Earlier this week I came home from dinner with friends to find my boyfriend up later that he typically is, mesmerized by our new Vizio television.
“Our television came with free cable!” he excitedly declared, flipping through channel after channel. He was obviously wrong, but in a way he was also sort of right.
Our Vizio television came with Pluto TV preinstalled, which is what he had discovered while setting it up. It’s not free cable, but it’s not tremendously far off either. While the app came preinstalled on our TV, anyone can download it.
It’s been around for a bit now, but it’s gotten tremendously better than it was the last time I saw it.
Pluto TV is an internet-based TV platform owned by Viacom. It runs on our Vizio TV, but also iOS and Android as well as things like Roku, PlayStation consoles, and Amazon Fire TV. You can also just watch it using the browser on your computer. It’s entirely free to watch, and as I discovered when I came home to by enthusiastic boyfriend, there are a lot of channels to watch.
Unlike most other streaming services, Pluto TV is live, in that you have to tune in to a specific channel to watch a program, and you can’t rewind, fast-forward, or pause that stream. You have to catch everything as it’s airing just like regular cable. Also, like regular cable, there are going to be some ads.
That said, it’s also pretty awesome. We may or may not have spent a good bit of time watching a broadcast of “Pawshank Redemption” on the “Cats 24/7” channel, and there’s a marijuana-focused channel where a gentleman was explaining how to make the perfect edibles.
Since it’s owned by Viacom, you also have access to some more traditional programming. For instance, there’s a channel that’s just MTV’s “The Hills” and another dedicated to Classic TV (which happened to be broadcasting Dennis the Menace while I was writing this).
There are a good deal of MTV, BET, and Spike TV options, as well as news channels like NBC News, CNN, CBSN, and Bloomberg.
And if you want to have the option to pause things and start them on your schedule, there’s also a pretty decent selection of free movies and TV shows to stream on-demand through the service as well. Obviously, these aren’t going to be new releases, but they’re not awful ones either.
Point being, no matter what you’re into there’s likely to be a free channel on Pluto that you’d like to watch. IF you get really into it you can also create an account and customize your channels. Regardless, it’s definitely worth downloading onto your device and scrolling through when you’re looking for something to watch and are coming up short on the other services you use.