Kanopy: Cord Cutting with Help from the Library

                Kanopy is a streaming video service many libraries, including the Kansas City Public Library, have begun offering to their patrons. Some libraries offer other streaming services, so if your library doesn’t offer Kanopy, you might check with them to see what they have available.

                Kanopy offers more than 30,000 titles, and it’s free. To get Kanopy, go to Kanopy.com, hit “Watch Now,” and follow the instructions. You’ll need a library account.

                Kanopy’s offerings include documentaries, indie films, foreign titles, and classic and contemporary films. You can watch twelve selections per month, and you have three days to watch each one, which comes in handy at times, since Kanopy offers several of the Great Courses, most of which have twenty-four thirty-minute lessons.

                The first thing I watched on Kanopy was Minimalism, a documentary by Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. That led me to check out their book, Everything That Remains, which is so good I’m going to review it in my next post. I also watched Beyond Food, another documentary that led to my reading Abel James’ The Wild Diet and Dave Asprey’s The Bulletproof Diet. Both books were interesting, but both authors have done very well financially and base their diet on food that is organic, grass fed, free-range, and every other euphemism out there for expensive, which puts strict adherence to their diets out of reach for most of us commoners—especially those with large families and small incomes. I did find Kerrygold Grass Fed Butter at Aldi, but it’s about four times as expensive as Countryside Creamery, Aldi’s brand.

                As I said, both books were interesting, and my take on them is we commoners can probably get some good out of the books if we do the best we can with what’s affordable.  

                In the meantime, those inclined to cut the cord can possibly save some money by eliminating cable and adding Kanopy to their streaming device. A word of caution, though: Dan and I subscribe to Acorn and Netflix, both of which offer an awful lot of good TV. There is a danger to having so much available, and that danger is we’ll wind up living vicarious lives, so I’d advise that you limit your viewing (my limit is 90 minutes a day plus the news) in order to give yourself time to have a real life.

© 2017 Larry Roth