I admit it: while I have multiple Samsung TVs in my house, I never thought about pressing the Samsung TV Plus button on the remote. Instead, like most, I log in to my favorite streaming apps like Netflix and Disney+, I download YouTube, and pretty much call it a day.
But after spending time with Samsung TV Plus and seeing that it offers hundreds of truly free content choices, I regret not looking sooner. On Samsung TV Plus, you’ll find a huge slate of channels plus a deep library of movies. All are free and ad-supported, available with no logins or setups as long as you have a Samsung TV.
Samsung TV Plus has been preloaded on all Samsung TVs since 2016
It offers hundreds of truly free content choices from movies to TV shows
The vast majority of Samsung TVs from 2016 and onward come built in with Samsung TV Plus as a Tizen app. All content is laid out in a guide-style interface with handy categories on the left side so that you can dive into Comedy, or Reality TV, or other categories.
Samsung TV Plus gives you a library of over 650 channels in more than 20 categories of content. Most of these channels, like the 24/7 streaming news from ABC, NBC, BBC, FOX, Bloomberg and others, run from channel 1100 into the 4500s. You even get AccuWeather and certain sports news channels (like CBS Sports, FOX Sports, and NBC Sports NOW), though you won’t find any live sports channels.
To bring some order to the admittedly overwhelming amount of content, you can star your favorites, which will populate the Favorites sidebar of the Samsung TV Plus interface. To do this, just select the channel you want to favorite in the guide view, and you’ll see a star appear in the upper left corner.
The “channels” just loop one title
Hopefully you like what is offered
The live/linear selection of content is just the start. The majority of the other channels contain the same titles looping forever, as there are channels for shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, This Old House, Property Brothers, Law & Order, and many others.
If you have kids, perhaps you’ll get the most value from Samsung TV Plus, as there are dedicated channels that play popular kids shows like Peppa Pig, Blippi, and Moonbug basically around the clock.
If you have kids, perhaps you’ll get the most value from Samsung TV Plus.
Then there are the movie channels that offer an extensive slate of movies. There are a lot of older cult classic movies, for example: Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, Contact, Clear and Present Danger, A Fine Mess, and so forth. Again, I wouldn’t say that you can watch blockbusters on Samsung TV Plus, but the selection is pretty extensive and there are movies playing at all times.
What Samsung TV Plus is missing
No access to live sports or local news broadcasts, and you can’t turn off the ads
Samsung TV Plus is ad-supported, and there’s no way to turn off the ads. You have to watch ads every 15–20 minutes, similar to regular TV, and they’re a mix of local ads (I saw a lot of political ads here in Pennsylvania with a major election happening soon) as well as normal ads for dish soap and insurance services.
Do not expect to get live and local news, like you might over a traditional TV provider or if you access terrestrial TV with an external antenna. You can access streaming feeds from most news channels, but that is different than their live broadcast signal (which requires an antenna, as mentioned).
It’s slow and frustrating to use (but free is free)
I mostly tested Samsung TV Plus on a relatively low-end Samsung TV in my daughter’s bedroom (though perhaps I should have just gotten her the rock-solid Roku TV and called it a day). The performance of Samsung TV Plus was my main concern on this particular TV, but I found it to be a bit faster on my higher-end living room Samsung TV. But as far as moving between the guide and the watch screen, browsing the guide, and navigating content, I found Samsung TV Plus to be frustrating to use. I much prefer using the apps loaded on the Roku stick I have connected, but even the built-in Tizen OS apps like Netflix and Prime Video are significantly faster than Samsung TV Plus.
But free is free, and I came away impressed by the sheer quantity of content available on Samsung TV Plus, requiring absolutely no logins or setup of any kind. You should definitely give Samsung TV Plus a chance if you have a Samsung TV from the past decade.