AZ Movies is a popular international free movie streaming website that offers its viewers access to fresh streaming entertainment from around the world at no cost. But is it safe? Is it legal? And what type of content do they offer?
Let’s see how AZ movies performs in our review. We’ll discuss how trustworthy the site is and whether or not you’ll run into any trouble using the site.
Content Library
AZ Movies has one of the largest movie libraries of available online free streaming services. The only word that can describe the video collection of AZ Movies is comprehensive (yet questionable), as there are a lot of movies available on this website. You can search for any movie from any era and are most likely to find it.
AZ Movies has old classics as well as newer titles. This website has a massive 600k monthly audience, according to VPN review site PrivacySavvy.
But the content may be questionable for some viewers.
For example, as of this writing, the following titles were available on its landing page.
- Nope (in theaters as of this writing)
- Black Phone (a Peacock release as of this writing)
- Spider-Man: No Way Home (Disney+ and Amazon Prime as of this writing)
- The Woman King (in theaters as of this writing)
Unfortunately, yes, this means AZ Movies appears to be a file share site that provides access to unlicensed content.
But is it illegal to use?
Accessing content that is unlicensed
According to Adam Michaels, streaming unlicensed content, while certainly illegal from a sharing perspective, may not equate to a clear-cut violation for the viewer.
According to Michaels, if you are watching something on a free streaming site, you may not be breaking the law – at least not currently.
“Whether it’s wrong or not, in a moral sense, is something you can ask your friends or your minister. But whether it’s illegal from a copyright viewpoint, the best answer is, probably not on an individual viewer basis,” says Jim Gibson, law professor and founder of the Intellectual Property Institute.
“This is because you are neither sharing copywritten content nor copying it. Downloading copywritten content is illegal because you are making a copy,” added Michaels, “however, streaming media is not because a new copy is not created.”
In this case, AZ Movies may make the argument that they are not violating copyright law either, as technically, they are not making copies of the content themselves, but linking to other sites where the files are hosted. But we digress.
As usual, this should not be substituted for legal advice.
Free
AZMovies claim that “it is free and always will be.” Hence, everything on this website is free, and you don’t have to pay. AZ Movies doesn’t require visitors to add their credit card information either.
Advertisements
All good things come at a cost. With AZ Movies, the audience has to put up with recurring and annoying ads. Regarding ad annoyance, we rate AZ Movies an 8 out of 10. You can close these ads, but they pop up again.
HD Content
There are not a lot of websites with this much HD content. On AZ Movies, users can watch 1080p and 720p content for free. All movies are not available for streaming in 1080p, but a large collection of movies are.
Multiple-click annoyance
From an advertising and user experience, AZ Movies can be pretty frustrating. Users report having to click multiple times on a movie before it plays. The average number of users claim they had to click three times before movies started playing. However, after a movie session was initiated, there were not a lot of ads (pop-up tabs) afterward.
Summary
AZ Movies is overall a reliable place for content. The question is: are you ok with how it is done?
You can stream from a large library of HD quality titles if you can put up with the annoying ads. You also need to be ok with the fact that it is a heavily backlinked site, where the video files, while not being copied by the site, are almost undoubtedly being shared from the original location without license (but we have no way to know for sure, just an observation).
Pros
- Free
- Clean layout
- Large collection
- HD content
Cons
- Annoying ads
- Multiple clicks issue