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Streaming Media & Media Resources at the Addlestone Library: Open Access Streaming Sites

Connect to Can I Stream It?

This free service created by Urban Pixels provides a simple interface to search across popluar streaming services to find where a film is available.

The site covers both movies and television and indexes Netflix, Amazon, HuluPlus and others.

Results show whether a title is available for instant viewing, rental, or purchase, or available on DVD to service subscribers  (Netflix).

Some titles are also available on Snag Films or other free sites, but this availability may not be displayed.

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 or to connect to any of these sites, click on the site name, below.

 
   

Disclaimer:  College of Charleston Libraries is not responsible for any of the content linked from these sites.  We cannot guarantee availability of the content they provide, nor assume responsibility for the functionality of these sites.

American Indian Film Gallery

Connect to American Indian Film Gallery

Vintage motion pictures offering rich perspectives on the American Indian experience.

The site organizes titles by tribes, linking to films for more than 100 tribes.  A text box to describe each film is nonfunctioning, providing only "lorum ipsum dolor" filler text as a place holder.  Apart from what displays in the film itself, no additional information (publication date, running time, etc.) is provided.
 
These archival films are not perfect. Some were educational shorts used in American schools from the 1930s to the 1970s. Several have abbreviated titles or missing endings. Some are spliced or scratched; others have faded color.  These films are windows into the human past, stunning documents with much to tell us about our New World story.

American Memory

Connect to American Memory

The American Memory project from the Library of Congress provides access to several hundred early motion pictures, organized into 11 discrete collections:

  • America at Work, America at Leisure: Motion Pictures from 1894-1915
  • American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920
  • Before and After the Great Earthquake and Fire: Early Films of San Francisco, 1897-1916
  • Inside an American Factory: Films of the Westinghouse Works, 1904
  • Last Days of a President: Films of McKinley and the Pan-American Exposition, 1901
  • Life of a City: Early Films of New York, 1898-1906
  • Origins of American Animation
  • Prosperity and Thrift: the Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929
  • Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures
  • Theodore Roosevelt: His Life and Times on Film

American Rhetoric

Connect to American Rhetoric

Features a growing collection of text, audio, and video versions of over 5,000 speeches. The site provides access to "public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, and other recorded media events." Includes sections for Christian rhetoric, "Top 100 Speeches," "Rhetorical Figures in Sound," "Rhetoric of 9-11," and more. Notable is the selection of speeches from movies, arranged alphabetically by title.

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

Annenberg Media

Connect to Annenberg Media

Part of the Annenberg Foundation, Annenberg Media uses media and telecommunications to advance excellent teaching in American schools. The Learner.org web site provides access to many of the exceptional educational video programs developed with grant money as telecourses, including series on algebra, art, chemistry, economics, film, history, poetry, and foreign languages, among others.

Not all series listed on the site are available for streaming.  This graphic marks programs available for online viewing .  Videos stream in Flash.  Many of the videos include closed captioning.  Users accessing the site on a PC have greater control over the size of the playback window.

Archive of American Television

Connect to The Archive of American Television

Hosted by the TV Academy Foundation this archive provides access to hundreds of in-depth video interviews with TV's greatest legends and pioneers.

These television history interviews can be  browsed by person, show, topic or profession. New interviews and indexes are added regularly.

ARKive

Connect to ARKive.org

Presents a collection of vivid wildlife films and still photographs, with more than 3,500 of the world's leading filmmakers and photographers actively contributing to the project.  Also included are teaching resources organized by age, games, and other activities.

The site permits searching across Species Groups, Eco Regions, Geography, and Conservation status.

Associated Press Archive / British Movietone

The Associated Press and British Movietone, one of the world's most comprehensive newsreel archives, are together bringing more than 1 million minutes of digitized film footage to YouTube. Showcasing the moments, people and events that shape the world, it will be the largest upload of historical news content on the video-sharing platform to date. 
 
