Research Guides: Historical primary sources online: Streaming media

Streaming media (film, broadcast, internet)

Broad-based video collections

These are your best options for finding classroom-legal versions of programs originally offered on consumer-oriented streaming platforms like Netflix or Amazon, whose licenses exclude library use. This list highlights streaming sources that provide content most directly related to historical and social science inquiry. It is not an exhaustive directory to all our library's video providers.

Academic Video Online from ProQuest
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Academic Video Online provides 70,000 streaming videos: documentaries, interviews, performances, news programs and newsreels, arthouse movies, TV programs, and more. Public performance rights are included for all films except Film Platform content. AVON builds on our former Alexander Street streaming video collection, including highlights named below. Two search interfaces:
- Standard Proquest search (for latop/desktop users) ; Visual interface (for phones, tablets, etc)
- American History in Video. Historical newsreels, archived news broadcasts as well as recent documentaries.
- Meet the Press Archive (1947-2013). Decades of interviews from the archetypal Sunday-morning TV news “talking heads” show.
- Engineering Case Studies Online. Documentaries, accident reports, experiments, visualizations, case studies, lectures and interviews from leading engineering institutions
Alexander Street Press’s text-centered primary source databases (Oral History Online and Women & Social Movements) are not part of AVON/Alexander Street video collections.
Kanopy Streaming Videos
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Kanopy provides hundreds of streaming videos in a wide variety of subjects. For videos outside our collection, you'll be presented a form to request they be added.
NOTE: As of Spring 2021 Kanopy made changes to links and access, so older links to streaming videos on the platform will no longer work. Please update any links to Kanopy videos in Canvas, syllabi, etc, with the new URLs: the new base URL for Kanopy is https://vt.kanopy.com/, and links for specific specific videos use the following format: https://vt.kanopy.com/video/slavery-another-name.

Films on Demand
Films on Demand provides streaming documentaries and educational films on many topics and genres, notably including
- Archival films and historical newsreels and
- "World cinema" collection.
Includes public performance rights for non-commercial, educational purposes. Searchable and browseable by general subject.

Swank Digital Campus
Swank offers over 1,000 streaming videos: popular movies, documentaries, and foreign films. Swank offers over 1,000 streaming videos: popular movies, documentaries, and foreign films. The available titles are revised by the vendor near the beginning of every academic year.
Film Platform
Film Platform provides streaming, recently released, documentary films.
Artfilms Digital
Artfilms Digital provides streaming videos in the humanities and performing arts, art and architecture, and education, including documentaries and feature films.

Locally hosted video ('Newman Library Documentaries' on Kaltura)
Streaming videos made from selected DVDs in VT Libraries collection -- we were able to purchase additional streaming rights. VT login required.
Moving Image Archive (Internet Archive)
Non-profit digital library archives millions of free digitized movies and broadcasts (even advertising), along with music, websites, software, and scanned periodicals and books.

Specialized media collections

Though covering many things, events, and people, these collections are curated within boundaries such as topic, creator, or medium. Free sources may become unavailable at any time.

Socialism on Film from Adam Matthew
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Socialism on Film provides streaming video from the communist world reveals war, history, current affairs, culture, and society from the 20th century and countries such as the USSR, Vietnam, China, Korea, much of Eastern Europe, the GDR, Britain, and Cuba.

PodcastRE
"A searchable, researchable archive of podcasting culture," PodcastRE searches for podcasts by keyword, author/creator, category, or title.

more... less...

Profiled in Jackson, Zoe. "Audio for the ages: a new database archives podcasting culture" Perspectives on History. Oct 2018: 12-14.
C-SPAN Video Library
records, indexes, and archives all C-SPAN programming for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. 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. 1987-present.
American Archive of Public Broadcasting
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AAPB is a collection of 40,000 hours of public radio and television broadcasts. Alongside significant national programs, APB offers mostly of regional and local programs that document American communities since the mid-20th century: 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 film-making on a local level. Searchable and browseable by topic and participating broadcaster
NBC News Archives from Getty Images
With some content dating to the late 1948s, the NBC News Archives is the oldest television news collection in the United States, featuring programs from NBC's news division and MSNBC. Segments can be viewed in the platform, but special licenses are usually required to download or reuse files. Browse within broad subjects or use the search box within the NBC banner image. (The top-of-page search box covers the whole Getty platform -- which is set up to market images and footage, with various kinds of licenses.)

Presidential Speeches
The Scripps Library at the University of Virginia, through cooperation with various presidential libraries, has been collecting some of the most important presidential speeches in American history. These speeches all have transcripts, and some are available in their entirety in audio or video. 1789-present. One of UVA Miller Center's American President collections of primary and secondary sources.
PBS Video
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Collection of several hundred streaming videos digitized from PBS documentaries that were originally distributed in videotape in the 1990s; Many may be available with better image quality from our commercial streaming video services . The collection covers a broad range of disciplines in the humanities, arts, social sciences and sciences, but it's particularly strong in American history and American studies. Server is at UVA.

You can link directly to the individual videos in the collection using the URL syntax described in the examples below. The normal bitrate videos are encoded at 300 kbps and may be accessed from anywhere on the Internet. The high bitrate movies are encoded at 800 kbps and are only accessible on-ground at UVa and from on-campus locations of some other VIVA members with high speed network connections to Charlottesville via the National Lambda Rail or Internet2 (Virginia Tech's campus has access to this network).

Standard video bitrate URL example
https://pbsvid.itc.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/secure/viva-pbs?pbs_amx025-1&N
High video bitrate URL example
https://pbsvid.itc.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/secure/viva-pbs?pbs_amx025-1&H
Standard video bitrate, start 5 minutes into the movie URL example
https://pbsvid.itc.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/secure/viva-pbs?pbs_amx025-1&N&00:05:00:00
High video bitrate, start 5 minutes into the movie, end at 6 minutes URL example
https://pbsvid.itc.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/secure/viva-pbs?pbs_amx025-1&H&00:05:00:00&00:06:00:00
Access World News from Newsbank
Articles selected from American and international newspapers, magazines, and transcripts (even video clips) of news broadcasts, sometimes as far back to 1978. Complete "image editions" are available of more than 100 papers, generally beginning in 2018 or later. These are same-day, color facsimiles of the print editions, including ads, legal notices, letters, comics, and crossword puzzles.
We provide additional archival image editions of
- Roanoke Times (1889-1989) and
- Richmond Times-Dispatch (1903-1986).
Pre-1923 content in AWN duplicates America's Historical Newspapers from Readex, a sister company.

Historical primary sources online: Streaming media

Streaming media (film, broadcast, internet)

Broad-based video collections

Specialized media collections

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