YouTube is taking over-the-air TV with nearly 4,000 free episodes of TV

YouTube is the latest company to offer free TV shows with commercials. Video Giant says you can now stream nearly 4,000 episodes of TV for free, as long as you want to watch commercials during the show. Available shows include Hell’s Kitchen, Andromeda and Heartland, and you can watch them on the web, mobile devices and “most connected TVs via the YouTube TV app” in the US, YouTube said in a blog post.

With a new free TV show, YouTube is facing many major competitors. One is over-the-air television – offering free TV on demand, hoping to see what’s available on its platform instead of surfing the channel to see what else might be on YouTube.

And there are already plenty of options for ad-supported TV free streaming with offers from Tubi, Xumo, Plex, Roku, and Vizio and Samsung – just to name a few – so YouTube is late for the game. That said, YouTube is already a place where a lot of people spend a lot of time watching videos, so it’s not hard to imagine people watching TV shows while scrolling through other YouTube content.

Free shows may prompt people to switch from Roku, a company with which YouTube owner Google has some public disputes. Roku doesn’t sit still, though; According to a November report, it plans to develop more than 50 original shows that may appear on its free and ad-supported Roku channel. If we’re going through potential users based on hardware ownership, Roku, which says 155 million people live in homes with Roku devices, is much smaller than YouTube. Google recently stated that there are over 3 billion Android devices in the jungle, and this is only one of the potential devices with easy access to YouTube.

Join the available lineup of free movies with ads on YouTube’s free TV show platform, which currently includes Gone in Sixty Seconds and Legally Blonde. The company plans to add 100 shows and movies each week.