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: TCU 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 Experience
View complete episodes of select films from the acclaimed PBS documentary series.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
EVIA Digital Archive Project – Ethnographic Video for Instruction & Analysis
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.
Provides streaming access to a large collection of documentary films about American folk, or roots, cultures. Includes essays about the traditions and filmmakers, 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
View complete episodes of a large selection of films from the acclaimed PBS public affairs series.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 MySpace, 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, occasion, 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.
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.
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 homeschoolers.
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, interactive, images, audio files, mobile apps, lesson plans, and worksheets.
Requires personal registration on the site.
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.
Provides a selection of full length films, short films, and lesson plan based clips from the acclaimed PBS documentary film series POV.
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
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.
TED: Technology, Entertainment, Design
Makes available the best talks and performances from TED and partners. More than 500 TED Talks 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.
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.
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.
Access to the videos in the collection requires Windows Media player. Macintosh users will need the free Flip4Mac plug-in. Access to the audio recordings in the collection requires the Real player.
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 on the Free Speech Movement, the Black Panther Party, Anti-Vietnam War Protests in the San Francisco Area and Beyond, and LGBT History.
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.
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.
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.