Legal Online Movie Sites in Canada & the USA
Posted: February 2, 2012 at 3:11 pm by Seppo
There is a surprisingly good selection of movies legally available online in Canada and the US today. Below I will review the movie sites I have found this far. For links to the sites mentioned in this review, and for those in a hurry, the full list of legal online movie sites available in Canada and the USA can be found at the end of this post.
As a whole, the sites discussed below feature at least 22,000 free and legal online movies for Canada and the USA!
Free Movie Sites – Commercial Movies
There are several sites offering free online movies, but many of them (e.g. AMC, Global TV, CTV, etc) have only a very few titles available. Global TV or CTV change their movie listings quite often, so visit often and you might get lucky and find a relatively recent movie worth watching. The same applies to the two dozen or so free movies on the Rogers On Demand movies section.
Crackle, on the other hand, has over 200 free movies available, including ‘The Big Heat‘, ‘Devil In A Blue Dress‘, and ‘A Few Good Men‘ just to name a few. Many movies are older, and understandably one cannot find recent blockbusters.
Youtube Movie Channel has both free and pay-per-view movies available. Some of the free movies can be found on Crackle as well. Youtube seems to have over 1000 free titles (based on my quick back-of-the-envelope estimate), including ‘Battleship Potemkin‘, and ‘Silverado‘. They also have over 200 documentary films including e.g. ‘First Orbit – the movie‘ about Yuri Gagarin’s first orbital flight.
Popcornflix has over 1500 movies available, and the selection looks a bit more modern than Crackle. On the other hand I could not find any movies that I would recognize, and the selection seems to be mostly B and C movies. They do have John Lynch’s ‘Night Train‘ and you can find Brad Pitt in ‘Dark Side of The Sun‘, ‘Whore‘ with Daryl Hannah, and Denise Richards, or “Homeboy‘ with Mickey Rourke and Christopher Walken. But if you want A or B movies or want to catch-up on the classics, Crackle, or Youtube Movie Channel would be the choice.
Free Movie Sites – Indy Movies and Movie Archives
The two big movie archives are Internet Movie And Television Archive, with over 3600 movie titles, and European Film Gateway, with over 400,000 titles. On these sites you can find a variety of content including (mostly older) movies, and TV show episodes, documentaries, and archival material. A must see for horror fans is Romero’s original ‘Night of The Living Dead‘ on IMTA.
EFG has a huge collection of material, but there is no structure and search functions produce too many results. For example, I remember reading that they have ‘La Dolce Vita’, but one cannot find this movie in the archive in any easy way. A simple search produces pages on pages of some short documentaries, but the movie is missing. Due to poor structuring of the data, at the moment EFG unfortunately does not seem the have any value as a movie entertainment source.
IMBd is not only the most comprehensive movie and TV show trivia database in the world, but also nowadays has its own online movie selection, totaling over 17,000 free titles. The movies range from short films to full feature length movies, most movies seem to be shorter indie movies. The selection is nevertheless substantial and worth checking out.
The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) site has over 1500 titles available. All material on the site is produced by NFB. It has for example the French-Canadian classic ‘Mon Oncle Antoine‘. Viki site has over 300 movies available, mostly from Asia.
Snagflims is a large collection of good quality independent movies. It currently has over 2500 titles, and over 600 short films in their catalog.
Indie Movies Online is a smaller site having over 150 indie and classic titles available, including short films. Movieola is another short film movie channel and site. It used to have a larger selection of shorts, but has seemingly reduced the number of available movies recently.
Openfilm is an independent movie and short film site with several hundred very high quality titles in their catalog. Check out for example this stunningly beautiful short ‘The Cathedral‘ by Suk Kyu Lee of Vancouver Film School and Tomasz Bagi?ski of Platige Image. You can read more about The Cathedral here.
Subscription or Pay-Per-View Movie Sites
Netflix is of course the ubiquitous online movie site both in the US and Canada. It has over 1 million Canadian subscribers at the moment, which roughly amounts to 10% of all adult Canadians (excluding seniors and kids). Netflix has around 7000 titles available in Canada. As a value service the company is walking a fine line between the price of the service and the licensing cost. In practice this translates to newer shows and titles missing from the catalog. Per Netflix’s ‘Letter to Shareholders’ in October 2011 Netflix was planning on doubling the spending on content in Canada in 2012. Given the recent beating the company has taken, in stock value and loosing customers, this plan might not come to fruition. For new entries on Netflix Canada, check out the free ‘What’s New On Netflix‘ service.
Best Buy’s Cinemanow is a new entry in Canada, starting service in late November 2011. They already have over 10,000 titles available, some of which are very recent. Cinemanow is not Netflix type all-you-can-eat value service, rather than more traditional one where one can either rent or buy individual online movies. The prices range from $3.99 to $19.99 per movie. You can for example rent ‘Friends With Benefits‘ for $4.99 or buy it for $19.99.
The main Canadian Telecom behemoths have their respective online TV services, Rogers-On-Demand, Bell Online TV, and Shaw Video-On-Demand all have quite a large a collection of movies available for less than $10 per movie. Some of the Rogers movies are even free. Not to be left behind Apple, Microsoft, and Sony also have their own online TV and movie offerings, iTunes, Zune Video, and Playstation Store respectively. For these you need to download additional player software though, or own a game console or some other proprietary gadget.
Canada’s #1 movie distributor Cineplex offers over 5000 movies online for rent or buy. They also offer over 10,000 titles for sale on DVD and/or Blu-Ray.
Criterion has specialized in high-quality award winning movies since 1984, and they currently have over 50 movies available online. The prizes are not that bad for streaming, you can e.g. watch Al Reinert’s “For All Mankind” for $5. They even have one of my all time favorites, Milcho Manchevski’s “Before The Rain”, but unfortunately currently only on DVD. This site is true movie lover’s mecca.
Youtube’s Movie Channel has a large collection of movies available for pay-per-view, prices start at $3.99. Youtube has both recent blockbusters and old classics available, they e.g. the amazing ‘2001: The Space Odyssey‘.
Future
First Weekend Club is working on a Canadian Online Movie streaming service. It has just finished fund raising and hopefully we will see this pay-per-view type of service for Canadian film come to life soon early next year.
I have not heard any news regarding Walmart’s Vudu (over 20,000 titles in the US) or Amazon’s Prime (over 5,000 titles in the US) coming to Canada. Having these big players would of course be great, but the upside is that we already have a very nice selection of at least 22,000 free and legal online movies available for streaming in Canada and the USA (excluding the archival material at Internet Movie Archive, and European Movie Gateway).
Legal online movie sites available in Canada and the USA
List of legal online movie sites available in Canada
List of legal online movie sites available in the USA
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