YouTube has released a slew of new movies and TV episodes for free streaming in the United States, if you’re prepared to go through some adverts. Unfortunately, locating them all is difficult.
YouTube has already offered free, ad-supported movies, but this is the first time it has expanded to include TV episodes. YouTube’s updated catalogue of free content now includes over 1,500 movies and 100 television shows, including 10 Things I Hate About You, The Sandlot, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Legally Blonde, two seasons of Kitchen Nightmares, and a good number of more obscure titles like 1970’s Western The Return of a Man Called Horse, which was announced last week.
Depending on your definition of the term, not all of the recently added films are technically new to YouTube. In 2018, Legally Blonde was available to stream for free with commercials, but it then departed the site and is only now making a comeback. Even yet, if you’re wanting to save money on a night in, YouTube has some good options.
YouTube, on the other hand, has made exploring its free titles far more inconvenient than it needed to be. The platform will not just display all of its free titles and allow you to scroll through them in search of your next binge-watch. You won’t be able to filter them, so you won’t be able to limit your search to all of YouTube’s free action movies or romantic comedies.
Instead, YouTube’s algorithm shows you a few hundred ad-supported titles in its “free to watch movies” area while obscuring the rest. Despite YouTube claiming to have almost four times that number, only 360 ad-supported films were found in this category.  A total of 100 free TV series was also found.
Viewers can search for titles using YouTube’s search box, as well as explore content in genre-themed categories that include a mix of free, rentable, and purchasable videos. However, there is no section dedicated to listing all of YouTube’s free films or television episodes, leaving users with no choice except to trust YouTube’s recommendations.
It appears to be a weird lack of functionality, but YouTube’s bread and butter is user-uploaded material, not big movies. It also benefits them if you give up and rent No Time To Die on YouTube for $5.99 instead.
So, while YouTube’s ad-supported film offerings are fun to explore when you have free time, don’t count on them for weekend amusement.
