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Kanopy

Kanopy

Free films and shows for library patrons and university students

4.5 Excellent
Kanopy - Kanopy
4.5 Excellent

Bottom Line

Kanopy is a top-tier streaming video service that offers a wealth of independent, ad-free educational and entertainment content. Even better, a library card or university email address lets you access the shows and movies for free.
  • Pros

    • Thousands of on-demand films and shows
    • Free with a library card or university email address
    • Lacks ads
    • Unlimited access to Kanopy Kids content
    • Can create and share/embed clips and playlists
    • No limit on simultaneous streaming from a single account
  • Cons

    • You can only stream a handful of Play Credit titles a month
    • Does not support offline downloads on mobile devices

Kanopy Specs

Concurrent Streams Unlimited
On-Demand Movies and TV Shows
Starting Price Free

If you’re looking for entertainment for the entire family, Kanopy is the video streaming service for you. With big-name content partners, Kanopy is a platform for independent films and documentaries as diverse as they are thought-provoking. Kanopy started in 2008 to provide films to academic institutions, and it now has a collection with thousands of films that you can stream on numerous platforms. The service helps fill the void caused by independent cinemas closing around the world. The price is unbeatable, too—it's free.


Kanopy catalog

What Can You Watch on Kanopy?

Kanopy offers a huge array of dramas, comedies, documentaries, biopics, and television series. For example, the service is home to 2020 Best Picture winner Parasite, the Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro, as well as popular series from major television networks like History, A&E, and PBS. The platform also has select Criterion Channel titles.

Like the Criterion Channel’s streaming service, Kanopy offers classic Hollywood films like A Star is Born, His Girl Friday, and Dial M for Murder. There are also some purely educational films and series from The Great Courses, with titles such as Understanding Russia: A Cultural History.

Kanopy’s partnerships with distribution giants, such as A24, Bleecker Street, HBO Documentary Films, Paramount, PBS, and Samuel Goldwyn Films, bring considerable value to the service, too, even if you won't find any Kanopy-branded original content. The service's library is comparable PBS Documentaries', which pulls from American Experience, American Masters, Frontline, Independent Lens, Nature, Nova, POV, and other independent producers. 

If you want to watch more classic movies, check out our roundup of the best movie streaming services. CuriosityStream in particular stands out for its excellent collection of documentary and educational films.

A Kanopy membership also includes access to Kanopy Kids, which is appropriate for viewers ages 2 and older. Kanopy Kids lets children and adults watch an unlimited number of educational and entertaining videos every month, including moves, TV series, animated storybooks, and more. Disney+ is another top option for families.

Kanopy educational series landing page

How Much Does Kanopy Cost?

Kanopy is totally free. All you need is a library card or a university email address to sign up for the service. Netflix ($6.99 per month), Hulu ($7.99 per month), and Amazon Prime Video ($8.99 per month) have video libraries that can compete with Kanopy's, but all of those require paid subscriptions. Netflix and Hulu are even more expensive if you want to remove ads.

Other comparable streaming services, such as PBS Documentaries ($3.99 per month) and CuriosityStream ($2.99 per month), are not free, but they cost less money. More serious film buffs have to pay more for Mubi and The Criterion Channel, which cost $10.99 per month, each.

How is Kanopy free? It starts with the brick-and-mortar libraries that offer a variety of digital resources they’ve bought for their patrons. The public library or university associated with your account taps into those resources and covers the access costs, thus letting patrons watch for free with no ads. Kanopy is not the only free video streaming service, however. Editors' Choice winner Tubi, for instance, offers a large ad-supported library of popular movies and network shows. 

There is a limit as to how much content you can watch on Kanopy. You get a set number of Play Credits each month, and spend them on all the content in the regular Kanopy collection. Expect about 10 credits, although you can expand this if you're a member of multiple libraries. Sometimes one Play Credit gives you a 48- or 72-hour viewing period, other times it only gives you one viewing for a season or just one episode. It depends on the movie or series. There are some Credit Free movies you can watch, and the entire Kanopy Kids collection is free for unlimited viewing. Other free services do not impose any limits on the amount of content you can watch, but, as mentioned, support their content with ads.

Kanopy is available on the web, mobile platforms (Android, Fire OS, iOS), media streaming devices (Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, and Roku), and smart TVs (Samsung and Telstra). It does not offer any apps for game consoles.


Kanopy on the Web and Mobile

As mentioned, Kanopy requires a public library card or university email address for access to its extensive library. We entered our information and email address on the signup page and were granted immediate access.