The two channels will act as a view-on-demand visual encyclopedia, offering a unique perspective on the most significant moments of modern history. Available for all to explore, the channels will also be powerful educational tools and a source of inspiration for history enthusiasts and documentary filmmakers.
 
The YouTube channels will include more than 550,000 video stories dating from 1895 to the present day. For example, viewers can see video from the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, exclusive footage of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Marilyn Monroe captured on film in London in the 1950s and Twiggy modeling the fashions of the 1960s.

BBC History of the World in 100 Objects

Connect to History of the World in 100 Objects

Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, narrates 100 programa that retell humanity's history through the objects we have made.  Each episode consists of an image of the item discussed, and a radio naration lasting about 15 minutes.

C-SPAN Video Library

Connect to C-SPAN Video Library

Contains all C-SPAN programs since 1987, indexed, abstracted, and cataloged by the C-SPAN Archives staff.

Programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and location. The congressional sessions and committee hearings are indexed by person with full-text.

Civil Rights Digital Library

Connect to Civil Rights Digital Library

Provides access to online films, texts, images, and audio recordings related to the Civil Rights movement in the United States in the 1950's and 1960's.

CRDL is a partnership among librarians, technologists, archivists, educators, scholars, academic publishers, and public broadcasters. The initiative receives support through a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The site provides both simple keyword searching and advanced searching.  Content also can be browsed by Events, Places, People, Topics, Media Types (including print, government records, correspondences, etc.)

Other features of the site include numerous instructional materials, including lesson plans, quizzes, slide shows, study guides, and worksheets.

Documentary Heaven

Connect to Documentary Heaven

Documentary Heaven is a compilation website for documentaries.  The site does not host videos itself, but rather links to and organizers documentaries that are already hosted on other sites such as YouTube and Vimeo.  The site gives a brief summary of each documentary and allows comments.

The videos are arranged by a vast number of categories.  Some of these categories include  9/11, archeology, art and artists, atheism, biographies, countries, economics, evolution, health, history, human rights, movies, music, nature, performing arts, philosophy, religion, science, sport, technology, and war.

Documentary Heaven encourages independent film makers to link their films to this site as well. 

 

 

EVIA Digital Archive Project - Ethnographic Video for Instruction & Analysis

Connect to Eviada

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.

Viewing videos requires registering for an account and agreeing to the end-user license agreement.

Folkstreams

Connect to Folkstreams

Provides streaming access to a large collection of documentary films about American folk, or roots, cultures.  Includes essays about the traditions and filmmakes, transcriptions, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites. 

Site provides simple keyword and advanced searching, as well as ability to brose by subjects, regions, titles, filmmakers, and other categories.  Video displays include links to additional, related films.

Frontline

Connect to Frontline

View complete episodes of a large selection of films from the acclaimed PBS public affairs series.

HealthLibrary Online

Connect to HealthLibrary Online

The Stanford Health Library provides a collection of online videos covering various health topics, including health and society, cancer support, and women's health.

Videos may be viewable online through Stanford University iUniversity (iTunes interface) or QuickTime, or available for purchase on DVD.  Not all videos are available for online viewing.

HippoCampus

Connect to HippoCampus

A project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), HippoCampus provides high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students.

Content is organized by broad disciplines:  Algebra, American Government, Biology, Calculus, Environmental Science, Physics, Psychology, Religion, Statistics, US History

The site was designed as part of Open Education Resources (OER), a worldwide effort to improve access to quality education. Colleges and universities develop the content and contributes it to the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), another MITE project. Both HippoCampus and NROC are supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Hulu

Connect to Hulu

A partnership between NBC and ABC (Disney), Hulu is predominantly a site for television content. 

Hulu distributes video both on its own website and syndicates its hosting to other sites, and allows users to embed Hulu clips on their websites. In addition to NBC, ABC and FOX programs and movies, Hulu carries shows from other networks such as Comedy Central, PBS, USA Network, Bravo, FX, Syfy, Sundance, E!, and other commercial producers. 

