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If you haven’t noticed, subscription streaming services have been getting more expensive and will likely continue to do so.

Disney, for example, just announced it would be hiking the price of its ad-free Disney+ service from $11 to $14 a month starting in October, a 27 percent increase. Also in October, the company is raising the prices of the cable-style Hulu + Live TV service, along with ESPN+. And Hulu without ads will be going up from $15 to $18 a month.

But you can slim your streaming budget by using some of the dozens of free streaming services that let you stream movies and TV shows in exchange for watching ads. You can access these services through most streaming devices and smart TVs, as well as on laptops, smartphones, and tablets—just like Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services you have to pay for.

There are some trade-offs. The number of ads you’ll see will vary by service. And with most free services, you’re out of luck if you want 4K shows, including any with HDR. Instead, they provide regular high-definition video, just like most cable TV companies.

You’re not likely to find recently released movies. And, of course, you won’t be able to watch newer original shows from paid services, such as Amazon Prime’s “Daisy Jones & the Six” or Hulu’s “The Bear.”

Still, in a world of $1,000 smartphones and $6 salted caramel mochas, it’s nice to know you can watch “Teen Wolf” or “Lethal Weapon” without having to pay. (Looking for another path to free content? Get a TV antenna.)

And if you haven’t checked lately, you might be subscribing to more paid streaming services than you realize. It’s easy to lose track, and it can get expensive. In fact, 42 percent of consumers admit they’ve forgotten about a streaming subscription that they were still paying for but no longer use, a recent C+R Research survey found.

Here’s a rundown of the best free streaming services, listed in alphabetical order. (You can scroll to the bottom for a list of several more to check out.)

Previously called IMDb TV, Amazon Freevee is an ad-supported service that offers a mix of live channels, on-demand classic TV shows and movies, and some original content.

You’ll find shows such as “Schitt’s Creek” and “Mad Men” alongside such classics as “Bewitched,” “Columbo,” and “All in the Family.” Movies currently available include “American Psycho,”" “Spy,” and “Back to the Future.” Licensed content rotates in and out from month to month.

Original shows include “Judy Justice,” starring Judge Judy Sheindlin, “Almost Paradise,” and “Bosch: Legacy,” a spinoff of the popular Amazon Prime series.

In addition, Freevee has an hour-long music performance and interview series, “Monumental: An Artists Den Experience,” showcasing popular recording artists at iconic locations throughout the world, such as Ellie Goulding at Kew Gardens.

Amazon regularly bolsters Freevee with new content, and this summer started showing content that was once exclusive to Amazon Prime Video subscribers, such as “The Summer I Turned Pretty.” It’s also committed to offering the first season of both “Reacher” and “The Wheel of Time” later in 2023.

Amazon also recently announced that it plans to license some of its Prime content—including “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Hunters,” and “All the Old Knives”—to other streaming services and cable companies. It’s not clear whether these deals will keep these shows and movies off its Freevee service.

Sign up for Amazon Freevee.

Crackle hosts a library of mainstream titles that include older TV shows such as “Alf” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” as well as some popular newer series, including “Sherlock,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Movies include everything from “Mighty Aphrodite” and “Night of the Living Dead” to somewhat more recent fare, such as “The Last Blockbuster.”

Crackle is owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul and is part of a bigger brand called Crackle Plus, which operates several ad-supported and subscription networks, including EspañolFlix, FrightPix, and Popcornflix. The company recently acquired Redbox (see below).

Crackle’s original content includes “Outbreak,” a series about a virus outbreak; “Les Norton,” a 10-episode series starring Rebel Wilson; “The Uncommon History of Very Common Things,” an entertaining and often irreverent history of everyday objects; and season two of “In the Vault,” a suspense series set at a fictional college. There’s also “Funny Girls,” about two women trying to create a comedy show in a male-dominated environment.

The company recently reached a deal to bring new and classic films from Roger Corman. “The RCU: Roger Corman’s Universe” will include classic films such as “Piranha,” as well as his latest movie, “Virtual Heroes,” which stars Mark Hamill.

Sign up for Crackle.

If you have a library card, Hoopla and Kanopy might be your ticket to free movies, music, audiobooks, and comics. Just go to the site, create an account, and find your local library. You check out TV shows and movies as if they were books, using your library card.

