LibGuides: Film Studies: Streaming Media

Streaming Media and Copyright

Unfortunately, many films are unavailable in streaming formats that Libraries can legally purchase. As a result, many of our films are only available on DVD or VHS. We are not able to digitize films at this point in time.

Fair Use of DVDs, Videos, and Films

Please note that the Barnard Library cannot give legal advice.

United States copyright law 17 U.S. Code § 107 clearly allows DVDs and films to be used for classroom instruction. As of October 24, 2012 (under US copyright law section 1201 updated every three years by the Librarian of Congress), professors and students are also permitted to use excerpts from motion pictures or films to create clip compilations and new works made for the purpose of criticism or comment, such as documentaries or "video essays."

Any other use may require a special license, called Public Performance Rights (PPR). This includes all film screenings open to the public or held in a public space, whether admission is charged or not. A guide to locating rights holders and obtaining PPR can be found here. Additional information is available on the Motion Picture Association of America's Public Performance Law website.

For Instructors

Additional information on U.S. Copyright exceptions for Instructors, and The Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Statement of Best Practices for Fair Use in Teaching for Film and Media Educators. Columbia's Copyright Advisory Services also contains a page on showing film and media in the classroom.

See also the Exceptions for Instructors website from the Copyright Advisory Network of the American Library Association -- a questionnaire that helps instructors determine whether their usage meets legal definitions.

In January 2012, the Association of Research Libraries issued a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries. See the Yale Copyright and Fair Use page for more information.

There is more information at the Association of Research Libraries' Copyright & Intellectual Policies page and Columbia's Copyright Advisory Services.

Streaming Video at Barnard

These are some selected streaming video databases available to the Barnard/Columbia community. When off-campus, you'll need a UNI to log-in to the databases.

For a full, up-to-date list of video databases that Barnard/Columbia subscribe to, click this CLIO link or check Columbia's guide to streaming video.

