Your Sony, Panasonic, Philips or Hisense TV just got great free upgrade

Amazon's Freevee streaming service, which was formally called IMDb TV

(Image credit: Future)

published 5 July 2022

Good news for anyone with a smart TV running Google TV or Android TV: Amazon's free streaming service, Freevee, is available now. The app is launching across Google TV and other Android TV OS devices including Sony, Panasonic, Hisense, Phillips, Sharp, Vestel, Nvidia, Xiaomi, TCL and more.

As for what to watch on Freevee, it's worth checking out for Bosch: Legacy alone, an accomplished LA cop drama based on the books by Michael Connelly, but there's lots of other good stuff to watch – and from my viewing so far, Amazon's streaming service isn't as heavy on the ads as, say, All4 or the ITV Hub.

What to see on Freevee TV

Freevee used to be known as IMDb TV, and in addition to using the dedicated app you can also access it via Amazon Prime Video where it appears as a dedicated carousel. As you'd expect from a free service it's not exactly a rival to Apple TV+, Netflix, Disney+ or Amazon Prime Video, but there's a decent selection of content ranging from crime thrillers to movie musicals.

In addition to Bosch: Legacy, Freevee has a small but growing collection of Amazon Originals such as Alex Rider and Leverage: Redemption, which will be joined by the first Amazon Freevee Original film, Love Accidentally, on 15th July. There's also a decent selection of shows and movies including The West Wing, The Closer and Person of Interest, and dedicated challenge such as True Crime Now and the Design Network. New movies are added weekly.

As you'd expect, it's a bit of a mixed bag but there's some really great stuff here, especially if you're into crime and classics: at the time of writing there's Scorcese's Mean Streets, the superb bad-cop drama The Shield and Cormac McCarthy's LOL-fest The Road. There are lots of documentaries too, including Anthony Bourdain's binge-worthy Parts Unknown and some decent music docs too.

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).