Hoopla, Kanopy and the Most Obvious Thing You're Not Doing Ever.

Go ahead and talk bundling until you're blue in the face but it's still going to cost you. But all of this content? It's free. Without ads.

Somewhere in my notes — hell, maybe even in my Notes app — there’s an entry that says, I’m sure of it, “Look into Hoopla and Kanopy.”

I’m also sure there’s another one that says, “Get Hoopla and Kanopy.”

Bold denotes that people are ramping up the reminders, probably.

And for all the kind folks here who have been leaving comments periodically about the merits of, you know, using your library card to get two streaming sites that have — pause for effect — tons of great shit on them, yeah, you were right.

When my partner watched “Past Lives” — yes, without me, because she’s super impatient — I endured weeks of “You have to see ‘Past Lives’ because you’re going to love it.”

Last week, up in Portland, I finally decided to find it and watch it. You know, stream it on one of the platforms I’m paying for, which is theoretically at least partly why I’m paying for them.

I got some wine, I settled in and….yeah, not there.

It’s on Hoopla, though.

OR:

Ah, Hoopla, that thing I didn’t have because like most people in this country — who even have one in the first place — I couldn’t tell you where my library card is or what library in what city it’s attached to.

One of the commenters mentioned in a past column that I should consider getting a digital library card from the San Francisco Public Library — anyone in California can, apparently, and they have deep vaults of good books and titles. So I did (or tried), but it still required me to come in to get the actual library card in person to activate it. In that moment I was here, and here is Portland for right now.

So I walked to my local Portland library. No, I was not turned away or maligned for being from California with a California driver’s license. I had filled out an application online the night before and walked in right after I had yet another outstanding meal in Portland’s Eater Paradise, and the library was just sitting right there.

So, hi, I said, and about one minute later had a library card.

Last night I downloaded Hoopla and Kanopy — two free streaming services to anyone with a library card — and, well, yeah. I should have done this a very long time ago.

To everyone who said so, you were right.

To everyone who reads this and goes and gets a library card or already has one and gets Hoopla and Kanopy, you too will soon be telling me I was right.

I have spent the day just marveling at the options on both of these free services, a delightful exercise in our current moment of everyone losing their shit and writing Hot Take after Hot Take about the buzz over “bundling” and how the streaming world is going to come full circle and be just like cable (um, no, a hundred times no).

I see “Past Lives” on Hoopla. And “The Whale,” and “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” and “Marcel” — all of them from A24, the cult-like studio that has its own app plus launched a deal with Max. Of those titles, I’ve only seen “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” Seems like a good value for free. Especially because I want to watch “Everything Everywhere All At Once” over and over again.

I noticed there are 13,757 movie choices.

Granted, a lot of them are old and you probably wouldn’t watch them, which reminds me of, let’s see, Netflix and Max and pretty much every other streamer I’m paying for. Having a big vault is part of the value. It is, in fact, added value.

I mean, one never knows when the itch for “Almost Famous” will occur, does one?

Hell, I would watch that right now.

A quick look at the available TV series finds a less surprise-filled, eye-popping group, but has plenty of offerings from AMC, BBC, Acorn, PBS (lots of hard to find Ken Burns documentaries, by the way), Sundance, etc., and you don’t have to be a math major to know that you might have to pay for some of those titles elsewhere if you want to watch.

Including PBS in some way, shape or form, especially for the good Burns stuff, right?

Anyway, all of those discoveries took about five minutes so I’ll circle back to Hoopla soon, but a quick tour of Kanopy also opened the eyes (even with duplicate titles) — “Beau Is Afraid,” “The Worst Person In the World,” “After Sun,” “Oldboy,” “Triangle Of Sadness” and a host of great offering from the wayback machine, “The Third Man,” “Barbarella,” etc.

It’s not about lists so much as it’s about free access to an endless amount of quality entertainment.

I don’t know why that stuns and excites me so much. Probably because of capitalism?

