often as Tubi did.
Why Tubi earned the most screen time
A month in, I’m not picking just one. Tubi ran away with most of my screen time because it simply had what I wanted, about 80% of the time. But Pluto stayed on for channel surfing and news, The Roku Channel handled originals and the odd gap, and Plex’s live grid became a regular stop for lean-back TV. None of them costs a cent, so all four are staying on my home screen. Whichever you start with, get the picture right first: switch off motion smoothing before you press play.
