Sony streams free movies to your iPhone with Crackle

By Jeff Hughes April 20, 2011

Sony released the Crackle app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch this past Monday. The Crackle app streams full-length Hollywood movies and TV series to your Apple devices – for free. Unlimited, on demand viewing; free to download, free to watch.

The app is an extension of the Crackle.com website and its streams of movies and television back episodes are supported by quick commercial that cannot be fast-forwarded.

The website is similar to Hulu.com or Netflix but Crackle offers a catalog of more than 200 movies from Sony labels such as Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures Classics, Screen Gems and Tri-Star. Unedited films are posted when they are available within an online rights window and then removed when no longer available. The television shows offered are also cycled out periodically. Users get a fancy queue for organizing and managing, and they have the option to stream in 3G or Wi-Fi.

Some of the shows and movies that caught our eye in the current line-up include News Radio, the Tick, Married… With Children, the old He-Man shows, Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, Blade of the Immortal, oh, and Seinfeld! Yes, you can watch Seinfeld on your iPhone. On the movie side, we saw Ghostbusters, Snatch, Drunken Master, El Mariachi, Quarantine and even the Shintaro Katsu Zatoichi. If you’re a fan of web originals they have a channel for those as well. They offer Streamy award winner The Bannen Way, alongside the sci-fi action series Trenches and the zombie comedy Woke Up Dead.

Crackle originally started out as Grouper Networks, Inc. in San Francisco. In 2007 they were rebranded and moved to Culver City. For a while, the site blocked access for anyone outside the US but reopened access in 2010 to those in UK, Canada and Australia.

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I'm a SF Bay Area-based writer/ninja that loves anything geek, tech, comic, social media or gaming-related.

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