There has never been a better time to watch mainstream movies in your home, but life for the arthouse film fanatic or classic film buff isn’t quite as easy, with a handful of films scattered across a range of streaming services requiring multiple subscriptions.
That’s about to change, as Turner has now officially launched its first ever direct-to-consumer streaming service, FilmStruck. The new service offers movies from across both the Turner Classic Movies catalog as well as the Criterion Collection, all together in one place, streaming commercial-free.
It seems that this will also mark the end of the Criterion Collection’s availability on Hulu. Though no official withdrawal has yet been confirmed, the press release says that FilmStruck will be the “exclusive streaming home” of the Criterion Collection. This includes the new Criterion Channel, a new curated premium service.
“Working with TCM’s programming team, we’ll present a broad, constantly changing cross-section of Criterion titles on FilmStruck, a platform designed from the start to present films with the kind of robust supplemental features that Criterion is known for. The addition of the premium Criterion Channel will offer subscribers the most comprehensive Criterion experience ever available anywhere,” Criterion Collection president Peter Becker said in a statement.
This includes access to over 1,000 films from the Janus Films library, many of which Becker says aren’t available anywhere else. Indie studios like Flicker Alley, Icarus, Kino, Milestone, and Zeitgeist are also among those supplying content, while more generally popular films like Seven Samurai, Blood Simple, Mad Max, and A Room with a View are also included.
FilmStruck’s basic plan, which comes with limited access to Criterion films, starts at $7 a month, whereas the expanded version will set cinephiles back $11 per month, and include both the basic collection of movies as well as the entire Criterion Channel. If you know you’ll be watching FilmStruck all year, you can also opt for the $99 annual plan, rather than paying month to month, and save a few dollars that way.
If you’re not sure about FilmStruck quite yet, you can get a 14 day free trial and stream movies across desktop, mobile, Amazon Fire TV, 4th generation Apple TV, and at some point in the near future, Chromecast and Roku, too.
Article originally published in April. Updated in November 2016 by Lulu Chang: Added news of FilmStruck’s launch and pricing.