The Channel link at the bottom of the Hulu homepage provides a broad subject organization of its content, including "News and Information" which includes sub-categories of Current News, Documentary & Biography, Live Events & Specials, and Politics.

International Monetary Fund

Connect to 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:  Countires and Regions, Economic Outlook, Speeches and Interviews, Topics and Issues, among others.

Internet Archive

Connect to The Internet Archive

The Moving Image Archive within the Internet Archive provides access to nearly a quarter million films, uploaded by Archive users, and ranging from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts.

Videos in the Archive are organized into 15 broad sub-categories:  Animation and Cartoons, Arts & Music, Computers & Technology, Cultural & Academic Films, Ephemeral Films, Home Movies, Movies, News & Public Affairs, Open Source Movies, Spirituality & Religion, Sports Videos, Video Games, Vlogs, and Youth Media.

The Archive also contains the Prelinger Archive, the most complete and varied collection of ephemeral films (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) in existence.

Internet Movie Database

Connect to Internet Movie Database

Provides access to full-length films and television episodes, many in the public domain.  The alphabetic listing of titles links to the IMDB page that describes the film and provides a link to stream the video.  The link may redirect or pull the stream from another site such as the Internet Archive, SnagFilms, or Hulu.

Lannan Foundation

Connect to Lannan Foundation

The Lannan Foundation is a family foundation dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity through projects which support exceptional contemporary artists and writers, as well as inspired Native activists in rural indigenous communities.

The site provides access to 15 years of audio and video recordings from live events and interviews with notable authors, scholars, and activists.  The site also provides @450 brief biographies.

There are separate search interfaces for biographies, audio files, and videos.  More recordings are included on the foundations podcast site, which is available for subscription via iTunes.

Learners TV

Connect to Learners TV

This comprehensive site provides thousands of streaming and downloadable video lectures, live online Tests, and other materials in the fields of Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Dentistry, Engineering, History, Language Training, Law, Literature, Management and Accounting, Mathematics, Medicine, Nursing, Physics, and Psychology

The site provides free video and audio lectures of whole courses conducted by university faculty from around the world. Most of the materials offered are licensed by the respective institutes under a Creative Commons License.

Media That Matters Film Festival

Connect to Media That Matters Film Festival

Annual collection showcasing twelve short films on important topics of the day.  Seven years of films available on the site, organized alphabetically by title, by year.  A simple search interface facilitates finding films by keyword.

Films may also be browsed by one of 15 issues:  Criminal Justice, Economic Justice, Environment, Family & Society, Gay/Lesbian, Gender/Women, Health/Health Advocacy, Human Rights, Immigration, International, Media, Politics/Government, Racial Justice, Religous Freedom, and Youth.

Metropolitan Museum of Art - 82nd & Fifth

More animated slide shows than videos, these interactive programs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC) offer unique perspectives on art through time, culture, and medium.

Connect to 82nd & Fifth

One hundred episodes, each @ 2 minutes, in which Metropolitan Museum of Art curators talk about works of art that changed the way they see the world.  Episodes posts two at a time, Wedensdays, through December 25, 2013.

Each episode links to related clips and/or interactive pieces, and includes full identification of the curator, the work of art, and its donor(s).


Connect to Connections

Offers personal perspectives on works of art in the collection by 100 Met staff members, each one addressing a theme such as Motherhood, Magic, Masks, or Water.

 

Connect to Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Presents the Met’s collection via a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of global art history. Targeted at students and scholars of art history, it is an invaluable reference, research, and teaching tool. Authored by the Met’s experts—predominantly made up of curators but also of conservators, scientists, and educators—the Timeline comprises 300 timelines, 930 essays, close to 7,000 objects, and a robust index, and is regularly updated and enriched to provide new scholarship and insights on the collection.

Mike Wallace Interviews, The

Connect to The Mike Wallace Interview

Video of 65 interviews from the television series hosted by the late Mike Wallace from 1957 and 1958.  Provided by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Each program includes a text transcript. Available interviewees include Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Margaret Sanger, and Salvador Dali among other notables of the time.