The main difference between the two services is that Hoopla tends to focus more on popular entertainment than Kanopy does, and it includes other types of media beyond video, such as audiobooks, comics, e-books, and music.

With either service, once you’ve signed up you can browse by title or genre, or get recommendations based on what you’ve previously borrowed and what’s popular. With Hoopla, you have 72 hours to watch a movie. (Your library sets the limit on how many movies you can borrow each month; in my case, it recently jumped from four to eight.) Your movie will start streaming once you’ve made a selection.

If you access Kanopy through a library membership, you may be able to watch a limited number of titles per month. But members of educational institutions get unlimited access.

Hoopla’s BingePass service gives library users seven days of unlimited viewing for the titles in each BingePass collection, with the whole group counting as a single title for the purpose of Hoopla’s monthly borrowing limit. BingePass now includes access to The Great Courses Collection and the Curiosity Stream service, as well as a collection of digital magazines. Current movie selections include “The Big Short,” “The Girl on the Train,” and “The Help.”

Kanopy says it has a catalog of 30,000 films from sources including the Criterion Collection, the Great Courses, New Day Films, and PBS. The latter, for example, offers “The Central Park Five.” If that sounds like a cerebral list, it is. Kanopy’s selection leans heavily toward art-house films. Indie flicks include “Moonlight” and “Lady Bird.” Documentary titles include “RBG” and “I Am Not Your Negro.” It has a number of BBC series, including “Death in Paradise.”

Sign up for Hoopla and Kanopy.

Peacock, NBCUniversal’s new streaming service, had a free, ad-supported tier of service, along with two paid tiers ($5 per month with ads and $10 per month without), but is no longer offering it to new subscribers. However, anyone who already had the free tier can continue to use it.

Sign up for Peacock.

Pluto TV, owned by Paramount, has more than 300 curated channels, drawing content from its own Paramount properties (BET, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Paramount Pictures), plus networks such as Bloomberg, Cheddar News, CNN, NBC News, and Fox Sports. Pluto TV also has a decent library of on-demand content, including now-classic movies—“Django Unchained” and “Gladiator.” TV shows run the gamut from “The Andy Griffith Show” and the original “Gunsmoke” to “The Twilight Zone” and “Criminal Minds.”

Paramount recently announced that it will offer full previous seasons of Paramount+ shows—such as “Mike Judge’s Beavis & Butt-Head,” “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars,” “iCarly, Queen of the Universe,” “Joe Pickett,” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”—on Pluto TV before their new season premiere on Paramount+. The shows will be available on the Paramount+ Picks channel on Pluto TV.

In addition to genre-based channels, Pluto TV has added channels powered by other providers, including CBS (“NCIS,” “FBI”); AMC Networks (“The Making of the Mob,” “NOS4A2: Ghost”); and Showtime (“Dexter,” “Billions”). Recently added channels include “BBC Top Gear,” “Blue Bloods,” and “Dateline 24/7.”

There’s also now a Pluto TV Latino service, with over 45 curated Spanish- and Portuguese-language channels covering categories including comedy, movies, music, reality TV, sports, telenovelas, and true crime.

You can set your favorite channels to appear at the top of the channel guide. Plus, you can add programs and movies to a watchlist for viewing on demand later, provided you sign in. A preview mode shows trailers and more info about each title.

Sign up for Pluto TV.

Best known for its rental kiosks at grocery stores and shopping centers, plus a newer video-on-demand streaming rental and purchase service, Redbox also has a free, ad-based live service, which gets some of its content from Xumo (see below). Thanks to the Xumo partnership, Redbox’s free service includes Magnolia Pictures’ CineLife ad-supported channel, which features top-rated independent films and award-winning documentaries from the Magnolia Pictures catalog.

Redbox is now owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul, which also owns Crackle. The company says that for now, the streaming service will continue to run as a separate entity.

You can access the content by clicking on Watch Free, and then either Free on Demand or Free Live TV when using the app on a streaming player or smart TV, or by clicking the Watch Free drop-down at the top of the Redbox website. The service is relatively light on blockbuster-type content, though there are about 100 channels. (Redbox offers a much larger catalog of movies that you can rent.) Redbox’s live TV comes in the form of genre-specific channels that run 24 hours a day, with shows such as “The Price Is Right,” “Unsolved Mysteries,” and “Baywatch.” Genre categories include news and weather, action, sci-fi and horror, movies, sports, food and design, comedy, classic TV and movies, and kids and family.

