Contrary to popular belief, you can, in fact, legally watch movies and TV shows online for free. There are a few websites that offer the service for free and have a decent catalog. One of those services is IMDb TV, it has a catalog of popular movies like The Social Network, Gravity, Megamind, Hacksaw Ridge, and La La Land. Some of the popular TV Shows include Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, The A-Team, Dallas, etc.
IMDb TV is an entirely free but ad-supported service for watching TV shows and movies. The only caveat is that IMDb TV is available only in the United States. However, you can still watch it outside the U.S, let’s see how.
Watch IMDb TV outside the U.S
1. On a Web Browser
Step 1:Â Head over to IMDb.com/tv with a web browser on your computer, You will see this error message “IMDb TV is only available to customers in the U.S at this time“.
To fix this error, you just need a good VPN. Install a VPN on your computer if you haven’t already. Turn it on and connect to the U.S server, but you can experiment to see which one works best for you. I’m using the Smart DNS Proxy VPN server, and it worked on Los Angeles Servers on some devices and New York Servers on the others.
Step 2:Â Now, if you go back to the IMDb TV page and refresh it, it should show you a normal screen where you will have to login or create an account. Tap the Sign in button to proceed.
Step 3: If you already have an IMDb account then you’d have to create a new account, as IMDb links your original country location to the account. Just create a new account with the VPN on and you should be fine.
Step 4:Â After creating an account, log in to IMDb. You might have to verify your email and once you do that, you can watch IMDb TV for free outside of the U.S.
The entire catalog is ad-supported, and there is no way to pay to remove the ads, and the ads are unskippable, just like a regular TV but without the cable subscription.
2. On an App
While there are no dedicated IMDb TV apps for Android and iOS, you can still watch IMDb TV using the standard IMDb app. But, it’s quite tricky, let me show you how it works on Android, and the steps should be the same for iOS as well.
Step 1: Start by installing the IMDb app from the Play Store or the App Store. Don’t open it yet, because even if you open it, there is no option to play IMDB TV. To get around this problem, we’ll use a mobile browser on your smartphone.
Step 2: Just like we did on the computer, open a VPN app and connect to a U.S server and keep it running.
Step 3: Next, open the web browser on your smartphone and log in to your account on IMDb. Make sure it’s the same account that we created in the previous method.
Step 4: After logging in, you will see a page like this, tap on a movie or video which you want to play, and it’ll redirect you to watch it on your IMDb app. The video should play right after an ad.
Final Thoughts: Watch IMDb TV outside the US
Overall, thanks to Amazon deals with production houses such as Warner Bros., Sony Pictures Entertainment, etc, IMDb TV offers a good catalog over other free streaming services.
There are unskippable ads, you can’t download tv shows or movies for offline use, there is no parental control and the interface isn’t as good as Netflix (actually it’s based on Amazon Prime). However, for a free streaming service, I’m fine with all of that.
The only downside I see here is that the search feature on IMDb TV isn’t as good as Netflix. There is no option to find movies and TV shows based on their genre as you can do in another streaming service. I hope this gets fixed with future developments.
You can check out our list of best free online streaming services if you want other options just like IMDb TV.
