There are many sources for streaming video content available that students can access on their own. For instance, subscription services Netflix and Hulu offer thousands of documentaries, mainstream film titles, and television programs on a streaming basis for an affordable monthly fee that many students likely already pay.
There are also many online sources for free and legal streaming content:
Full length episodes from the acclaimed series.
Hundreds of early motion pictures are viewable in the American Memory collections from the Library of Congress.
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.
Teacher resources across the curriculum - short films on a variety of subjects.
The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative represents one of the most ambitious and comprehensive efforts to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web, including a collection of unedited news film, instructive stories and discussion questions from the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
The EVIA Digital Archive Project is a collaborative endeavor to create a digital archive of ethnographic field video for use by scholars and instructors.
A National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures streamed with essays about the traditions and film-making. The site includes transcriptions, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites.
Frontline is a leader in investigative journalist. More than 180 FRONTLINE documentaries are streaming in full online.
Free educational resources - video and other media - for secondary, high school and college teachers.
This library contains thousands of digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download.
Access to selected programs from the acclaimed PBS science series. Closed captions are available. Available videos are organized by broad subject categories: Ancient Worlds, Body & Brain, Evolution, Military & Espionage, Nature, Physics & Math, Planet Earth, Space & Flight, Tech & Engineering.
A thoughtful collection of links to hundreds of Indie Films, Film Noir, Documentaries & More. The list includes films by directors like Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan, Ken Loach, Sergei Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Capra, Luc Besson, Godard, Hawks, Kubrick, and many more.
A Project of the School of Library and Information Science at UNC Chapel Hill. The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities.
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 like The National Archives and NASA.
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.
From the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, the Scripps archive provides a unique collection of material on the U.S. presidency. 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.
SnagFilms.com is a website where you can watch full-length documentary films for free, but also a platform that lets you "snag" a film and put it anywhere on the web." Searchable and browseable alphabetically or by topic.
TED talks is large collection of recorded presentations from the TED (Technology, Entertainment Design) conference held annually since 1984 in Long Beach California. Talks are generally short and run the gamut of topics from biotechnology to astronomy to population to urban design and beyond.
More than 1200 documentary films available for streaming. Subjects are varied and cover a wide range of personal, social, scientific, political, historical topics.
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.