- Whenever I highlight some other channel other than this one in my
videos, I get a lot of comments. A lot of people saying
things along the lines of, "Well, what about Pluto TV? "Talk more about Pluto TV. "Pluto TV is amazing." Well, all right then, today
let's talk about Pluto TV. This is definitely a trending channel. Not that it's brand new, but things are on the upswing. It's got tons of growth and tons of future potential as well. So today, we're gonna go over a little background about Pluto TV, what it is, how it works,
what you'll find on it, and how you can decide whether you want to jump on this bandwagon or stick with whatever
other streamer you're using at the moment. Because yeah, there is a deciding factor, but we will get there in just few minutes. For now, let's dive into Pluto TV. (upbeat music) All right, everybody,
thanks for watching today. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you enjoy these videos and join me every Friday for a live stream where we do fun games,
giveaways, that sort of thing. It's a great time. I hope you'll join us. So what is Pluto TV? Well, it's a streaming service,
a free streaming service, that's owned by ViacomCBS. Now, why do we care who owns it? Well, because it's owned by ViacomCBS. So let's compare and contrast
with something like HBO Max. Okay, so AT&T bought WarnerMedia and all of the properties that came along with that including HBO and for a few years AT&T seem to struggle to figure out what to do with
that entertainment platform and with these entertainment brands. Well, ViacomCBS has been in
the game for a long time. So, I feel like they have
a little bit better handle on exactly what to do with
something like Pluto TV and that kinda shows. With Pluto TV, they've really made quite
the streaming channel and it is paying off. Pluto has grown a ton recently. Back in 2018, they made
$70 million in ad revenue. Not bad, right? 70 million bucks. Well, in an industry like this, nah, it's not that much money, but by 2022, they will be
at over a billion dollars in ad revenue just on Pluto TV. Wow and that is growth. So they've grown a lot recently and like I said, they have
a lot of room left to grow in the future as well. So take this summer for instance, we're in June now but even through the rest of this summer, they're gonna be adding a ton of movies. They already have the
"Hunger Games" series and "Charlie's Angels"
that went up this month. They're also over the summer
getting "Minority Report," "Shaft," "Total Recall," "Forrest Gump," "Face Off," and more. And that's just on the
on demand side of things. On the live TV side of things, they just added three more
channels to their lineup, Pluto Courtroom, "Jersey
Shore," and "Bar Rescue," yeah. So let's talk about the channels actually. Let's go ahead and dive into
Pluto TV and take a look at it. So I'm gonna be looking
at Pluto TV on my Roku TV, whatever you're using, whether it's a Fire Stick
or a Chromecast, whatever. It's gonna look very similar, so don't worry about that too much. But yeah, I'm gonna be
using it on my Roku. So, if we get in here, it's gonna start me out right
away on the Live TV tab. So you can see right up top,
Live TV versus On Demand. As far as how you navigate around this and once I'm in here watching a show, if I press the up and down button that's going to channel surf. Okay, so this is very similar to what you remember from
cable or satellite, whatever. You can channel surf on Pluto TV. Some people may miss that
in the age of streaming, so you can do it or you can hit the back button and that will bring up the menu here. So now, I can scroll through the channels, I can go over to the channels
or the genre selection here. I can also hit the back
button one more time and that takes me up to the
top Live TV or On Demand. Let's start with the Live TV one. Okay so Live TV, you can see, like I said we've got a bunch
of different categories here. So I went through and counted how many (chuckles) channels are in each category and
it's pretty ridiculous. Okay, so if we start... Okay, Featured is actually pulling from these other different categories, but we've got Movies,
Entertainment, News, Reality, Crime, Comedy, Classic TV, Home
DIY, Explore, Sports, Gaming and Anime, Music,
Espanol, Kids, and Local. And if we add all of these together, it comes to a whopping 294 channels, not bad at all. Okay, so this is going to,
just in terms of channel count, rival any cable or
satellite company out there. Now, the difference is you're
not getting the same channels that you would on those cable
and satellite providers. But the good news about it is that even though the
channels are different, the content sometimes is very similar. So for instance, if I go to this Reality tab here and click over to "Jersey Shore," there's an entire channel
devoted to "Jersey Shore." Now, that is not MTV, right? It's not the MTV channel,
but it's MTV content. And so if you love the "Jersey Shore" or if you love, oh gosh, "Rescue 911," whatever the case
(chuckles) may be for that, then you're gonna be able
to find channels dedicated to just one show, this happens quite a bit or there are some like VH1 I Love Reality that are going to be a
little bit more broad in what they show. But anyway, the point here
is you can see VH1 content, MTV content, Spike,
"Dog the Bounty Hunter." Anyway, so you don't have to wait for these shows to come up like
you did on a cable network, you can just go ahead and
watch it 24 hours a day. "Dog the Bounty Hunter," I don't
know, whatever you're into. And that's gonna be the case
in pretty much every category. So go up here to News and Opinion. You're not going to get CNN, but you will get the latest news from CNN. So they're gonna pull
in clips and highlights and walk you through the news of the day, but it's not the same as being able to tune into the actual CNN network. You can even get CNET News. Although, why you would go
