People hunt for Hulu alternatives when their must-watch shows live on other services, when they want a cheaper plan, or when they want one place to track everything they stream. The picks below share Hulu's core job: helping you find and watch TV and movies on your iPhone. Some are full streaming services, others are guides that point you to where a title is available across platforms. We ranked them by embedding similarity to Hulu's description, then weighed live App Store ratings and review volume so the more trusted, widely used apps rise to the top. Ratings move week to week, so use the order as a guide and pick the one that matches what you actually watch.
How we ranked these 9 alternatives
Embedding similarity
Every app in our database carries a dense vector embedding derived from its title, subtitle, full description, and category metadata. To find apps similar to Hulu: Stream TV shows & movies, we compute cosine distance against every other app and surface the closest 60 candidates. The similarity score shown on each pick is 1 - distance/2 clamped to [0,1] — 100% means the embedding spaces are identical, 0% means orthogonal.
Re-ranking signals
We then re-rank the candidate set using current App Store rating and review-count signals so a 4.8-star app with 100,000 reviews ranks above a 4.5-star app with 200 reviews even when their embedding distance is similar. Apps that haven't shipped an update in 12 months are filtered out before re-ranking.
Refresh cadence
The similarity cache is recomputed weekly. Live App Store data (rating, review count) is verified every 6 hours.
What we don't do
No paid placements. No affiliate links. No sponsored picks. Read our full methodology.