The on-demand titles are available only for a limited time because of agreements with programming providers, and the service gains and loses shows and movies each month. The company recently announced that it was adding programs across eight new channels from Fremantle, Revry, and Love Stories TV to its free live TV service.

Sign up for Redbox Watch Free.

Thanks to a rapidly expanding roster of programming, you can watch a nice selection of free shows and movies via the company’s ad-supported Roku Channel, which is no longer exclusive to and TVs.

The Roku Channel has a lot of licensed TV shows and movies, plus some live channels from ABC, Fox, NBC, Hallmark, and others. New channels include BBC Earth and FIFA Plus. One big focus going forward will be Roku Originals, which will roll out 50 new shows over the next few years. Roku also purchased the content from Quibi when that short-lived service went under. Current Roku Originals include “Reno 911: Defunded”; “The Fugitive,” starring Kiefer Sutherland; “The Newsreader”; and the movie “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” a biopic based on the life of Weird Al Yankovic that stars Daniel Radcliffe.

New original series include “Reptile Royalty” and “UFO Cowboys.” The company also recently added a second season of original food series starring Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse, part of co-production deals with Marquee Brands and Milk Street Studios that bring over 3,000 episodes of library content.

Recently, Roku (and Tubi) licensed hundreds of movies and TV shows, including “The Bachelor” and “Cake Boss” from Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.

In addition, Roku has a multiyear deal with Lionsgate that gives it rights to stream Lionsgate’s theatrically released films. Exclusively on Roku, this will be the first time Lionsgate titles are available free anywhere. Roku is also teaming up with a private equity company to acquire up to a 20 percent stake in the premium channel Starz, which Lionsgate acquired back in 2016.

Roku also lets you access AMC Networks’ paid streaming services—AMC+, Shudder, and Acorn TV—through the Roku Channel’s Premium Subscriptions.

To make content easier to find, the company has added an option called Featured Free to the Roku home screen, where you’ll find links to content from not only The Roku Channel but also other providers including ABC, the CW, Fox, and streaming services such as Crackle, Pluto TV, and Tubi TV.

Sign up for The Roku Channel.

Sling Freestream is a new ad-supported service from Sling TV that replaces Sling Free, the company’s earlier free streaming service. It has about 400 channels and over 41,000 on-demand titles, with genres including news, sports, game shows, crime dramas, sitcoms, home improvement, and cooking. Popular channels and programming include ABC News Live, CBS News, ESPN On Demand, FilmRise, “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Heartland,” “Forensic Files,” and titles from The Walking Dead Universe and VH1 I Love Reality.

Through Freestream, you can subscribe to a number of stand-alone streaming services, including AMC+, Discovery+, and Showtime.

Sign up for Sling Freestream.

This ad-supported service has more than 60,000 on-demand titles, including selections from the libraries of Lionsgate, MGM, Paramount Pictures, and Warner Bros., plus networks including A&E, Lifetime, and Starz. That’s in addition to 250 live TV channels on the service. The options range from old (and probably best forgotten) Chuck Norris films to classic indie titles (“Requiem for a Dream”) and somewhat more recent movies such as “Maze Runner: Death Cure” and “Ready Player One.” You’ll also find full seasons of TV shows ranging from oldies (“The Honeymooners”) to more recent titles (“Next Level Chef,” “Midsomer Murders”).

Recently, Warner Bros. Discovery licensed hundreds of movies and TV shows, including “Raised by Wolves” and “Cake Boss,” to Tubi (and Roku). And Tubi has a deal to bring all 10 episodes of the fourth season of the “QB1: Beyond the Lights” sports documentary to the service. The series was shot but never aired by Netflix, which also pulled the earlier three seasons.

Now owned by Fox, Tubi is ramping up its original content with 100 new film and TV titles slated over the course of this year. The service offers streaming access to many Fox shows, such as “Hell’s Kitchen” and “The Masked Singer” after they’re broadcast. It also has a slate of newer originals, including “Immortal City Records” and “Corrective Measures,” the latter starring Bruce Willis. These join other Tubi Originals, such as “10 Truths About Love,” “War of the Worlds: Annihilation,” and “Mysteries From the Grave: Titanic.”

Tubi has several programs based on the Lego franchise, specials starring Garfield, and some Pokemon programs. The company also has a deal that brought eight seasons of “Barney & Friends” to the service. It has several live local and national news channels, from outlets including ABC, Black News Channel, Bloomberg, CBS, Cheddar, Fox, and NBC, among others.