Kanopy’s web interface is intuitive, with a slider showing featured content on the home page, followed by newly added movies and documentaries underneath. Each row of content is organized by genre or characteristics such as Directed by Women, Oscar Winners and Nominees, Seasonal Favorites, and more.

Kanopy create a clip

The search feature on the site is extensive. You can search by subject, filmmakers, features, languages, captions, year of production, and other criteria. The landing page for each feature has buttons for adding movies and shows to your personalized playlists, sharing the content, and even creating shorter clips of movies and shows to embed on websites or share on social media platforms. The landing page also has a wealth of information about each piece of content, including whether or not you have the right to play the film at your own public event. Plus you'll find user ratings and comments. Mubi and Shudder let you leave reviews, too.

If you need to finish watching something later or want to see what other people have viewed from your account, the service keeps track of where you (and anyone else) left off in a Viewing History section, much like the one Netflix offers. 

To test the mobile experience, we downloaded the Kanopy app on an iPhone; We didn't have any issues accessing the account. The interface looks much like the website, with a dark background and colored thumbnails. You can hit the Browse button at the bottom of the screen to scroll through the videos that are organized by genre or tap the search button to look for something specific. The My Lists button takes you to your previously viewed videos and videos that you have started but not finished.

Kanopy mobile app screens

Unfortunately, you cannot download content to watch later; PBS Documentaries and CuriosityStream both support offline viewing. You can easily link your Kanopy account to a media streaming device from the mobile app, which takes a little bit of the pain out of that task. 

Kanopy's playback screen just has standard rewind and fast-forward controls, along with a button for changing the playback speed (up to 2X) and a toggle for closed captions. Kanopy does offer a nifty picture-in-picture (PiP) mode, but it doesn't let you choose the streaming resolution. Naturally, there are a lot of older films on the site that are not available in 4K, but it would be great to have the option to choose a streaming quality for the newer titles. Titles also display how much time you have left to watch based on your remaining Play Credits.

Kanopy picture in picture mode with Spotify in background

We tested Kanopy's streaming performance over both gigabit ethernet and Wi-Fi connections (450Mbps download). We watched Oscar- and Golden Globe-winner Moonlight without any issues. We switched from the desktop test device to the mobile phone halfway through the film and picked up right where we’d left off.

Since Kanopy is free, it does not impose any restrictions on sharing your account and you can stream on an unlimited number of devices. However, every viewing will count against your Play Credit limit for the month (except for Kanopy Kids content).


Kanopy Accessibility and Parental Controls

As with Amazon Prime Video, you can adjust the font size and color of the captions. You can also customize the background and the window for captions, as well as choosing the font family of the text. None of Kanopy's content supports audio descriptions for the visually impaired, which would be a nice feature to add in the future. Kanopy does, however, provide live time-stamped transcriptions for every movie and TV show. You can access these resources by clicking More on a title's details page.

You can make sure your kids are viewing age-appropriate content with Kanopy's built-in parental control tools. If you choose to set up this feature, you will need to enter a PIN whenever you want to leave Kanopy Kids content, regardless of the device you use. Parental control settings can only be managed from a browser. If you click on a non-Kids Kanopy title from an email or post on the web, you will have to enter your PIN to view that content, too.


Kanopy and VPN

A VPN can keep your information private while you browse but many video streaming services block VPN traffic to enforce geographic-based streaming rights. Unlike Amazon Prime Video and its associated channels, Kanopy works just fine over a VPN connection. We connected to a US-based ProtonVPN server and a server based in the Netherlands while reviewing Kanopy and did not run into any streaming problems. 


Kanopy Is an Excellent Streaming Video Service

Kanopy is an invaluable resource for anyone with a current university email address or a library card. It’s perfect for sharing new and old movies with family members, and Kanopy Kids provides hours of free educational entertainment for the little ones. With thousands of videos to choose from, just about everyone should find something of interest on Kanopy. It's an Editors' Choice winner for free streaming video services, an honor it shares with Tubi. Kanopy's limit on streaming content each month is the main drawback, but we like that this restriction does not apply to content in the Kanopy Kids section.

Netflix continues to be our Editors' Choice winner for on-demand video streaming with its robust library of originals and movies. Hulu is also a great option for its combination of immense on-demand library and live TV offerings. CuriosityStream is our top pick for documentary fans. Peacock is a fantastic service for affordable streaming.

For more on streaming, check out five reasons why you may want to ditch your video subscription and keep cable, read how streaming has ushered in a new trash TV golden age, and learn why companies must preserve their streaming catalogs. In addition, check out our recommended streaming video guides if you don't know what to watch. 

About Jordan Minor