Alt Streaming Services

I, like many, enjoy a variety of TV shows and movies located on myriad streaming services and much like anyone who doesn't want to spend full price for a streaming service only to watch a 1/5 of the content I found myself wanting a cheaper, more convienent solution. And after scouring the internet I have found some moraly ambiguous solutions at little to no cost and with more convienence. Below is a compilation of them.

(Free, not versatile, somewhat reliable, braindead easy)

• Cost- Nothing


• Versatility- Since these are websites and therefore are confined to the webbrowser, playing media on a home theater or even mobile device might prove to be difficult but possible with some jerry-rigging.


• Reliability- Most free streaming websites are in a proverbial wack-a-mole contest with governments and media companies. As a result, websites often go down every once-in-a-while and reappear later as a mirror site.


• Instruction- Simply add any competent adblocker (such as UblockOrigin) to your webbrowser or use a DNS (such as piHole or Safing Portmaster) and go to the domain.

Links: 123Movies, Cinezone, Yesmovies

(Free, very versatile, reliable, somewhat technical)

• Cost- Nothing, although a VPN might be useful to avoid legal trouble.


• Versatility- Kodi can be installed on most operating systems such as Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Amazon firestick, Android, and MacOS. Although not permitted on the app store, it is possible to download Kodi on iOS with sideloading.


• Reliability- Kodi is very reliable but, its addons sometimes depreciate or get taken down so you may need to install an alternative from time-to-time.


• Instruction- Kodi itself is just a media player and can be downloaded by going to the website or downloading it from whatever app store your device has. The true value of Kodi is in it's 3rd party addons which add the ability to stream content for free. I personally use The Crew repository due to its variety of services and updates. Firestick tricks has a good guide for installing addons. Note that there are also Kodi centric operating systems like LibreELEC or OSMC which can be added to SBCs or other media devices.

(Expensive, extremely versatile, very reliable, technical)

• Cost- A VPN in order to avoid legal trouble, and you might also want to buy hard drives for data storage.


• Versatility- Because torrenting directly provides the media file you can put it on any device with a media player for use offline or stream them from a separate device such as a NAS or jellyfin server.


• Reliability- Legitimate torrented files (know your file types!) are as reliable as the hard drives you put them on.


• Instruction- I have a more comprehensive guide for torrenting here but in short you'll need to download a torrent client and a vpn before going to a torrenting website (such as YTS or EZTV ) and opening the .torrent file in your client.