[throwbacktictac]

How is this legal? Do Pluto and Tubitv have some contract with providers that allows this?

I remember a company named Aereo being sued out of existence because they were offering OTA TV to their subscribers by allocating an micro antenna to each user. The excuse did fly in court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo

BTW, thanks for sharing!

[zuminator]

Pluto TV is owned by ViacomCBS and Tubi is owned by the Fox Corporation (the non-Disney one), and as others have pointed out, all their content is licensed. There's also Xumo, owned by Comcast. Pluto TV has partnership deals with Roku, Vizio and others to provide them with content for their branded apps. Amazon has a somewhat similar service with IMDb TV, although it has a crappy interface modeled off Amazon Prime's. And of course even Plex has now (sadly) entered the game with their "Live TV" section.

What annoys me about these free offerings is that they have cannibalized their content from paid streaming services. Before, services like Hulu and Amazon Prime would stock their catalog with tons of old "classic" TV shows that you could binge commercial free. Now, the only way to stream many of those shows is with commercials, they are no longer available as part of any paid commercial-free packages, unless you are willing to purchase the individual episodes.

[mason55]

Pluto operates a model called FAST (free ad supported television). Because the content is still aired in a linear fashion (as opposed to on demand) the licensing costs are lower than it would be for VOD and there’s no infrastructure costs to support like traditional cable tv, they can support it with ads easily enough.

They don’t have regular channels and instead do all their own programming. You get things like “The Bob Vila Channel” and other channels that focus on library/long tail content.

[5555624]

Pluto has both "live" TV and on demand. The on demand material is essentially the libraries for specific channels.

[etempleton]

They don’t run the channels you would get on cable. They are special OTT chanels and are ad supported.

You won’t get live sports or networks, but you will get a lot of reruns shows, second run movies, and news coverage that is a few hours old.

[foxhop]

Yes they own license to broadcast, formed by legacy media companies.