Roku and Amazon Fire Sticks get surprise benefit with 25 free TV channels – legal way to find them plus new movie perk
ROKU and Amazon Fire Stick customers can add two dozen free channels to their devices beginning this month.
Pluto TV, one of the oldest free, ad-supported streaming services, has landed a distribution deal with Fremantle for 25 new channels.
The platform is home to an expansive selection of live TV, with shows and films from over 200 content partners.
With the deal, Pluto TV is launching new channels in the United States and United Kingdom.
The streamer will also expand its content offerings in Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Italy, San Marino, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden.
Pluto TV is available for download in the Roku Store and the Amazon App Store, affording users easy access to hundreds of free channels.
“We are beyond excited to expand the Fremantle content offering on Pluto TV across international markets,” Katrina Kowalski, Pluto’s senior vice president of international content and acquisitions, said in a statement.
Fremantle-owned titles including “Baywatch,” “Let’s Make a Deal,” and “Family Feud Classic” debuted in Canada last month.
The wildly successful “Baywatch” channel will become available in Spain, Italy and northern Europe in the coming months.
An “Escape to the Country” channel will premiere in the U.K., streaming episodes of the hit real estate program around the clock.
The “Three’s Company” sitcom channel will debut in Canada later this summer, marking the first time it will be available outside the States.
New channels that have already been launched include one offering 24/7 episodes of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”.
Another new offering is The Weather Channel en Español, a network providing Spanish-language weather news to customers in the U.S., Caribbean, and Latin America.
The platform is also adding a slew of movies including “Girl, Interrupted,” “Mission: Impossible,” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
“Pluto TV’s state of the art platform provides a seamless streaming experience for viewers and makes it the perfect home for our channels,” said Laura Florence, Fremantle’s senior vice president of global FAST channels.
The streaming service was co-founded by Tom Ryan, Ilya Pozin and Nick Grouf a decade ago.
It debuted as a beta website in March 2014 and expanded through a series of deals including one with Hulu in 2015.
In its early days, the streamer focused almost exclusively on live content, but began offering an on-demand option in 2017.
Where to buy an Amazon Fire TV Stick
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AMAZON unveiled the first Fire TV Stick back in 2014 and since then has released various versions, the newest being the Fire TV Stick 4K Max.
There are several places you can pick up a Fire Stick including:
- Shop Fire Sticks at Amazon – shop here
- Shop Fire Sticks at Best Buy – shop here
- Shop Fire Sticks at Target – shop here
- Shop Fire Sticks at Home Depot – shop here
- Shop Fire Sticks at Lowe’s – shop here
We recommend shopping around for the best price, though Amazon usually has the best deals on Fire Sticks so should be your first port of call.
Pluto TV was acquired by Viacom for $340 million cash in January 2019.
In its second-quarter earnings call later that year, Viacom announced that the platform was being using by 16 million monthly users, up from 12 million at the time of acquisition.
The media conglomerate merged with CBS in December 2019, creating Paramount Global and expanding Pluto TV’s content offerings.
The company revealed in its 2023 Q1 earnings call that Pluto TV had reached 80 million active monthly users, making it the number-one FAST service in the world.