anywhere else for tech news? It's just beyond me. Like and subscribe. So 294 channels, all commercial supported so it's still free of charge. And like I said, this looks
and feels and smells similar to what you would get on your
cable or satellite provider. So if you've cut the cord but you like the channels
that you had before, you like the channel surfing and you like just having
something on in the background, then Pluto TV is fantastic for that with its Live TV service. Let's go ahead and
pop-up to the On Demand. So, On Demand is stuff
you can watch any time. It's not on a timetable like you get with the Live TV schedules and Pluto TV has a pretty
good On Demand lineup here. So in this case, they also
have categories similar to what we saw over on the Live TV side: Most Popular Movies, Top
TV Series, and whatnot, but it's almost similar to Netflix in just how many categories they have. So I'm going to just press my down button and let's see how long it
takes us to get through this. (gentle serene music) (Craig exhales) All right, by my count,
that was about what? 17 seconds. And (chuckles) that's a
lot of content on here, I did not bother to count
it like I did the channels on the Live TV side. But you can see, like I mentioned before, they've added some titles that are very attractive to people. So, we've got the "Hunger Games" series, we've got "Colombiana," "Noah,"
whatever, "Ninja turtles," again, whatever you're into, right? It's on here. So as you can see as I'm
flipping through here, it's a lot like Netflix or
like Tubi or anything else where most of the stuff you
probably won't be interested in, but there are going to
be a lot of titles here that you are interested in. So I talked in a previous
review about Plex. Now, Plex. I love Plex. You can go back and
watch my review on Plex. It's fantastic. It's got a similar setup, but they allow you to bring
in your own library of stuff which I think is absolutely amazing. But when it comes to the Live TV and the On Demand offerings, I think Pluto TV pretty
easily has them beat, they just doesn't let you
pull in your own library. So, Plex is still (lips smacking) awesome. But yeah, I do like what I'm
being offered here on Pluto. It's really great, contentwise. One last thing to talk
about on the interface is, over here on the left-hand side, if I keep pressing to the left there's a Search and a
Settings menu option here. Now, the Settings is
not actually Settings. (Craig chuckles) These are little things
that will send you online to get more information
about whatever it is, whether it's a support, or privacy, Don't Sell My Personal Information, it's all just telling you
to visit here, visit here. So, there aren't any settings
that you can change on here. You're gonna have to rely on whatever TV you're
using to change settings. And then on the search bar, the search actually
works pretty darn well. What's interesting is here on my Roku, I can use the voice search on my Roku as long as I'm in this search field. So when I press this, I already
searched the "Hunger Games," so what could I search
for that I saw on demand? "Tomb Raider." So there you go. As long as you're
searching within that bar, you can use the voice search. Obviously, you can go ahead
and type it out as well, but there are your
results for your search. Now, it doesn't work perfectly. I've seen some stuff in the On Demand menu that did not pull-up when
I tried to search for it. I don't know why, maybe it's just too new in
the system to be recognized. Not sure exactly. But for the most part, the search function does
work pretty darn well better than the settings. Then there you have it. That's Pluto TV. That's what you're gonna get for free. And that's why it's awesome, it's free. The content selection,
not bad, not bad at all. The navigation, pretty easy
once you get the hang of it. It's not super intuitive, but it'll just take a few
minutes of trial and error and you'll get the hang of it. So the question now is, would Pluto TV replace your
cable or satellite service? I say yes, but hey, I'm
a diehard cord cutter. I think this is better (chuckles) for free than what you were paying for, for cable or satellite. The next question then is whether you might like Pluto TV better than the paid stuff that you
get like Netflix, Disney Plus, HBO Max, whatever the case is, is Pluto TV a replacement
for those things? Well, the question you
need to ask yourself is what do you value more,
your time or your money? Because while this is a free service, you do pay for it with your time because you are watching commercials. Now, I didn't clock the
commercials necessarily, but my impression is that you'll watch slightly fewer commercials
than you would have with cable or satellite,
but not a ton less. It's not like it gives you one
commercial every 15 minutes and then you're back onto your show. It is gonna show you four,
five, six commercials during those breaks. And so it's, like I said, maybe not quite as long as you were doing with cable and satellite, but still you are gonna spend
some time watching commercials with this one. Again, whether that's worth it to you, totally up to you and your situation. What do you want to keep more of? Your time and just make your way through whatever title you're watching or your money, save the
money and get rid of Netflix, get rid of HBO Max and just go with the
free service like this. I'll be interested to
hear what you guys say, your preferences. Please hit the comments
below and let me know. I know that you love Pluto TV, I've heard you all say
it, but what do you think? Is it worth the amount of
time you spend on commercials? Let me know with your opinions
and on your way down there, don't forget to like and subscribe. Make sure you subscribe so that
you can join me every Friday around 2:00 PM Eastern for
the live stream that we do with the giveaways, the games, the Q&As, all that fun stuff. I will see you all there. Thanks for watching.
