Amazon Is Saying Goodbye to Freevee
Streaming services are finding new ways to make sure we spend more money than ever, like cracking down on password sharing. But not all streaming services charge an arm and a leg for their content. In fact, there's a decent list of options that are totally free of charge (and legal, at that). Among those is Amazon's Freevee, a way to watch shows and movies without worrying about your wallet—at least, it used to be.
On Tuesday, we learned Amazon plans to shut down Freevee over the next few weeks, a move that may surprise casual fans, but not others who saw the writing on the wall. The service, as its name implied, offered content to users for free, supported by ad breaks throughout shows and movies. But once Amazon started offering an ad-supported Prime Video plan last year, Freevee started to seem a bit redundant.
Undoubtedly, the platform's most famous original show was Jury Duty, a Truman Show-like reality series that tricked one man into serving his "jury duty" with a court full of actors surrounding a fake trial. However, there were plenty of other Freevee originals, including Alex Rider, Bosch: Legacy, and Judy Justice (yes, featuring Judge Judy).
Freevee hasn't always been Freevee, however. The service originated under IMDb (a subsidiary of Amazon), as IMDb Freedrive in 2019. Shortly thereafter, it rebranded to IMDb TV, but in 2022, Amazon changed the name again to Freevee.
Can you still watch Freevee?
The good news is none of Freevee's content is going away. Amazon is simply folding it under its "Watch for Free" category, which will be available with or without a Prime membership. That means you can boot up Prime, scroll to any "free" content, and watch it with ads. Right now, that requires scrolling through a sea of locked content that requires a Prime membership to find, but perhaps Amazon will make this free content more apparent in the coming weeks.