Big-budget Hollywood blockbusters tend to dominate theaters, which casts aside those people with a more nuanced appreciation for film. Video streaming services such as Ovid.tv look to attract those audiences with collections of indie and arthouse films that aren’t easily found elsewhere. The size of Ovid’s library and the frequency of new entries is impressive, as is the solid web and mobile app experience. Some drawbacks are that the service lacks subtitle customization options and is only available to subscribers in the US and Canada.
What Can You Watch on Ovid.tv?
A representative from Ovid.tv said the service includes titles from 30 different film distribution companies, most of which you can explore on Ovid.tv’s Content Partners page. Examples include Bullfrog Films, The dGenerate Films Collection, Distrib Films US, First Run Features, Grasshopper Film, Icarus Films, KimStim, The British Film Institute, and Women Make Movies.
Ovid.TV mostly focuses on indie and art-house titles, which means its lineup is similar in content to that of Filmatique and Mubi. The Criterion Channel’s focus on preserving classics means that its library is decidedly more mainstream. Many of the films on Ovid.tv are in languages other than English. If you do not like foreign films, then Ovid.tv is not the right choice for you.
A representative from Ovid.tv explained that the service releases, on average, between one and four new films each week, and that titles are typically available for between one and three years after they debut. With that release cycle, Ovid.tv outpaces Filmatique (which debuts about five films per month) and is nearly on par with Mubi, which releases a new film every day. The Criterion Channel’s release schedule is similar to Ovid.tv’s, too. All of these other services make their films available to watch for some time after they premiere, with the exact length dependent on licensing deals.
In terms of library size, Ovid.tv sits at 900 titles at the time of testing, which slightly beats out Mubi’s growing collection of around 800 titles. The Criterion Channel comes out ahead of both of those services with an impressive count of over 2,000 titles. Filmatique’s collection is far behind with a count of films below 100. KweliTV sits in the middle in terms of library size, with a collection of around 400 titles.
Ovid.tv has an extensive collection of documentaries you can stream, including docuseries like The Adventures of Modern Art. The documentaries range from high-budget social critiques to lower-budget arthouse offerings. Films of note include F11 and Be There, a commentary on American civil rights, race, social justice, and art as told through the lens of photographer Burk Uzzle. There’s also Tattoo Uprising, Edith + Eddie, and Geek Girls. These offerings reflect the diversity of studios that have partnered with Ovid.tv.
To give an example of some of the films you can find on Ovid.tv, here are some titles in a few categories. In the Recently Added: Narratives category, you can find A Man Called Ove, A Quiet Passion, Ava, Full Moon in Paris, Ida, Mesrine: Killer Instinct, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, Polina, and Tell No One. Fans of animated fare should check out Ovid.tv’s Animation Domination section, which includes films and collections such as Alice, Alois Nebel, The Book of the Dead, The Exquisite Films of Kihachiro Kawamotō, Louise by the Shore, and Tatsumi. The Academy Award Nominees & Winners category includes such titles as Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, Facing Fear, Hotel Terminus, If a Tree Falls, Kings Point, Rabbit à la Berlin, and Small Wonders.
You can explore all of the titles that Ovid.tv offers without an account, which you should do to get a better grasp of its library. It’s impractical to list all the films here, so Ovid.tv very well may have a title you are interested in, even if we didn’t mention it above. Ovid.tv and similar services have sections for exclusive films, so you may be limited in your choice of service if there is a particular title you want to watch.
How Much Does Ovid.TV Cost?
Ovid.tv costs $6.99 per month, which makes it inexpensive, but not the cheapest film streaming service we’ve reviewed. That distinction belongs to Filmatique, which only charges $4.95 per month. KweliTV is also cheaper than Ovid.tv; it costs $5.99 per month. All of those options are significantly cheaper than Mubi and The Criterion Channel, which each cost $10.99 per month.
More-mainstream video streaming services are typically more expensive than these film-focused ones, but some, such as Disney+ ($6.99 per month) and Apple TV+ ($4.99 per month), match or even beat Ovid.tv’s monthly price. Other options are more expensive. Amazon Prime Video is $8.99 per month, Netflix’s Standard plan is $12.99 per month, and HBO Max is $14.99 per month.
If you don’t want to pay for your video-streaming entertainment, check out our roundup of the best free video streaming services. Our top pick for the category, Peacock, offers a worthwhile selection of popular shows and movies for streaming.
