By minor, I don’t mean Amazon, YouTubeTV, Sling or even HBO or Paramount etc. I’m thinking more along the lines of Fawesome or philo or any of the specialty streaming offerings.
We use Roku (free) & Britbox currently. My wife loves those Brit Detectives.
We also have Kanopy (free through our Library) and this month the Yes Network App for Yankee games but at $20 per month I’m dropping that one.
I’ve used Pluto in the past, but it offers too little and I think I deleted the App.
There is also PBS app used occasionally.
We have TennisTV and TennisChannel+. They stream more-or-less all the pro tennis matches.
We do Britbox and MHz Choice, which offers non-English detectives and other shows, It has Montalbano, it has an Italian version of Nero Wolfe, it has a German version of Brunetti, it has Homicide Unit Istanbul (also German) and it has Murder In, each of which is set in a town or region of France. Lots of good scenery.
Not minor in Canada, but I have enjoyed some stuff from the CBC Gem streaming service.
I like Pluto TV which has various iterations of Star Trek, including the Original Series, and Classic Doctor Who. They also have some Smithsonian Channel offerings that are pretty good.
I used to love Tubi, before Fox bought it back in 2000. They turned a wonderful source of schlock and awe into yet another generic streaming platform full of safe crap found on most of the others.
Freevee has some excellent series, including Greg Garcia’s Sprung and the Canadian classic Corner Gas. There’s also The Dectorists – a real treat – Time Wasters (uneven, but can be very funny). It’s tied in with Amazon, and has quite a few originals.
My library offers Hoopla, which has various mystery shows on demand. I’m liking My Life is Murder with Lucy Lawless. Bonus: no commercials.
We use Passport quite a bit, which is the PBS streaming service, and for which we have a subscription as a benefit of contributing to our local PBS station. We used it last year to binge all the old episodes of Endeavor.
I look at the shows on Roku that run on a schedule like regular TV, and other stuff accessible on the Roku channel. I has several cooking channels loaded but they weren’t very good, just a few recipes. Maybe some have improved. From time to time I load up a local news channel for places I’m familiar with. Also watch YouTube videos sometimes on the TV, but mostly I do that on my laptop or phone.
Just started up Woodworkers Guild of America channel and see stuff that wasn’t there before that will now interest me. I think I have to go back and look at some of the specialty channels again.
Definitely Pluto. And it’s got MST3K all day all the time! And free! I only pay for one service, Netflix. It doesn’t make any sense to me to get Hulu or all the sundry services out there while I’m also paying for cable. Maybe one day I could convince my wife to cut the cord, but losing sports would be a big deal.
I still love Tubi, which only goes back a few years and the Fox purchase was 2020. The Onion had them just right with this one:
I knew that, but my mind slipped and my fingers decided to go along for the ride.
I recently subscribed to dropout tv.
It has a bunch of TTRPG content, and a fair amount of other amusing stuff.
Don’t know if I’ll keep it long term, but for the moment, it provides me with enough content to have value.
Kanopy is pretty cool, documentary heavy but has some fiction film gems. I found it when it was the only way at the time to watch Nolan’s Memento. Free? Sign me up.
Hoopla is similar but I haven’t had a chance to try it, neither the public library nor university library support it so I’m not sure how to get on.
I also use Plex to stream from my computer but they also stream their own things and they sometimes have some rare stuff.
Britbox, Acorn, for British
Shudder, Screambox, Horror Drive-in for Horror
Jive Turkey, Brown Sugar for Blaxploitation
Nightflight, Arrow Channel, Kino Cult for cult movies
This is one of my main reasons to use Pluto, I do not deny it.
Another aggregator of sorts for ‘live’ streaming is the PlexTV Live TV Channels, which I occasionally browse. It also has (perhaps the same) MST3K channel, although as with many live channels, things may come and go before you finish watching them. In the past, Journey was showing No Reservations (Bourdain) which I enjoyed getting to watch again, only to move on to other content. And recently I was re-watching classic Red Dwarf on one of the channels, but the programming ended before I finished Series 3.
Still, for when I want something different from my normal services (Netflix subsidized largely by TMobile and Amazon Prime), it can be fun to scroll through the listings and see if anything leaps out at me.
Hoopla is also excellent if your library participates. I use it for both audiobooks and movies.
All commercial free, all work on phone, TV, or computer.
It’s movie selection is limited, but what they have is HD and commercial free. Plays like a stream on Netflix.
Oh, Shudder is excellent if you like horror movies of any time. Last year, I got 3 months for something like $10 and when I cancelled, they gave me another month free.
I did cancel, but I plan to re-subscribe this summer when I’m off work(I’m a teacher).
for me, i’s music and TuneIn, you can get radio shows across the world, and virtually any kind of music