Movieclips

Connect to Movieclips

Provides more than 12,000 short clips from feature films licensed from Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. The Movieclips player can be embedded in social networks as Facebook, and shared on blogs, Twitter and other personal websites, and used in PowerPoint presentations.

In addition to searching by title or actor, the site provide additional search capabilities for dialogue, genre, action, occassion, theme, and mood and categories including best kiss, tearjerkers, birthdays, holidays, awkward moments, action moments, bad guys and fight scenes.

Reuse of the clips requires registering with the site.

National Screening Room: Library of Congress

National Screening Room: Library of Congress

This is a free collection of digitized historical films, commercials, newsreels and other clips. Most of the movies are in the public domain and are available for downloading; others are only available to stream.

The National Screening Room is something of a time capsule: The videos cover the period from 1890 through 1999, capturing a broad range of American life. Notable films include home movies by the songwriters George and Ira Gershwin; issues of the “All-American News,” a newsreel intended for black audiences in the mid-20th century; and a selection of instructional films about mental health from the 1950's.

The library has the largest archive of moving images in the world, amounting to more than 1.6 million materials. Nearly 300 videos are online, and new content will be added to the website on a monthly basis.

This text adapted from New York Times article of October 23, 2018:  The Library of Congress Lets You Stream Hundreds of Free Films

 

Newslook

Connect to Newslook

 

Provides direct access to visual news stories and analysis of the current issues, selected from the web by journalists and documentarians.


Advanced search provides filters for subject, source, length, and ideology (Progressive, Centrist, Conservative).


Sources include (among many others): ABC, CBS, Fox News, NBC, PBS, Associated Press, Al Jezeera, C-Span, Time, Washington Post.  Categories include World (further subdivided by region), Economics, Science, Health, Art & Culture.


Specific stories provide links to Different Perspectives, Background and Analysis & Additional Stories as they relate to that story. Registered users can comment on individual stories.

NOVA

Connect to NOVA

Provides access to selected programs from the acclaimed PBS science series.  Programs are divided into chapters and have closed captioning.

Available videos are organized by broad subject categories:  Anthropology, Disasters, Earth, Exploration, Flight, Health, History, Investigations, Nature, Physics & Math, Space, and Technology.

 

PBS Learning Media

Connect to PBS Learning Media

Developed by PBS, WNET, and KET, and 31 other PBS stations.  Content contributed from publicly funded organizations, including the National Archives, the Library of Congress and NPR, NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the US Department of Education, delivers thousands of resources for use in the classroom and with home-schoolers.

Content aligns with Common Core State Standards for preK-16 classrooms.  This collection contains more that than 114,000 research-based instructional resources – including videos, interactives, images, audio files, mobile apps, lesson plans, and worksheets. 

Requires personal registration on the site.

PBS Video

Connect to PBS Video

Provides access to selected programs from selected PBS series (such as Nature, American Experience, Nova, and Frontline, among others.)  Users can browse by Programs, Topics, or Collections. Individual programs are subdivided into smaller segments.

Plunkett Research

Connect to PlunkettResearch

Provides short videos on topics related to market research, industry trends analysis, business commentary, and industry statistics on a dedicated YouTube channel.

Includes selected videos specifically geared to the chapters in the book The Next Boom

P.O.V. Video

Connect to P.O.V. Video

Provides a selection of full length films, short films, and lesson plan based clips from the acclaimed PBS documentary film series POV.

ScienceCinema

Connect to ScienceCinema

Contains multimedia videos highlighting the U.S. Department of Energy's scientific research.  State-of-the-art 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

Connect to Scripps Library and Multimedia Archive

From the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, the Scripps archive provides a unique collection of material on U.S. public policy.

The Library's collection includes streaming video of State of the Union addresses from Kennedy to Obama.  The multimedia archive also 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.

SnagFilms

Connect to SnagFilms

Provides access to full-length documentary films from established distributors and first-time filmmakers.  The Snag Films library includes more than 850 films.