In addition to a web interface, Ovid.tv offers apps for mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and media streaming devices (Android TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, Fire TV, and Roku). Ovid.tv does not offer any apps for game consoles. Mubi offers an app for the PlayStation 4.
Web Interface
Ovid.tv’s web interface features a subdued black, gray, orange, and white color scheme that looks coherent and doesn’t distract from the film content. We didn’t experience any performance issues or slowly loading pages in testing either. The top navigational menu in the upper-left side of the screen has three items: Browse, Search, and All Titles. You can access your profile settings via an icon in the upper-right section of the page. The settings in this section are pretty basic, however, and there aren’t any options here that affect the playback experience. All you can do is update your profile information (I’m not sure why there is a field for an associated website, since there is no way to interact with other users on Ovid.tv), manage your billing details, and set preferences for email notifications.
Ovid.tv’s Browse page offers a similar experience to most other video streaming services I’ve reviewed. The top of the page shows a large slideshow of highlighted content, while horizontally scrolling categories of films populate the rest of the page. Categories of films include Recently Added: Documentaries, Exclusive to Ovid, Curated by Friends of OVID, Academy Award Nominees & Winners, Animations, Black Lives, Immigration & Migration, LGBTQ, and many others. You can also click on the category header to view all the films in the list. If you are interested in video streaming services that celebrate Black art, our feature rounds up some of the best options.
Ovid.tv’s search function is fairly advanced. You can search for films by name, director, category, year, run time, and any terms that appear in the film’s extended description. One helpful touch is that you can add search results directly to the My List section.
The All Titles section is also useful and well-designed. For example, you can filter the list for keywords, studios, release year, and genre. It’s also possible to sort by alphabetical order (A-Z and Z-A), chronologically by year (both directions), and by relevance (should you enter a keyword).
If you see something you want to watch on Ovid, just hover over the title’s thumbnail to add it to the My List section or hit the play button to jump directly into playback. Upon hovering over a thumbnail, Ovid provides some basic information about the entry, including the director, genre, release year, and runtime, which is helpful.
A film’s detail page shows the playback screen at the top and the full description of the title below it. At the bottom of the page, Ovid.tv lists additional films in the same category.
Ovid.tv recently launched metafilm, a free companion blog to the main Ovid.tv site. The blog lists every film on the service in a sortable and searchable chart and has articles, reviews, essays, discussions, and interviews you can read or watch. You can also find some interesting analytical graphs (member size, number of titles watched per week, and aggregate film streaming data) on this site. Some content types support comments, too, but I didn’t see any notable user activity in the comments section at the time of this review update.
This is a good start to making Ovid.tv feel more like a film community, but Mubi, in particular, is better for community engagement. Users of that service can create and share lists of movies, leave reviews of titles, view other subscriber’s profiles, and explore new films that are not even available for streaming on the service.
Ovid.tv’s Mobile Apps
We downloaded the Ovid.tv app on our test phone running Android 10. We had no issues logging in to our account and did not experience any performance issues in testing. The app retains the web interface’s color scheme and offers both a light and dark mode. You navigate the app via a series of four menu icons at the bottom of the screen: Explore, Search, Library, and Profile. The mobile app’s profile options are far more comprehensive than those available on the web. Here, you can enable notifications for new content, switch between the interface themes, set the quality of downloads and streams, and control playback behavior. The Manage subscription option redirects you to the website, however.
The mobile app’s Explore and Search sections work exactly as they do on the web, but there is no section for sorting and filtering all of the available titles. You do get a dedicated Library section for viewing all the films you’ve added to the My List section and for seeing all of the titles that you downloaded for offline playback. Unfortunately, there’s no way to sort or filter entries in either of these last two subsections.
The Ovid.tv Playback Experience
Ovid.tv’s playback interface is based around the Vimeo video player. Although Vimeo is a solid management service in its own right (and has tons of indie content), Ovid.tv’s implementation of the Vimeo player is mixed. It does have all the standard playback controls, and the player automatically switches to a picture-in-picture mode if you scroll down on the page. We also like that you can select a streaming resolution for playback and the button for quickly adding a title to the My List section. However, the player lacks 10-second fast forward or rewind buttons and a toggle for subtitles. You won’t find anything similar to Prime Video’s IMDb-powered X-ray overlay which lists cast members, music, and general information about a given scene.
