How to Watch TV: Amazon Freevee Is a Great Place to Start

TV is fantastic.

Yes, there are too many streaming services. Yes, too many of them are too expensive. Yes, picking a new TV show is hard. Yes, last year’s TV sticks are slow and unresponsive.

You know what? I don’t care. There has never been a better time in the history of the universe to watch TV.

I’m rewatching Friends. Every Bravo show is now next-day on Peacock. So You Think You Can Dance is back. Atlanta will have two seasons this year. The Boys, Ms. Marvel, For All Mankind, and Peaky Blinders all have new seasons that just started, or are about to start.

For almost a decade, I have covered the TV business for Decider, the New York Times, Fast Company, Buzzfeed and Wired. I’ve interviewed network presidents, watched production on Netflix and HBO originals, and covered the launches of HBO Max, Disney+, and Peacock. (And Seeso. And also Quibi.)

Today, I start a new, long-in-the-works column for Decider called “How to Watch TV” that shifts my focus from the TV business to the TV consumer experience. In upcoming columns, I’ll write on a new Samsung TV, how to talk to your Amazon Fire TV, a Peacock refresh, and new TV companion podcasts.

Today’s column — about Amazon Freevee — is a great place to start. It’s a reboot.

Amazon Freevee Has a Premium Approach

I don’t watch a lot of TV ads — too many, too repetitive, easy to avoid with premium streamers — but the relaunched Amazon Freevee (formerly IMDb TV) has me thinking it over.

On the one hand: Life is short, Stranger Things episodes are long, and I see plenty of ads for toothpaste subscription services on YouTube and Instagram. Can’t TV just be my ad-free sanctuary for Marvel movies and house-flipping shows?

On the other hand: I watch RuPaul’s Drag Race on Xfinity cable with ads, Red Sox games on MLB.tv with ads, and SNL Vault on Peacock with ads. What’s the harm in watching a movie like Knives Out with a handful of ads if it’s not streaming on the premium services that I subscribe to?

Amazon Freevee’s approach, as content co-chiefs Ryan Pirozzi and Lauren Anderson described to me in a recent interview, is to program film and TV titles that consumers actually want to watch (instead of whatever’s available) and to limit the ads you see per hour (instead of cable’s intolerable glut).

“We’re a premium service — premium content, premium user experience, premium distribution,” Pirozzi said, “and we’re very proud to have an ad load that’s about half of what you’d see on linear television.”

Ads Aren’t So Bad When There Aren’t So Many

One of my early-pandemic boredom cures was watching early seasons of Chicago Fire on what is now Amazon Freevee, and I remember being fairly unbothered by the 60- and 90-second ad blocks. I had the same experience recently watching The Hitman’s Bodyguard on the streamer; there were only seven ad blocks in the two-hour runtime, and most ran two minutes or less.

“We oversee a team of brilliant people who obsess over what’s the best ad-break policy,” Pirozzi said. “How much time should we wait before we have the first ad pod? What’s the right place to put an ad pod so that it doesn’t disrupt the narrative? How do we prevent repetitive ads?”

The free streamer has 6-7 minutes of ads per hour, which is about the same as free, ad-supported Pluto TV and Tubi and slightly more than the ad-supported tiers of HBO Max, Hulu and Paramount+. All of those streamers are all big upgrades from cable networks’ 15-20 minutes of ads per hour.

There’s an Amazon Freevee app for every major TV platforms. It’s also available on the Prime Video app where it’s part of a bigger content mix that includes Prime Video, Amazon Channels you subscribe to, movies you’ve bought, movies you’ve synced with Movies Anywhere, and movies you can rent or buy.

When you watch Amazon Freevee titles on otherwise-ad-free Prime Video, you will still see ads. That may rankle a Prime Video subscriber who has never seen ads on the streamer and suddenly does, but Pirozzi notes that those additional titles wouldn’t be available at all unless they were ad-supported: “We have many Prime Video customers who are willing to watch ad-supported content to get a wider selection.”

I’ll Watch Free Stuff … Good Free Stuff

Amazon Freevee streams film and TV titles from the major Hollywood studios and has a growing slate of originals that Pirozzi and Anderson developed. YA action series Alex Rider premiered as the streamer’s first original in June 2020, and the lineup has grown considerably in the two years since.

“We want comedies and dramas, hours and half-hours, scripted and unscripted,” Anderson said. “Our north star is to be a modern broadcast network, but we’re looking for content beyond what you’d find on a broadcast network.”

At its May presentation to advertisers, Amazon Freevee showed off a sizzle reel (above) that includes Bosch spinoff Bosch: Legacy (streaming now), home-renovation series Hollywood Houselift with Jeff Lewis (premiering June 10), My Name Is Earl creator Greg Garcia’s upcoming comedy series Sprung (in production) and catalog titles including Mad Men, Madagascar, King of Staten Island, and Emma.

“We started three years ago as a purely licensed-content service,” Pirozzi said, “and saw an opportunity to differentiate the content and acquire new customers with streaming originals. Originals are how we acquire new customers, and then we engage them with a deep catalog of film and TV titles.”

Amazon Freevee has a new deal with Disney to bring Logan, Deadpool, Murder on the Orient Express, and other 20th Century Studios films to the free streamer. Logan is already available. Films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other Disney nameplates are coming, Pirozzi said.

Amazon Freevee’s catalog of a few thousand titles is too small to reliably search for specific movies or shows — here’s where using the service within Prime Video is a big plus — but content rows like “Horror Movies” and “Reality TV” will generally turn up some mid-2000s titles you remember wanting to see or want to see again.

Still, as HBO Max, Netflix, and other streamers inch toward $20-a-month subscription fees, Amazon Freevee may have the content goods to replace one of those paid streamers with the best deal on TV: it’s completely free.

Scott Porch writes the “How to Watch TV” column for Decider. He produces podcasts about film and TV and is a contributing writer for The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.