Filmmakers and distributors submit titles to SnagFilms for curatorial review.  Videos stream in Flash.

The site organizes titles by broad Topics (such as Arts, Environment, Health, History, Women's Issues, etc.) and by Channels (including well-established film companies such as Alive Mind, Icarus, Fanlight, PBS, and National Geographic).

The SnagFilms website encourages donating to causes by linking each film to a specific charity.

Brief commercials precede and are interspersed through the video playback.

TED: Technology, Entertainment, Design

Connect to TED:  Technology, Entertainment, Design

Makes available the best talks and performances from TED and partners.  More than 500 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks feature closed captions in English, and many feature subtitles in various languages. Videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Talks are organized under broad subject categories:  Technology, Entertainment, Design, Business, Science, and Global Issues.

Thanhouser Films Online

Connect to Thanhouser Films Online

More than 50 films provide a representative cross section of the output produced by the Thanhouser film enterprise based in New Rochelle, New York between 1910 and 1917.

The films were assembled over the past 25 years with the cooperation of archives around the world, including The Library of Congress in Washington, DC, The British Film Institute in London, England, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York, the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, California, the EYE Film Institute Netherlands in Amsterdam, Holland, and from the Thanhouser collection.

Each film includes a summary and analysis written by film historian Victor Graf.  Andrew Crow, Raymond A. Brubacher and Ben Model composed and performed original musical accompaniment commissioned exclusively for this collection.

Top Documentary Films

Connect to Top Documentary Films

TDF is an amalgamation of hundreds of documentary flims covering a wide variety of topics including history, science, politics, and society. 

The embedded videos on this site are from Youtube. In fact this site functions as a comprehensive index of Youtube documentaries.   There is no meta-data for titles (such as producer or year of production), and TDF makes no attempt to critically evaluate a title for scholarly content.

Even so, it is a vast collection of documentary films for reviewing and screening.

 

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TVNews

Connect to TVNews

This portion of the Internet Archive collects and preserves television news.  The collection contains more than 350,000 news programs collected over 3 years from national U.S. networks and stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C.  The archive is updated with new broadcasts 24 hours after they are aired.  Older materials are also being added.  Use the index of searchable text and short, streamed clips to find programs to borrow on DVD-ROM or view at the Internet Archive’s library in San Francisco.  Fees apply for borrowing.

UC Berkeley Media Resources Center Online Media

Connect to UC Berkeley Media Resources Center Online Media

A collection online video and audio recordings of notable lectures, events, and readings held at University of California, Berkeley.  This database includes both video materials accessible by the general public, and videos licensed for access by current University of California, Berkeley students, faculty, and staff only (CalNet authentication required). Audio recordings in the collection are accessible by all users.

The site includes a simple keyword search interface.

Linked from within this site are audio, video, and text files from the UC Berkeley Library Social Activism Sound Recording Project.  This collection includes information onf the Free Speech Movement, the Black Panther Party, Anti-Vietnam War Protests in the San Francisco Area and Beyond, and LGBT History.

Veoh

Connect to Veoh

Provides access to videos from major content publishers like CBS, ABC, WB, MTV Networks, ESPN, Sony/BMG and Lions Gate, other video sites like YouTube and Hulu, as well as independent filmmakers and content producers.

Users can sort content by type using pull-down menus for Videos, TV Shows, or Movies, each with sub-menus including categories such as Documentary & Biography.

Brief commercials precede video playback.

Watching full-length videos via Veoh requires installation of the Veoh Web Player.

WGBH Open Vault

Connect to 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

Connect to YouTube

Perhaps the best known of all steaming video sites, YouTube is a subsidiary of Google, Inc . The site displays a wide variety of user-uploaded video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos.

Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, but some media corporations including CBS, the BBC, and other organizations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program.

Due to the 10 minute limit on YouTube uploads (partners can load longer videos), many programs on the site are divided into several parts.

YouTube can be a source of last resort for out-of-print and hard-to-find content. 

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