The Chosen

What The Chosen is

The Chosen is a multi-season dramatic television series about the life of Jesus and the people around him, created and directed by Dallas Jenkins and produced by The Chosen, Inc. through the donor-funded Come and See Foundation. As of writing, the series is in its fifth season with additional seasons announced, and has accumulated more than 200 million episode views worldwide — widely cited as the largest crowdfunded film or TV project in history.

The Chosen app is the official streaming home for the series. It bundles the full episode library with a growing set of companion experiences — behind-the-scenes content, Bible roundtable discussions with the cast and theological consultants, livestream events, devotional plans, and the Pay It Forward giving flow that keeps the whole thing free. It runs on every major mobile and TV platform and the web, and you can start watching without creating an account.

Why everyday viewers prefer The Chosen app

The single biggest practical difference between the The Chosen app and every other faith-based streaming service is that the headline content is genuinely free. Not free-with-ads, not free-for-seven-days, not free-but-only-the-first-episode. Every season streams in full at no cost, on every supported device, because the production is funded on the back end by viewer donations rather than on the front end by subscriptions. For households who would otherwise have to weigh another $9.99/month against the rest of their budget, that changes the math entirely.

The second difference is the companion layer. Most streaming apps stop at the episode. The Chosen app keeps going — the Bible roundtables alone are an unusual artifact, with Jenkins and a rotating set of cast members and Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Latter-day Saint consultants walking through the scriptural background of each episode. It’s the kind of thing a publisher would normally sell as a separate "Behind the Series" subscription. Here it’s in the same app, on the same shelf as the episode itself.

Free streaming of every episode: the headline feature, and a real one

Open the app, tap Watch, and every episode of every season is available immediately. There is no account wall, no payment screen, no trial countdown — you can hand the phone to a friend who has never heard of the show and they’ll be watching the pilot in under ten seconds. Resolution and bitrate are solid on TV apps; the iOS and Android players have been tuned hard over the last two years and now stream cleanly even on weaker connections. Subtitles and dubs are accessible from the standard player overlay, with 50+ languages supported as of writing.

This sounds like a small thing. In practice it’s transformative for how the show actually moves through the world — a pastor can recommend the app from the pulpit knowing every visitor that night can watch the same episode for free; a grandparent can send the link to a grandchild without worrying about whose card pays for what; a small group can plan a six-week study around season one without anyone needing to subscribe to anything. The donor-funded model is the entire reason the app gets to behave this way, and it is the single most distinctive product decision in faith-based streaming right now.

Behind-the-scenes and Bible roundtables: the companion layer most apps don’t bother with

Each episode ships with a set of companion videos that live one tap away from the main player. The behind-the-scenes featurettes are short documentary pieces — location scouts, costume notes, conversations with the actor playing a given disciple, gag reels, and the production diaries Jenkins has been recording since season one. The Bible roundtables are the more unusual artifact: long-form, sit-down conversations in which Jenkins and a rotating panel of theological consultants — typically including Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Latter-day Saint voices — walk through the scriptural source material for each episode and discuss where the show stayed close to the text, where it adapted, and why.

For viewers who want to use the show as a launching point for actual Bible reading, the roundtables are the bridge. They aren’t verse-by-verse exegesis — they’re conversational — but they consistently send viewers back to specific passages with more context than they had before. Small groups in particular tend to use the pattern of "episode, then roundtable, then read the passage together," and the app supports that flow natively: every roundtable is grouped with its episode rather than buried in a separate extras menu.

Live events and global watch parties: appointment television, restored

Season premieres, finales, and special broadcasts livestream inside the app to a global audience simultaneously — the recent global premiere of season five streamed to viewers in 175+ countries at the same hour. There’s a live chat panel during these events, a countdown clock that brings everyone in together, and post-show Q&As with Jenkins and cast that often run an hour or more. The app handles the scale unusually well; the production team has been streaming live events at this size for several seasons now and the infrastructure has been hardened against the demand spikes that have crashed other launches.

The cultural effect of this is hard to overstate. Faith-based streaming has spent two decades trying to replicate the "everyone watching the same thing on Sunday night" rhythm that live network television used to provide. The Chosen app is the first one to actually pull it off at scale — a global audience, the same hour, a shared chat, a shared finale. For a lot of viewers the live events are the moment the app stops feeling like a streaming product and starts feeling like a community.

Pricing

Where The Chosen falls behind

No reliable offline downloads on iOS in the standard player. The TV apps are streaming-first by design, which is fine on home Wi-Fi, but if you fly often or take long drives without coverage you’ll feel the gap. Workarounds exist on some platforms, but a clean "download this episode for the plane" button on iOS isn’t there yet.

Search and library navigation lag the catalog. The app now holds five seasons of episodes plus hundreds of behind-the-scenes pieces, dozens of roundtables, livestream replays, and devotional content. The shelves do a reasonable job, but finding a specific roundtable from two seasons ago can take more taps than it should.

Frequent giving prompts. The Pay It Forward asks are gentle and the model is the entire reason the show exists, but families watching with younger kids may want to know in advance that the post-episode screen will sometimes invite a donation.

Not a Bible study app. The roundtables and devotionals are excellent companion content, but if you’re looking for original-language tools, commentary integration, or structured Bible study, this isn’t the product — pair it with YouVersion, the YouVersion-hosted Chosen reading plans, or a dedicated study tool.

Live chat moderation at scale is best-effort. During the biggest livestream events the global chat moves fast and the moderation is volume-limited — the experience is fine for most viewers, but it’s a live, public chat, not a curated comment thread.

The Chosen app vs. Pure Flix vs. Angel Studios

Different products, different jobs. The Chosen app is a single-show app — the official, donor-funded home for one ongoing dramatic series and its companion material. Pure Flix (now Great American Pure Flix) is a subscription streaming service with a broad catalog of faith-and-family films and series. Angel Studios is a hybrid — distribution platform, theatrical pipeline, and crowdfunding marketplace — hosting a slate of titles it has helped fund, including Dry Bar Comedy, Sound of Freedom, Tuttle Twins, and previously a distribution role with The Chosen.

On price, The Chosen app is the clear winner of the three because there is no price — the entire library streams free. Pure Flix is a paid subscription (around $7.99/month or $79.99/year as of writing) and that’s how it funds its catalog. Angel Studios runs a freemium model with a paid Guild membership that supports its slate, and some titles are gated to members.

On catalog breadth, the order flips. Pure Flix has the deepest faith-and-family back catalog, Angel Studios has the most active original slate across genres, and The Chosen app has — by design — one show and its companion content. If you want a broad streaming subscription, Pure Flix or Angel are the candidates. If you specifically want The Chosen with the best possible companion experience, the official app is the only place to get it.

On companion content, The Chosen app is the standout. The Bible roundtables, behind-the-scenes featurettes, livestream events, and devotional integration around a single series are not matched by either of the broader platforms. Different strengths. Pure Flix is better at catalog breadth. Angel Studios is broader (theatrical, animation, comedy, originals). The Chosen app is better at going deep on one story.

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