I know the Toronto Star made some sort of big time deal for exclusive access to material from the Wall St. Journal, and they’ve been using it to try and get subscriptions. Most of the articles are behind a paywall, but on occasion, they release a few for free. And sometimes I wonder if anyone there checks them before posting them.
 
Case in point – this story that appeared high up on their homepage on Sunday. It sported the rather unwieldy headline: “Free, Easy and Legal: How to Stream Great TV and Movies Without Spending a Dime.”
 
It sounded good until you realized that more than half of the websites referred to are geoblocked in Canada, rendering most of the piece virtually useless for those without a VPN.
 
Freedive, Stirr, Vudu and Crackle, all of which are highlighted in the text, aren’t available at all in Canada. Despite a note in the article that the Roku Channel could be accessed over a browser without its namesake’s box, I couldn’t get it to work on two different ones – Chrome and Firefox.
 
I had no luck with Yahoo View, but I’m not all that interested in signing up for it, so I don’t know it that’s available north of the border at this point.
 
Only YouTube, PlutoTV and Tubi TV, the anime site Crunchyroll and Snagfilms – the latter two which are of zero interest to me -  actually functioned for Canadians, at least in my limited experiment.   
 
Which means more than half of the sites mentioned in the story were pretty much worthless for those trying without a VPN here. I wonder if any editors at The Star took that into consideration before posting this less-than-useful piece?

“Free, Easy and Legal: How to Stream Great TV and Movies Without Spending a Dime.”