60 Minutes: 1997-2014
Provides streaming video access to the 60 Minutes news show archive for the third and fourth decades of this long-running show, plus segments from the CBS News program Sunday Morning. Includes transcripts of the videos for ease of citation, and a citation export feature. Topics include international and national news, politics, women's studies, society and culture, and many more.
Alexander Street Video
Streaming video in a variety of areas from Alexander Street Press. Most have transcripts available.
American History in Video
American History in Video provides the largest and richest collection of video available online for the study of American history, with 2,000 hours and more than 5,000 titles on completion. The collection allows students and researchers to analyze historical events, and the presentation of historical events over time, through commercial and governmental newsreels, archival footage, public affairs footage, and important documentaries. This release includes over 1260 titles, equaling approximately 420 hours
BroadwayHD
Currently includes 19 of the full BroadwayHD individual videos of streaming performances, but will have up to 25 award-winning live Broadway plays and musicals curated especially for performing arts scholars
CNN Video Collection
This collection of CNN's specials and feature programming includes 450 high-quality videos covering business, economics, environmental studies, health technology, women's studies, human rights and more. It will continue to grow with additional titles through 2023
The Criterion Collection
Since 1984, the Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films, has been dedicated to gathering the greatest award-winning early cinema, foreign cinema and Hollywood films from around the world. The foundation of the collection is the work of such masters of cinema as Renoir, Godard, Kurosawa, Cocteau, Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Hitchcock, Fuller, Lean, Kubrick, Lang, Sturges, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Ozu, Sirk, Buñuel, Powell and Pressburger. Each film is presented uncut, as its maker intended it to be seen.
Digital Theatre Plus
Provides online access to a digital streaming video collection of unique films of current, leading British theatre productions. Includes behind-the-scenes documentaries as well as teaching and learning resources to facilitate a deeper understanding of the productions and texts. Learning resources include a detailed introduction, plot summary, character biographies, a relationship map, language analysis, scene study, performance background and historical context for each play.
Feature Films for Education
Contains 620 full films. The collection focuses on both current and hard-to-find titles for educational instructional purposes, including dramas, literary adaptations, blockbusters, classics, Academy Award winners, and more.
Filmakers Library Online
The collection includes documentaries that are already heavily used in humanities and social science classrooms. Topical coverage is contemporary and relevant across the curriculum--race and gender studies, human rights, globalization and global studies, multiculturalism, international relations, criminal justice, the environment, bioethics, health, political science and current events, psychology, arts, literature, and more. The titles in Filmakers Library Online present points of view and historical and current experiences from diverse cultures and traditions world-wide.
Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive
The Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive is a collaborative project providing online access to performances of Shakespeare from many parts of the world as well as essays and metadata provided by scholars and educators in the field. The idea that Shakespeare is a global author has taken many forms since the building of the Globe playhouse. Our work honors the fact and demonstrates the diversity of the world-wide reception and production of Shakespeare’s plays in ways that we hope will nourish the remarkable array of new forms of cultural exchange that the digital age has made possible. Global Shakespeares is a participatory multi-centric networked model that offers wide access to international performances that are changing how we understand Shakespeare’s plays and the world.
Independent world cinema: classic and contemporary film
includes more than 400 of the most important films produced from the early 20th century to today. It proudly turns the spotlight on preeminent independent distributors--Milestone Films, Zeitgeist Films, Pragda, and Oscilloscope. More than just a cinema studies collection, these films support disciplines, such as cultural history, psychology, gender studies, anthropology, theatre, African- American studies, and more.
Kanopy
Check both the Barnard AND Columbia links via CLIO, since both libraries have different videos in Kanopy. An on-demand streaming video service which provides access to educational titles, including award-winning documentaries, training films and theatrical releases - on a very wide range of topics. Kanopy titles are licensed from such major educational producers and distributors as PBS, BBC, Criterion Collection,and the Media Education Foundation.
kweliTV
"Kweli means 'Truth' in Swahili. kweliTV celebrates global Black stories and amplifies Black storytellers from North America, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia and Australia. Our mission is to curate and create content that is a true reflection of the global Black experience that’s oftentimes missing in traditional media."
LGBT studies in video
LGBT Studies in Video is a cinematic survey of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as well as the cultural and political evolution of the LGBT community. It features award-winning documentaries, interviews, archival footage, and select feature films exploring LGBT history, gay culture and subcultures, civil rights, marriage equality, LGBT families, AIDS, transgender issues, religious perspectives on homosexuality, global comparative experiences, and other topics. A primary partner for this collection is Frameline, a nonprofit media organization that produces the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, the oldest film festival devoted to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender programming currently in existence.
Browse by people, themes, and topics. View videos by filmmaker, country of origin, production date, producer, and other features. Combinable search fields enable cross-search of all video transcripts, liner notes, bibliographic data (including producer, series, title, country of origin, publication date, narrator, production staff, and more), and many other indexed fields, including person discussed, year discussed, and the browse options listed above.
Meet the Press
NBC's Meet the Press is broadcast-television's longest-running program, with interviews, panels and debates from across the political spectrum. The collection includes every surviving program from the show's inception in 1947 through the present day. All programs can be watched in streaming format and are fully searchable. All programs are provided with running transcripts. Programs and clips can be saved to a playlist and shared with others.
Naxos Video Library
A performing arts video collection with operas, ballets, documentaries, live concerts, and musical tours of historic places. Users may create their own playlists and custom video clips.
New World Cinema: Independent Features and Shorts
The collection includes approximately 200 full-length feature films from leading independent distributors such as Kino Lorber, First Run Features, Film Movement, MK2, and the Global Films Initiative. All films were presented at major film festivals, many were nominated for awards, and many have major awards.
OntheBoards.TV
Provides access to films of full-length performances by artists working in dance, theater, music and other forms that defy categorization.
PBS Video Collection
The PBS video collection assembles hundreds of documentary films and series from the Public Broadcasting Service, including Frontline, NOVA, American Experience, Odyssey, as well as films by Ken Burns and Michael Wood.
Silent Film Online
Silent Film Online database brings together more than 500 films which together represent the basis of modern cinematic technique and film theory. Carefully curated with ASP's Video Advisory Board, the database covers silent features, serials, and shorts from the 1890s to the 1930s. High quality versions of films have been selected for the collection from leading distributors such as Kino Lorber, Lobster Films, Flicker Alley, and Image Entertainment.
Socialism on film: the Cold War and international propaganda
This collection of films from the communist world reveals war, history, current affairs, culture and society as seen through the socialist lens. It spans most of the twentieth century and covers countries such as the USSR, Vietnam, China, Korea, much of Eastern Europe, the GDR, Britain and Cuba
Sourced from the British Film Institute (BFI), this collection of documentary, newsreel and feature films reveals the world as seen by Soviet, Chinese, Vietnamese, East European, and Latin American filmmakers. Ranging from the early 20th century to the 1980s, material encapsulates the themes of war, revolution, news, current affairs, culture and society. This project makes available the superb ETV-Plato Films collection put together by the British communist Stanley Forman in the years after the Second World War - produced almost exclusively in the communist world and then versioned into English for distribution in the West. The majority of the footage is previously unseen and provides an essential repository of research material for the study of key political and social events of the 20th century. A crucial resource for anyone studying twentieth-century history, propaganda, communism, the Cold War era and its conflicts, the Soviet Union, film and documentary, military history, media studies, cultural and social history. The films are fully transcribed and available to stream through a specially-developed video player. Users can focus their research through advanced search functionality, and by filtering all footage by country of production, genre or subject area.
Swank Digital Campus
Swank Digital Campus provides colleges and universities with the largest academic streaming collection of its kind, including many major motion pictures. Columbia and Barnard license individual titles through Swank for course reserves. Each college has separate links and separate libraries of films
Theatre in Video
Contains performances of the world's leading plays and film documentaries on the subject of theater in streaming video. Some plays presented in multiple productions exemplifying various interpretations of the text, and technical and cultural differences among the presentations. Stage work of directors and actors are cross-searchable and available for side-by-side comparison. Interviews with directors, designers, writers, and actors, along with excerpts of live performances, provide illustration of the development of texts and the productions.
Television News Archive
Searchable archive of abstracts of news broadcasts from 1968 to present (ABC, CBS, NBC), 1995 to present (CNN), selected content from PBS and FOX News. Video content from CNN viewable. Descriptive summaries of the Vanderbilt University collection of network television news programs and other news-related programming collected in its archive since August 5, 1968.
World Cinema Video Collection
The World cinema video collection provides access to online streaming titles from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, including films from the silent era, from the mid-20th century, as well as award-winning contemporary works.

