Library Class and Subject Guides: Film and Video Collections: Freely Available Video sources

Internet Sites for Streaming Video

A number of openly accessible Internet sites provide access to streaming videos. These sites may host content or merely point to content hosted elsewhere. Advertising supports some of these sites. Others are the official site for a producer, distributor, series, or festival. Searching functions on these sites vary widely, and content can change or be removed without notice. For additional information click on the site name, below.


	American Archive of Public Broadcasting American Experience American Indian Film Gallery American Memory American Rhetoric Annenberg Media (Learner.org) Archive of American Television ARKive C-Span Video Library Civil Rights Digital Library Ethnographic Video for Instruction & Analysis Folkstreams Frontline (PBS) HippoCampus International Monetary Fund Internet Archive		Minnesota Video Vault - Twin Cities Public Television National Film Registry PBS Nova PBS Video PBS Learning Media P.O.V. Video ScienceCinema Scripps Library and Multimedia Archive TED: Technology, Entertainment, Design Thanhouser Films Online WGBH Open Vault YouTube

Disclaimer: These are freely available websites. Library Services cannot guarantee availability of the content they provide, nor assume responsibility for the functionality of these sites. But we appreciate it if you report a problem with the links.

American Archive of Public Broadcasting

American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB)
The Library of Congress and WGBH in Boston have embarked on a project to preserve for posterity the most significant public television and radio programs of the past 60 years: The American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The collection of 40,000 hours contains thousands of high quality programs that have had national impact. The vast majority of this initial American Archive content, however, consists of regional and local programs that document American communities during the last half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. This extraordinary collection includes local news and public affairs programs, local history productions that document the heritage of local communities, and programs dealing with education, environmental issues, music, art, literature, dance, poetry, religion, and even filmmaking on a local level.

American Experience

American Experience
Browse the entire PBS American Experience series featuring over 250 films. Watch full films online, download teacher’s guides, go behind the scenes, and learn more about your favorite films.

American Indian Film Gallery

American Indian Film Gallery
The AIFG presently contains over 450 non-fiction films that document Native lifeways from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, with a large concentration on peoples of the Southwest. The films range from a 1922 silent newsreel to recent footage of pow-wows and political meetings in 2011. The majority of the films date to the golden age of U.S. educational and sponsored filmmaking, after World War II up to the advent of portable video. Interestingly, the video age marks a shift in the collection from films about Native peoples to films by Native peoples. This historical span, then, allows for study of Native representation from outside and inside indigenous communities across the Americas over nearly a century. As such, it is an incomparable teaching and research tool for examining historical attitudes, representations, and understandings of indigenous populations across the Americas.

American Memory

American Memory
From the Library of Congress collections, several hundred early motion pictures are viewable in the American Memory project.

American Rhetoric

American Rhetoric
Database of and index to 5000+ full text, audio and video versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, other recorded media events, and a declaration or two.

Not all speeches have accompanying videos. Site supported by advertising, and maintained by a speech communication professor.

Annenberg Media

Annenberg Media (Learner.org)
Part of the Annenberg Foundation, Annenberg Learner funds and distributes more than 100 multimedia courses and workshops to help teachers keep current on the content they teach. Professional development resources provide teachers with research on the most effective teaching strategies along with their connection to national education content standards, and examples of these principles applied in real classrooms. The video components are paired with extensive Web sites that include online texts, course and workshop guides, and extensive background information to enhance the learning experience. Using these resources, teachers can learn from experts, other teachers, and even students who reveal their unique interpretations of the content.

Click on the Video graphic to view available programs. Not all series listed on the site are available for streaming. Many of the videos include closed captioning.

Archive of American Television

The Archive of American Television
Archive of American Television (EmmyTVlegends.org) has conducted over 800 oral history interviews (over 4000 hours) with the legends of television. These interviews chronicle the birth and growth of American TV History as it evolves, and make the interviews available worldwide. The Archive continues to produce new interviews every year. The collection covers a variety of professions, genres, and topics in electronic media history.

ARKive

ARKive
ARKive is sponsored by the wildlife charity Wildscreen. Their mission is to use the power of wildlife imagery to inspire the global community to discover, value and protect the natural world. Working with the world’s very best wildlife and environmental filmmakers and photographers, Wildscreen collects, curates, showcases and shares the world’s best wildlife imagery through a series of inter-related initiatives, each uniquely helping to deliver the charity’s mission.

C-SPAN Video Library

C-SPAN Video Library
The C-SPAN Video Library began in 1987 as a way to archive and index the thousands of hours of congressional coverage produced by the network every year. The project quickly became one of the most comprehensive video archives of governmental and political content.

In 2010, C-SPAN won its third Peabody Award for the Video Library—now a collection totaling over 213,000 hours of programming first made available to the public for free in 2007. In addition, The Video Library records all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Programs are extensively indexed, making the database of C-SPAN programming an unparalleled chronological resource.

Civil Rights Digital Library

Civil Rights Digital Library
The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. The CRDL provides educator resources and contextual materials, including Freedom on Film, relating instructive stories and discussion questions from the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia, delivering engaging online articles and multimedia.

EVIA Digital Archive Project - Ethnographic Video for Instruction & Analysis

EVIA Digital Archive
The EVIA Digital Archive Project is a collaborative endeavor to create a digital archive of ethnographic field video for use by scholars and instructors. Funded since 2001 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with significant contributions from Indiana University and the University of Michigan, the Project has been developed through the joint efforts of ethnographic scholars, archivists, librarians, technologists, and legal experts. Beyond the primary mission of digitally preserving ethnographic field video, the EVIA Project has also invested significantly in the creation of software and systems for the annotation, discovery, playback, peer review, and scholarly publication of video and accompanying descriptions.