You don’t have to register for Tubi TV, but if you do, you get some perks, such as being able to resume play from where you left off and keep track of what you’ve watched.

Sign up for Tubi TV.

ViX is a free, ad-supported Spanish-language service owned by Univision and formerly called PrendeTV. Unlike PrendeTV, which was exclusively a free, ad-supported service, ViX also has an ad-free subscription version called ViX+, which costs $7 a month.

Both the paid (ViX Premium) and free (ViX Gratis) versions offer more than 100 entertainment channels, including movies, sports, and children’s programming. (ViX+ also has premium series and some exclusive live sporting events.) ViX has more than 20,000 hours of on-demand content, which includes shows from Univision, plus content from large media companies based in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. It also has deals with Disney, Lionsgate, and MGM to offer more than 150 films to viewers.

Other programming includes several soccer channels, nature and wildlife channels from Blue Ant Media, nine telenovela channels, and seven movie channels. There are also three family channels.

Sign up for ViX.

This new ad-supported service from Warner Bros. Discovery hasn’t yet launched. Details haven’t been announced, but it will likely leverage content from Warner Bros., including Max (HBO), Discovery, and Scripps. Warner Bros. Discovery recently licensed hundreds of movies and shows to Roku and Tubi, but those types of deals may end when it launches its own free service. So far, no launch date or content has been announced.

Xumo Play, a joint venture between Comcast and Charter, is an ad-powered streaming video platform that offers live and on-demand content from more than 290 channels across multiple genres, including sports, action and drama, news, kids and family entertainment, live events, comedy, lifestyle, and movies.

Content on Xumo includes news programming (ABC News Live, Bloomberg, CBS News Latest Headlines, LiveNow from Fox); movies from FilmRise, Hallmark, and Crackle; TV shows ranging from classics (“My Favorite Martian”) to kids (“Garfield and Friends”); and sports (CBS Sports HQ, Fox Sports). Movies also run the gamut from classics (“Nosferatu”) to modern classics (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower”). It also has channels created specifically for Black and Latino audiences.

In addition, last summer the service struck an exclusive deal with Magnolia Pictures to have Xumo Play stream a new Magnolia movie almost every month, with a three-month exclusive window. Xumo also has some originals (“The Killing of Billy the Kid,” “A Royal Christmas Match”) and a few exclusives (“Looper,” “Once We Were Brothers”) that rotate in and out.

On a related note, Xumo is partnering with Element Electronics to launch a line of 4K Element Xumo TVs in the U.S. this year. Earlier, Comcast and Charter announced that they’d be rebranding XClass smart TVs as Xumo TVs. The Flex streaming player will be rebranded as the Xumo Stream Box.

Sign up for Xumo Play.

There are dozens of free ad-supported alternatives to paid streaming services. For example, most smart TVs now either offer their own free services or let you access the ones included on this list directly from the set.

Here are some additional free services to consider:

• Fawesome.tv is a newer ad-supported streaming service, owned by FutureToday, that offers more than 10,000 movies and series in HD quality across 25 genres, including action, comedy, family and kids, health and lifestyle, horror, and thriller.

• Google TV—available on a Chromecast device or on TVs that use the Google TV smart system—offers more than 800 free channels, from new providers such as Tubi, Plex, and Haystack News, that appear in Google TV’s updated Live tab. They join an existing lineup of free, ad-supported channels from Pluto TV, plus Google’s own free built-in channels. Programming includes streaming news channels from all the major broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC—as well as more than 10 channels in foreign languages, including Spanish, Hindi, and Japanese. Like other so-called FAST (free ad-supported television) services, Google’s Live section uses an old-school cable TV-style menu with TV shows and movies that run at scheduled times, with ads that you can’t skip.

• Haystack News—formerly called Haystack TV—provides local, national, and global news from more than 400 content partners, including ABC News, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, and Yahoo Finance. The company says the service now provides more than 50 live news and weather channels, covering more than 90 percent of local U.S. markets. An expanded partnership with Hearst Television includes the company’s Very Local local news and information channels. A Newsline feature has an interactive news ticker with local news headlines, weather conditions, forecasts and alerts, and stock market data, plus top business, tech, and entertainment stories.