Free Viewing Sites

UbuWeb
Important online repository for avant-garde arts, including music, film and video, poetry, writing. It has working relationships with Anthology Archives, WFMU, Roulette.org, and other NYC-area experimental music and art organizations. UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.

FACETS: Free Films Online
provide access to 50k+ films, spanning the art form's varied history and formats, from VHS to streaming.
Internet Archive: Animations & Cartoons
Archive of classic cartoons, Brick Films, Machinima, and computer animations from the 2001 SIGGRAPH competition.
Internet Archive: Movies
Digital movies uploaded by Archive users, ranging from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts.
Minnesota Video Vault (PBS)
The MN 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.
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All of the material in the MN Video Vault is fully searchable. Programs have been broken into segments and tagged with key information to make specific videos easy to locate. In addition, all of the material is closed-captioned and, through advanced search functions, these captions can be searched to locate any word spoken within a program. Finally, many of the video segments will be tagged to relevant Minnesota State Academic Standard benchmarks, to facilitate classroom use.
MIT Open Documentary Lab
Drawing on MIT’s legacy of media innovation and its deep commitment to open and accessible information, the MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore new documentary forms with a particular focus on collaborative, interactive, and immersive storytelling.
National Film Board of Canada
National Film Board of Canada’s award-winning online Screening Room, featuring over 2,000 films, excerpts, trailers and interactive works.
NYPL Digital Collections
Free digital collections from the New York Public Library. Note: some streaming video is location-restricted, and must be viewed at the Library for the Performing Arts at NYPL.
Open Culture
Curated collection of online movies and media from across the web.
The Open Video Project
Shared digital video collection
UCLA Preserved Silent Animation
Included here are most of the Max Fleischer and Famous Studios Paramount subjects; the George Pal “Puppetoons”; the independent productions of Ub Iwerks; many of the Van Beuren “Rainbow Parade” shorts; a large number of Warner Bros. cartoons; and a recent acquisition of “Terrytoons” still being sorted through as of this writing.Includes a sizeable number of “Aesop’s Film Fables”; original negatives to several dozen “Inkwell Imps” and “Out of the Inkwell” cartoons; scatterings of prints and elements from other series, such as “Felix the Cat” and Disney’s “Alice Comedies”; and the occasional one-shot subject that survives today only as a single print.

Film Studies

Copyright Flowchart

Film Studies Librarian

Streaming Media and Copyright

Fair Use of DVDs, Videos, and Films

For Instructors

Streaming Video at Barnard

Free Viewing Sites