You don't need a cable bill to keep watching History. Here's every way to stream it online, and how to do it for free.
Reviewed and updated June 2026 by our cord-cutting team · 7 options
History was originally a place for purely historical shows, but now it's more geared toward reality TV shows like Pawn Stars and Alone.
You can watch History on Sling TV Blue, Sling TV Orange, Philo, Hulu with Live TV, or Spectrum TV Stream.
The cheapest option to watch History is Philo for $25/month.
I started A Good Movie to Watch in 2013, and for a long time cord-cutting was something we covered because readers kept asking about it, not because we went looking for it. The prices changed that. We now keep paid accounts on more than a hundred live TV and streaming services in the US, and we hold onto them on purpose, since the only reliable way to know that a service has raised its price or dropped a channel is to be the one getting the bill. The rest of that work is on our cord-cutting hub.
This History guide has been up since 2021, and we come back to it whenever something we wrote has stopped being true, which is more often than it should be. No company pays us to move it up the list, and we hold no stake in any of them. The affiliate links on this page are part of how we keep it free to read, but they have no effect on the ranking or on anything we say about a service. When one of them is overpriced or a chore to use, we tell you that, even the ones paying us a commission.
Yes, with a free trial. History is on DirecTV Stream, and you can watch it free for DirecTV Stream's 5-day free trial. Cancel before it ends and you pay nothing.
DirecTV Stream plans
Yes, with a free trial. History is on Philo, and you can watch it free for Philo's 7-day free trial. Cancel before it ends and you pay nothing.
Philo plans
With over 90 channels for as little as $28, Philo’s price is tough to beat. Sports fans or local TV viewers might not appreciate the narrow lineup, but those who love watching History would be happy to find it there along with other reality TV channels.
It carries no sports and no local channels, so it only covers entertainment and lifestyle networks.
Yes, with a free trial. History is on Hulu + Live TV, and you can watch it free for Hulu + Live TV's 3-day free trial. Cancel before it ends and you pay nothing.
Hulu + Live TV plans
Hulu with Live TV is the fastest and most convenient way for Hulu users to get live TV channels without having to test out other unfamiliar streaming services. It offers a great mix too: along with channels like History, NatGeo, and Lifetime, users also get live sports from channels like ESPN and NFL Network as well as local channels like FOX, NBC, CBS, and ABC.
It caps you at two simultaneous streams, the fewest of the big live-TV services; lifting that cap costs about $10 more a month.
Our breakdown of Hulu + Live TV →
No, not free. Sling TV carries History but has no free trial, so you pay from day one — at $45.99/mo it's the second-cheapest way to watch History on this list.
Sling TV plans
Sling Blue is the better option for History viewers who also want to stay updated on the history being made today. That’s because it streams more news programs than Sling’s other plan, Orange, on account of it carrying local channels. However, you do have to pay an extra $5/month if you do get local channels where you live.
There's no ESPN on the Blue lineup, and local channels only come in a handful of markets.
No. Fubo doesn't carry History, so there's no way to watch it there, free or paid.
No. Paramount+ doesn't carry History, so there's no way to watch it there, free or paid.
No. Peacock doesn't carry History, so there's no way to watch it there, free or paid.
No. Frndly TV doesn't carry History, so there's no way to watch it there, free or paid.
No. YouTube TV doesn't carry History, so there's no way to watch it there, free or paid.
The honest way to watch History for free is a free trial, and the trick is not to spend them one at a time. Start one, then start the next when it ends, and you can string together a few weeks of free live TV back to back, usually enough to cover a tournament or a playoff run without paying for a month.
If you're cutting cable for History, odds are you want A&E too. It's a sister channel, so every service above that carries History carries A&E as well, and the same free trials get you both. See our full guide to watching A&E without cable for the per-service breakdown.
| Service | From | Free trial | Plans | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DirecTV Stream |
$86.99/mo | 5 days | 3 | Get it |
| Philo |
$28/mo | 7 days | 1 | Get it |
| Hulu + Live TV |
$82.99/mo | 3 days | 2 | Get it |
| Sling TV |
$45.99/mo | None | 3 | Get it |
Cheapest is the question everyone starts with, and it's the wrong place to stop. A $35 plan that drops History the month after you sign up hasn't saved you anything. So the first number we pay attention to is the real one, what you owe after the introductory month ends, not the figure in the ad. From there it comes down to whether the channels you actually want sit in the base plan or get stranded in an add-on, how the service behaves day to day (a slow app and a useless DVR wear on you faster than you'd expect), and how much of a fight it puts up when you decide to leave.
Whatever lands at the top of a list like this is the service that gets most of that right for the most people. Once in a while that's also the cheapest one. Usually it isn't.
Some of the links on this page are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you sign up through one. It never costs you anything extra, and that money is part of how we pay writers and keep the site free to read.
What it doesn't do is buy a place on the list. We order these services by price, by the channels they carry, and by how they hold up in actual use, and a commission has no bearing on any of it. Plenty of the services we link to get called overpriced or a pain to use right here on the page. Prices and lineups also change constantly, so it's worth checking the current numbers on the provider's own site before you sign up for anything.
The people who test, price-check, and update our cord-cutting coverage.