• LG Channels is a free streaming service for LG smart TV owners, with content from both Xumo and Pluto TV. It has more than 300 live and on-demand news, sports, and entertainment channels, which you can access using an integrated program guide. It recently added several new channels, including Free Movies Plus, a 24/7 big-budget movie channel, as well as video-on-demand movies. If you’re using an antenna, free over-the-air channels and Channel Plus options appear together in the same program guide.

• Watch Free is an ad-supported free streaming service from Plex with more than 50,000 free movies, TV shows, extreme sports films, music documentaries, Bollywood musicals, and more. It has deals for content from Crackle, Lionsgate, Magnolia, MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., and other studios. Live TV on Plex features about 300 channels across multiple genres. Plex recently started offering a $5-a-month upgrade, called Plex Pass, that works with an antenna to give you live local channels, plus a DVR, the ability to pause and rewind shows, and a program guide.

• Samsung TV Plus—a free streaming service available on Samsung smart TVs—offers more than 250 ad-supported channels featuring news, sports, and entertainment, plus thousands of movies and TV shows on demand. A strength is its roster of news channels, including ABC News Live, CBS News, Cheddar News, LiveNow from Fox, NBC News Now, and Newsy, among others. Samsung has also partnered with Bloomberg Media to launch Bloomberg TV+, a 4K business/finance channel. It recently signed a deal with Vevo for a music-video channel, and with FIFA+ for men’s and women’s soccer games. This summer it added a Conan O’Brien TV channel, an exclusive deal that brings "Conan" to the platform. All Samsung smart TVs dating back to 2016 are able to access TV Plus.

• Stirr is an ad-supported streaming service launched by local TV broadcaster Sinclair. It offers local content, plus a mix of national news, sports, entertainment, and digital-first channels, as well as a library of on-demand video titles. It has over 100 channels and more than 5,000 hours of programming. When you sign up for Stirr, you select your city (or a city near you) so that you can receive local news and other content on the 24-hour Stirr City channel.

• TiVo+ is available only via TiVo devices, either a TiVo DVR or a TiVo Stream 4K. TiVo+ has more than 160 free channels. The service is powered by several services, including Pluto TV and Tubi. It includes more than 40 channels of TV shows and series, 12 live news channels, and 12 live sports channels, including Major League Baseball. TiVo is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Xperi, the parent company to home entertainment brands including DTS and Imax Enhanced.

• WatchFree+, different from Plex’s Watch Free, is an ad-supported streaming service from Vizio and Pluto TV with more than 260 channels, including nine new streaming channels and 150 on-demand films from AMC. It has also added its own roster of channels, along with ad-supported video-on-demand titles, so Vizio SmartCast users can now access thousands of on-demand titles, along with hundreds of current WatchFree+ live streaming channels, all with no subscriptions or log-ins.

• Vudu’s “Free” section offers a growing selection of free, ad-supported movies and TV shows from a wide range of genres, including action, comedy, horror, kids and family, romance, sci-fi, and more. To access the free content, you’ll need a Vudu account, but you don’t have to provide payment information.

• YouTube’s “Free With Ads” section has free, ad-supported offerings that are different from those on YouTube Premium, which bundles videos, original movies, TV shows, and music as part of an ad-free plan that costs $12 per month or $120 per year. YouTube’s free TV roster now has about 100 shows, with almost 4,000 episodes in all. Like many of these services, the content lineup changes periodically.

If you need a new streaming player, consider one of the ones below.

James K. Willcox

James K. Willcox leads Consumer Reports’ coverage of TVs, streaming media services and devices, and broadband internet service. His focus ranges from the challenges of finding affordable internet service to emerging display technologies. A veteran tech journalist, Willcox has written for Business Week, Maxim, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, Sound & Vision, and others. At home, he’s often bent over his workbench building guitar pedals, or cranking out music on his 7.2-channel home-theater sound system.

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Yes, air purifiers with a HEPA filter trap polluting particles, including dust, from the air. While it is not a method of getting rid of dust completely, it helps remove the particles in the air you may inhale. Zamora-Martinez also recommends an air purifier in dry climates with sandy environments.

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Best 3 features for you.

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Yes, if you choose an effective air purifier, it will likely support your ongoing wellness at home – and in some cases, prevent problems from arising. 'The contaminants in our home are small enough to be inhaled. Some are so tiny that they can bypass the lungs and head straight into the bloodstream.