You will be able to watch YouTube’s original shows and movies without a YouTube Premium subscription starting in 2020 if you are willing to sit through ads. You don’t need to wait two years, however, to get in on the ad-supported free fun. YouTube currently offers more than 100 feature-length films for free.
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YouTube’s free-to-watch films
A free movie on YouTube is a great alternative for those times when you can’t find something to watch on Netflix, whose catalog is geared more toward TV shows than movies. You can find YouTube’s Free to Watch movies here, or you can navigate to it by clicking the menu button in the top-left of YouTube’s homepage and choosing Movies & Shows. Scroll past the rentals in the Recommended for you and New releases categories and click Free to Watch.
YouTube’s collection of free movies is devoid of new releases and littered with terrible titles (the Pauly Shore vehicle Bio-Dome, to name one), but there are some gems. I can always watch Dirty Rotten Scoundrels another 80 times, and it’s been too long since I’ve seen any of the Rocky movies or Pink Panther movies.
All of YouTube’s Free to Watch movies are tagged as Free with Ads. In my viewing of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, I had to sit through a 15-second ad roughly every 10 minutes. I would complain about the jarring nature of the ads starting at seemingly random spots in the movie, sometimes in the middle of a character’s dialog, but then I remembered I was watching for free.