How to get television and movies 100% free!

When I was a kid, i absolutely loved going to the movies to see the next big blockbuster of the year. Back in the day, you would only have to beg your parents for a $10 bill, and that would cover two tickets and a drink to share with you girl.

The early days

As with anything, times have changed. The days of paying only $10 to fill up the gas tank, and $5 for a movie ticket are long gone, and a $100 night out at the cinema with the family is an all to true reality.

Now, if you were broke like me, you would probably wait until the movie you wanted to see came out on VHS then later DVD, but even that came with fees that would put you in a hole after a while such as rewind fees (remember those!?!) late fees, damaged DVD fees and the annoying VIP card that they pushed on you every time you walked through the door.

As customers began to get fed up with the greed of mega movie rental stores like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, we began to find different outlets to fuel our movie craving appetites.

NetFlix

When Netflix came onto the scene, we were able to get our favorite movies sent right to our house without even getting of the couch! For a lazy person such as myself, this was the best thing I could have ever imagined! Now, even with laziness taken into consideration, Netflix was starting to get old fast. I was starting to hate waiting for those damn DVDs to come in the mail. Netflix then began to stream movies to help combat this issue, but they really only offered movies that were a bit older, and really not all that good. Netflix turned out to be a disappointment.

before you knew it, all of these little red boxes with movies started popping up around the neighborhood. every Wal-Mart, grocery store and pharmacy had one in the parking lot, and movies only cost a dollar!

Red Box

As great as that sounded, many times the movies were limited when it came to new releases. not only that, those little red boxes can only hold so many copies, so I always had to deal with the currently out of stock) icon. Not to mention I still had to drive to and from when renting and returning the movie, so it was already getting old fast.

As streaming was starting to get more and more popular, prices started to go up higher and high to the point that going to the movies did not seem so bad anymore. Companies like Dish Network and Direct tv began charging about $7 per movie, and my bill began to climb just because it was so easy to push one button on the remote to rent something.

Even if you did rent the movie, you only had it to watch for 24 hours, o your money literally went up into thin air as you had nothing to show for the purchase that you just made. Not only were you paying top dollar for a movie that you really didn't like, he price of my provider began to increase on a yearly basis. it was getting to a point that I was paying around $200 a month for TV and movies that I thought were crap anyway, so I began to do some research to see what else was out there, I'm glad I did!

The first thing I wanted to do was cut ties with my satellite provider. I was tired of getting stuck with a large bill every month, so I started looking for other alternatives.

The first thing I tried was to buy a few stick up antennas for behind each TV in the house (3 in all). These added up as they were around $20 a piece. They worked on, but I had a real issue keeping them stuck tongue wall. The other issue I had was I needed to do a channel surf on each TV once a month just to get as many channels as possible. This turned into a real pain after a while.

After a few months of fumbling around with the stick up antennas, I decided to try an outdoor Antop Antenna as I heard that they worked well and actually looked half decent when attached to the house. Long story short, I bought the antenna for around $100, and installed it in under an hour.

Once the install was done, I was able to get all of my local channel and then some. All together I started receiving around 18 channels all together.

Now that I had my local stations, I soon realized that I was unable to get the national news stations like CNN and FOX. After trying to figure out how to get those channels, I discovered that you can actually stream them on YouTube! (More on that later).

Now it was time to figure out the movie situation. I really wanted to be able to stream my movies straight to my television, but did not want to spend an hour looking for a site to stream it from each time.

I was speaking to a friend of mine, and he mentioned how he just purchased an Amazon Fire Stick. I never heard of these before, but wanted to learn more as they seemed to be growing in popularity.

The Wave of The Future

I started to watch some videos on you tube, but every time I typed on fire stick, a name always seemed to come up with it in the search results (KODI).

I had no clue what KODI was, so I started pulling videos about it, and eureka... this was what I was looking for! To give you an idea as to what KODI is, I'll refer back to Netflix as its basically the same thing, but free.

KODI is an app that you can download directly to the fire stick that allows you to stream television shows, YouTube videos and just about any movie you want to watch!

What you will want to do once you install the KODI app is look for what called add-ons. These add-ons suck as Exodus will find every steam available on the internet and send them directly to you TV. Not only does it find older movies, but will even show you movies that are still playing in the theater. That being said, sometimes you may have to wait a week or two for a HD version to show up, but you literally have every movie known to manning waiting to be watched at the press of a button.

Now, you can buy these pre-loaded sticks on eBay completely loaded, or you can find a few YouTube videos showing you how to set them yourself. A pre loaded stick will run you anywhere between $70 to $150, but you can also purchase the stick directly from Amazon for $35 and do it diy for free with a bit of knowledge that you can get from YouTube.

Now that I have my antenna, I have all of my local stations, and the KODI not only gives me movies and streamed episodes of my favorite show, it also allows me to stream CNN, FOX and just about everything else I need directly from YouTube.

The last thing to do was cut ties with my satellite provider. My contract was finally up, so I sent them all of the large outdated equipment that was sitting on my fireplace.

I now have everything I needed to watch everything for free, and the quality was even better that what I was getting from my provider. Not to mention, I could watch the movies as many times as I wanted without a fee of any kind.

I will tell you that if you want to be able to stream shows and movies from every tv in the house, you will need a fire stick for each set. As for you local station, you will only need one outside antenna as you can hook every TV into it using a splitter.

I think the Antop antennas work extremely well, and they are easy to set up. They also look nice on the side of the house, and won't stick out like a sore thumb like the old metal antennas used to.

Like all the other inventions of the past, this may seem like the best way to watch what you want, when you want it... and it is (for now), but who know what the future will bring when it comes to entertainment. And though I'm sure I will be writing about the next best thing in the next year or two, I'm just going to sit back ad watch some free TV until the time being.