Find Free Shows with the Roku Featured Free

It used to be that Cord Cutters looking for free shows had to switch between apps like Sony Crackle, Tubi, and even Roku’s own free channel The Roku Channel. But now, you can find free shows with the Roku Featured Free link on the left navigation bar on your Roku Home Screen.

Find Free Shows with the Roku Featured Free

Do you want to browse for a free TV show or movie to watch, but don’t want the hassle of switching between apps to see what is available? Roku has a solution. Right on your Roku Home Screen, you can click on the Featured Free link to see what is free to watch now!

What is Roku Featured Free…

Roku Featured Free is a spotlight of free content that can be found on Roku apps that include Sony Crackle, Tubi, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, Freeform, ABC, NBC, The CW, CW Seed, FOX and more.

Roku Featured Free sorts shows nicely into categories in a way like Netflix. It looks like Roku is using the same sorting behavior for Featured Free that they also use for The Roku Channel app.

Here are current the categories of Roku Featured Free.

• Featured
• Recent TV
• Catch Up For Fall TV
• Full Seasons
• TV Dramas
• Reality, True TV, and Food
• Horror (Movies)
• Action (Movies)
• Family Films
• Comedies (Movies)
• Classic TV

Each category has 5-6 (or a few more) TV shows or Movies.

Roku Featured Free is Not…

There are a LOT of FREE TV shows and movies available on Roku players.

And the Roku Featured Free is NOT an exhaustive collection of all the TV shows and movies that are available and free on your Roku.

Instead, Roku Featured Free is nice curated collection of SOME of the free content available across the Roku platform.

Unfortunately, Roku does not offer any options for finding TV shows and movies that you might be interested in watching.

How is the Roku Featured Free content selected…

Since the Featured Free content is a “featured” list, and not a list of all free content, Roku is deciding what ends up on the Featured Free list of TV shows and movies. But how does Roku decide what free TV shows and movies to include in the Featured Free section?

Well, don’t look past the possibility that Roku is getting paid to include the content you see in the Featured Free section.

It is likely that Roku has created partnership deals to promote or highlight other app services (Sony Crackle, Tubi), TV series, movie from certain studios, or even important episodes.

Roku is also an advertising company. They collect data and work with companies to target content and ads to Roku owners.

Roku has been very open that they are NOT a hardware company, but an advertising company. Who can blame Roku for moving into advertising. There just isn’t very much profit in selling Roku devices at $30 each. But the potential ad revenue for streaming media is nearly unlimited… and is the future.

Roku isn’t alone in wanting to sell advertising instead of devices. Amazon sells advertising and other media with their Fire TV and tablets. Google makes the Chrome browser and Chromecast to sell ads.

There Is Another Option: JustWatch.com

JustWatch is a powerful search engine that helps Cord Cutters find streaming TV shows and movies. The simple interface is filled with ways to filter through thousands of TV shows and movies to help you find exactly what you are looking for.

With JustWatch, you can filter on apps (like Netflix, Hulu), release year, movies, TV shows, rating, genre, and yes… FREE.

You can use JustWatch on your computer (JustWatch.com) or with an app on any iOS or Android device.

Read more about… Using JustWatch To Find Streaming TV Shows and Movies.