The mobile playback interface adds 10-second fast forward and rewind buttons as well as buttons for rewinding to the beginning of a title (the fast-forward to the end button was always grayed out in our testing experience). You also get a download button to sync the currently playing title for offline playback on your device, in addition to the My List and Share buttons.
Ovid.tv limits subscribers to three simultaneous logins per account, which is about standard. Most other video streaming services I’ve tested limit accounts to two or three concurrent streams. Ovid.tv does not allow you to create multiple viewing profiles, which makes the My List section’s lack of organizational features more problematic. Disney+, Prime Video, and other services, allow you to set up multiple profiles.
The highest resolution that Ovid.tv supports is 1080p. Most (but not all) of the titles on the service hit that spec. We noticed at least one film that had a maximum streaming resolution of 540p. Many other streaming services top out at that resolution, but Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Netflix offer growing libraries of 4K content.
Ovid.tv says that you need an internet connection speed of at least 3Mbps to stream 720p videos and of at least 7MBPs to stream 1080p content. To test out Ovid.tv’s streaming performance, we tried watching A Man Called Ove in full 1080p quality on our test PC over a home Ethernet network (200Mbps download). As expected, we did not encounter any streaming issues or lags in testing. The audio sounded fine as well.
We tried downloading the French thriller Tell No One (a 5GB download) on pur test mobile device in high quality. The download took approximately 16 minutes to complete, which beats the performance of Mubi over the same connection to our test Wi-Fi network (80Mbps download).
Accessibility and Parental Controls
Ovid.tv includes baked-in English subtitles for foreign-language films, which means that you cannot customize them. Most English-language films also get captions, which you can toggle on or off. You cannot adjust the size, position, color, or font of these captions. Filmatique does not allow you to customize subtitles either.
We prefer the flexibility that other video streaming services offer. For instance, BritBox allows you to customize the appearance of subtitles directly from the playback screen. Apple TV+ supports closed captions in many different languages. You won’t find anything similar to the Audio Descriptions accessibility feature that Prime Video and Netflix offer. When enabled, this feature adds audible commentary about character movements and scene changes that would not otherwise be discernible through dialog alone.
Ovid.tv does not offer any parental control options. A representative from Ovid.tv noted that “Ovid is a service for adults.” This lack of support is consistent with other movie streaming services, such as Filmatique, Mubi, and The Criterion Channel. Most mainstream video streaming services offer parental control tools that let you specify what rating of content is appropriate for each viewer. Ovid.tv does not even list the parental rating for any of its titles, but we can imagine some parents wanting the ability to simply add certain movies to an allow list and block everything else. That way, they could let their kids watch only the content that they specifically approve.
Ovid.tv and VPN
VPNs are an excellent tool for protecting your privacy online and can also help you spoof your location. That last benefit is why some video streaming services may try to block VPN traffic altogether. Some of the content on these services may be region-locked or the service itself may only be available in specific locations. A video streaming service may opt to block all VPN traffic to prevent someone with a VPN for working around these blocks. For example, Ovid.tv is only available to subscribers in the US and Canada. Mubi is available in far more countries.
We tried streaming a movie on Ovid.tv from our desktop PC, which was connected to a US-based Mullvad VPN server. We had no trouble watching streams over this connection. Next, we tried connecting our PC to a Canada-based server and similarly had no issues. When we tried a VPN server in Sweden, Ovid.tv popped up a message that the video was not available in our country.
Even if you find that your video streaming service and VPN currently work fine together, there’s no guarantee that they will continue to do so forever. One solution is just to disable your VPN for streaming and then re-enable it directly afterward.
Broaden Your Horizons With Ovid.tv
Ovid.tv is ideal for fans of all sorts of under-the-radar and non-English-language films, and it is committed to adding new films and documentaries from many sources at a rapid pace to give you more viewing choices. Ovid.tv’s web and mobile apps are seamless to use, and we particularly like the slick search functionality. On the other hand, we wish that the subtitles were customizable and that the service was available in more locations.
Our top pick for mainstream video streaming services is Netflix, because of its top-notch original content and excellent features. YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV share the top spot in the live TV streaming category; both offer comprehensive channel lineups and support high-quality streaming.