I was elated to see things like “Freak Scene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr.,” because I love that band and delight in music docs. There’s an endless amount of kids TV (I saw they had the first season of “Madeleine” and was excited to re-explore those long ago days from when I loved some series my kids watched — mostly they worked as visual Xanax). I could watch all those episodes again, though.

Tout de suite!

On both streaming platforms, there are comics, there are LGBTQ-centric selections, there are musicals, international cinema, etc. So much random etc. to explore.

And if I haven’t said it enough, let me ring the bell with the sing-song-y vibe of “free fa-free, fa-freeeeee, free” to remind you that, yes, these are free.

And they don’t have ads.

Since I have yet to deep dive on either platform, I thought it was less important now to talk about lists as it was the conceptual existence of these two streamers, which certainly has a cost-benefit element in bold, does it not?

We don’t talk enough about people who can’t afford any streaming services. Yes, we talk here especially about what streamers to cut when you’ve added too many and the costs are getting ridiculous, but plenty of people in this country can’t afford any streaming services or, if they can, it’s one or possibly two, which is at the root of why these platforms are so essential.

And since, as alluded to above in this opening tale of not listening to the message being sent, I have to wonder how many people who really need these free options are aware of them?

I don’t know. Maybe you can help spread the word to those who do.

But even for people who have multiple subscriptions, a theme I see in the comments here a LOT is the need to really cut down. And it’s pretty easy to see numerous threads in the Hoopla and Kanopy offerings — from Netflix to PBS to Max and Prime to the Criterion Channel.

Titles you would likely find there, are also found scattered here, in these two library-connected streamers. New, new-ish, older, forgotten and classics — all here. Highbrow, Mid, Not Great. All here.

It’s kind of a little miracle, really, just sitting there, most of us not ever using it.

It’s the maybe the most obvious thing we should all be doing that we’re not doing that ever was.

And most of us are not using This Cool Free Thing either because we had never heard of it or because, gasp, the library seems like such an ancient concept. It’s 2024 — we can get an AI ChatBot to read us Shakespeare and tell us what the hell it means when it gets complicated. We can listen to books while we drive. Discount bookstores are everywhere (especially in Portland). People put up little free book libraries in their front yards, FFS! There is no lack of having access to a book.

To some, a library probably seems like a bomb shelter with bad coffee and moldy sweaters in the Great Tech Epoch.

So, while I’m increasingly of the belief that technology is destroying us, I’m also not going to point the finger at people who don’t go to the library, in part because that finger could would eventually end up in my eye.

My older sister just moved up to Portland and, while she’s not a huge TV watcher, I had an extra flat screen to give her for the new place (she’s used to watching on a laptop only). She didn’t really have or use TV apps — she had Amazon Prime and watched there and had connected two subscriptions: Masterpiece and Acorn.

I set up the TV, got the apps up and running (well, really just Prime), then pondered whether a person who A) doesn’t watch much TV and B) is retired and on a fixed income, would want to spring for, say, Netflix?

One night, I did a little impromptu rundown of what she should get, if she decided she wanted to expand her viewing (the flat screen was definitely working some magic), and concluded Netflix, with its enormous catalog, would probably be the best bang for her buck. (Although I could see BritBox or Criterion Channel instead.) We tabled that discussion and went about setting her place up some more.

Now? Shelling out is not necessary. We’re heading to the library soon.

End note: I can definitely see writing about some of the shows I’m finding here — like a Deep Dive: Kanopy or a Deep Dive: Hoopla, just as I’m already doing with Netflix (and was with BritBox). So, while I found the forays for that feature were limited when I tapped into BritBox, my assumption was that a lot of people simply didn’t subscribe to it because, well, it wasn’t on their must-have list, which is usually overseen by a budget.

Since that doesn’t really apply to Kanopy and Hoopla, I would suggest as many of you as possible try to add these streaming services in the near future. Hell, there was a Neil Gaiman masterclass of sorts on one of the two platforms and I could see myself watching that for sure, (Edit: OMG, NO, NO, NO…) along with dozens of obscure music docs and foreign films.

Maybe this is one way to expand the Deep Dive feature. So, you have the assignment.