This Free, Family-Friendly Streaming Service Is TV’s Best Kept Secret
— Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
It seems like every few days, yet another streaming service — Disney+, Netflix, — has decided to raise its prices. Many parents, rather than being faced with streaming service charges that have ballooned to the cost of a regular old cable subscription, have decided to cut the cord with streamers they barely use or go analog and buy DVD collections of their kid’s favorite shows. But there’s at least one amazing streaming service that parents may not know about that they can add to their streaming service rota — rather than ditch. And it’s totally free. And there are zero ads. And it’s completely family-friendly. What’s that, you say!? Yes!
NASA — yes, that NASA — launched their very own streaming service, NASA+, on November 8. It’s free because it’s NASA. The streaming service is available on all the major players — iOS, Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, etc — and promises to cover everything you could possibly need, including brand-spanking new series, live launches — perfect for the space-obsessed kid in your life — and documentaries. It will also feature, because, yes, it’s NASA, an archive of over 20,000 images of space, podcasts, a Solar System Exploration feature, and “Emmy award-winning live event coverage,” per Space.
Their trailer (which is frankly epic) also reveals a bevy of new titles to look out for: among the titles announced include something called NASATalks, as well as: Space Out, The Color of Space, NASA Kids, NASA Explorers, First Light, Lucy, and more. It’s almost overwhelming!
Space Out, it so turns out, is a sort of ASMR space show perfect for you (and possibly your toddler) that is basically just outstanding shots of outer space “all backed by chill music,” says The Verge reporter Jay Peters. Of the episodes of Space Out that are released, one is just a 30-minute episode looking at the surface of Mars, another is a look at the Hubble Telescope and its iconic images, and there’s an episode on the moon phases and the rings of Saturn, plus more. It’s no Cocomelon!
And there’s way more than just beautiful images and videos. The whole family can dive into dozens and dozens of episodes of brand-spankin’ new TV — The Traveler, for example, is an animated series for kids with 8 episodes that explores what would happen if you visit a black hole.
There’s also extra-epic archival footage — including a 1977 NASA recruitment film starring ground-breaking Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols (!), tons of footage of the Apollo missions, a film all about women astronauts and NASA experts, and many live events to come. On November 16, for example, NASA Science will explain the “science behind your favorite planet being in retrograde.” On the 22nd, lucky viewers can watch astronauts on ISS Expedition 70 live-stream from space.
We could go on and on. The point is, you may have just found your Saturday morning Bluey replacement. (Okay, you definitely didn’t, but you did find something totally kick-ass.)