Folkstreams

Folkstreams
Folkstreams mission is to build a national preserve of hard-to-find documentary films about American folk or roots cultures, and to give those films renewed life by streaming them on the internet. The films were produced by independent filmmakers in a golden age that began in the 1960s and was made possible by the development first of portable cameras and then capacity for synch sound. Their films focus on the culture, struggles, and arts of unnoticed Americans from many different regions and communities. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an institutional partner.

Frontline

PBS Frontline
Described by The Atlantic as “the best news program on television,” the series has built a reputation for powerful investigative storytelling that tackles the tough, controversial and complex stories that shape our times. More than 180 FRONTLINE documentaries are streaming in full online.

HippoCampus

HippoCampus
HippoCampus.org is a free, core academic web site that delivers rich multimedia content--videos, animations, and simulations--on general education subjects to middle-school and high-school teachers and college professors, and their students, free of charge. Teachers project HippoCampus content during classroom learning and assign it for computer labs and homework. Students use the site in the evenings for study and exam prep.

International Monetary Fund

International Monetary Fund Videos
Provides more than 1,000 short-form videos, generally under 5 minutes, produced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Search options permit searching by a combination of elements: Category, Country, Year, Language, and Keyword. Categories include: Countries and Regions, Economic Outlook, Speeches and Interviews, Topics and Issues, among others.

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive
The Moving Image Archive contains digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons, concerns, and ephemeral material.

Minnesota Video Vault

Connect to MN Video Vault

Minnesota Video Vault
The Minnesota Video Vault is a project of Twin Cities Public Television. The Vault contains hundreds of programs from the tpt archives: classic interviews and performances from Nighttimes Variety, Newsnight Minnesota and Almanac as well as a broad cross-section of tpt documentaries. Also included are current tpt productions, as well as programs from other regional public television stations. And soon, the MN Video Vault will feature new web-only tpt productions.
Includes titles such as Dakota Exile, Dakota Conflict, Diary: Asian Minnesotans, Disabilities: Independence to Inclusion that have never been released on DVD.

National Film Registry

National Film Registry
The National Film Registry is a list of movies deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" that are earmarked for preservation by the Library of Congress. A selection of films from The National Film Registry are available online for free.

NOVA

PBS Nova
Access to selected programs from the acclaimed PBS science series. Available videos are organized by broad subject categories: Ancient Worlds, Body & Brain, Evolution, Military & Espionage, Nature, Physics & Math, Planet Earth, Space & Flight, Tech & Engineering.

PBS Learning Media

Connect to PBS Learning Media

PBS LearningMedia offers teachers more than 100,000 videos, images, interactives, lesson plans, and articles drawn from critically acclaimed PBS programs such as NOVA, FRONTLINE, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, and SID THE SCIENCE KID, and from expert content contributors such as The National Archives and NASA. Content aligns with Common Core State Standards. Requires registration, but is free to use.

PBS Learning Media
PBS LearningMedia offers teachers more than 100,000 videos, images, interactives, lesson plans, and articles drawn from critically acclaimed PBS programs such as NOVA, FRONTLINE, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, and SID THE SCIENCE KID, and from expert content contributors such as The National Archives and NASA. Content aligns with Common Core State Standards. Requires registration, but is free to use.

PBS Video

PBS Video
Home page for available videos from all PBS programming.

P.O.V. Video

PBS Point of View
POV (a cinema term for "point of view") is television's longest-running showcase for independent non-fiction films. POV premieres 14-16 of the best, boldest and most innovative programs every year on PBS. Since 1988, POV has presented over 400 films to public television audiences across the country. POV films are known for their intimacy, their unforgettable storytelling and their timeliness, putting a human face on contemporary social issues. This site provides many full length films, as well as interviews with filmmakers and clips for use in the classroom setting.

ScienceCinema

ScienceCinema
Science Cinema contains multimedia videos highlighting the U.S. Department of Energy's scientific research. Audio indexing and speech recognition technology allows the user to search for specific words and phrases spoken by the presenter in these video files. Simply enter a term and the results list will point to the precise snippets of the video where the term was spoken.

Scripps Library and Multimedia Archive

Scripps Library and Multimedia Archive
Scripps archive provides a unique collection of material on U.S. public policy. The Library's multimedia archive includes more than 2,500 hours of secret White House recordings, hundreds of presidential oral history interviews, audio and video recordings of Miller Center Forums, and documents related to the executive branch of American government.

TED: Technology, Entertainment, Design

TED Talks
TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues.

Thanhouser Films Online

Thanhouser Films Online
56 titles provide a representative cross section of the early silent motion picture era films produced by the Thanhouser film enterprise based in New Rochelle, New York. From its founding in 1909 through 1917, Thanhouser Company, and its successor company, Mutual's Thanhouser Film Corporation, produced and released over 1,000 silent films to worldwide distribution.

University Videos

UniversityVideos.org
Video library that curates freely available academic videos and the metadata from numerous universities' YouTube channels, as well as other informational sources such as TED talks, scientific and cultural institutions such as NASA and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, hospitals, research institutions, and broadcast archives such as Nova, the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. Includes searchable transcripts.

WGBH Open Vault

WGBH Open Vault
Provides online access to unique and historically important content produced by the public television and radio station WGBH. The ever-expanding site contains video, audio, images, searchable transcripts, and resource management tools, all of which are available for individual and classroom learning.

YouTube

YouTube
YouTube can occasionally be a source of last resort for out-of-print and hard-to-find content.
Use common sense when copyrighted programs are posted by users other than the copyright holder.