I thought the last thing I needed right now was another streaming service. Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, Hulu, Max, Netflix, Prime Video and more popular streaming services are already part of my monthly budget and my weekly viewing plans. But as soon as I saw what Kanopy had to offer, a service that I had heard a little bit about but only recently truly gave a look, I immediately knew I had to add it to my rotation.
Kanopy is a free streaming service backed by public libraries (the original entertainment hubs) and only requires potential users to have a public library card (which are also free to anyone that is interested) or if you are a student or professor at a US university.
Big deal, you might be saying, there are other free streaming services out there right now — Tubi, The Roku Channel and others — all of which you can watch without going through the potential extra step of getting a library card. Well there are a couple of things that quickly convinced me that what Kanopy has to offer is truly special: first is their incredible selection of movies that rivals the likes of Netflix, Max and The Criterion Channel; second is the fact that unlike Tubi and other free streaming services, Kanopy has no ads.
That means you can watch any of the movies part of Kanopy’s slate of available movies uninterrupted. Among those viewing options are Best Picture winners like Parasite and Spotlight; blockbusters like Interstellar and the Mission: Impossible franchise; fan-favorites like Clueless and Meangirls; recent international movies like La Chimera, The Taste of Things and Anatomy of a Fall; indie movies like Rachel Sennott’s I Used to Be Funny or the cult favorite Hundreds of Beavers; as well as Hollywood and international classics like The Third Man, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
New movies are added every month too. Among the highlights for June are the most recent Best Picture winner Anora, Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, all-time great comedies in Beverly Hills Cop, This Is Spinal Tap and Airplane! and more.
And it’s not just movies, Kanopy also offers a number of TV shows, most BBC dramas and comedies, but also some great older US series like Freaks and Geeks, Lonesome Dove and Spin City.
The one catch is that there is a cap on what people can watch on Kanopy. All subscribers are given 15 “tickets” a month to watch things. Shows and movies are given certain ticket values, so when your tickets run up for the month that’s it. Most movies cost about two tickets (some lesser known titles are available for less), while most TV shows cost four tickets. You also only get a limited window to watch what you want, about 72 hours for movies and five days for TV seasons.
As much as I love to watch movies, streaming seven movies a month (if each cost two tickets) is plenty for me.
While other streaming services refer to their available movies and TV shows as their streaming libraries, Kanopy is the only that truly lives up to the purest definition of the word. It gives interested users access to a range of options that span genres, countries and eras, allowing for entertainment and education. And to do it all for free and with no ads makes it a rarity in today’s streaming landscape. It may quickly become my go-to streaming service for watching movies.
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