LibGuides: Streaming Media: Streaming Media Collections

Feature Films

Alexander Street Video
Streaming video in a variety of areas from Alexander Street Press. Most have transcripts available.
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 s.een"--Provider's description.
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.
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.

Check both the Barnard AND Columbia links via CLIO, since both libraries have different videos in Kanopy.
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."
Projectr
"Projectr partners with educational institutions and public libraries throughout North America to present a curated and ever-expanding collection of acclaimed movies, archival restorations, award-winning documentaries and artist-made works from around the world."
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.
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.

Check both the Barnard AND Columbia links via CLIO, since both libraries have different videos in Swank.
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.

Television

Alexander Street Video
Streaming video in a variety of areas from Alexander Street Press. Most have transcripts available.
C-Span Quick Guide
he C-SPAN Archives records, indexes, and archives all C-SPAN programming for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. Every C-SPAN program aired since 1987, now totaling over 160,000 hours, is contained in the C-SPAN Archives and immediately accessible through the database and electronic archival systems developed and maintained by the C-SPAN Archives. The Archives records all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.
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. 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.

Documentary Films

American Indian Film Gallery
The AIFG presently contains over 450 non-fiction films that document Native lifeways from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, with a large concentration on peoples of the Southwest. The films range from a 1922 silent newsreel to recent footage of pow-wows and political meetings in 2011. The majority of the films date to the golden age of U.S. educational and sponsored filmmaking, after World War II up to the advent of portable video. Interestingly, the video age marks a shift in the collection from films about Native peoples to films by Native peoples. This historical span, then, allows for study of Native representation from outside and inside indigenous communities across the Americas over nearly a century. As such, it is an incomparable teaching and research tool for examining historical attitudes, representations, and understandings of indigenous populations across the Americas.

Docuseek2
Docuseek2 is the internet site where one can discover, access, license, stream and share over 1500 documentary and social issues films and videos. This database provides educational streaming access to content from Bullfrog Films, Icarus Films (including The Fanlight Collection and dGenerate Films), Kartemquin Films, MediaStorm, the National Film Board of Canada, Scorpion TV, Sincerely Films, Terra Nova Films and Villon Films. Topics covered include business and economics, health care, humanities, performing arts, and social sciences. Docuseek2 supports the ability to create clips, playlists, and save searches of the films and videos available through this website.
Ethnographic Video Online
Offers access to classic and contemporary ethnographic documentaries in streaming video. The collections contain over 1,300 hours of streaming video, including ethnographic films, documentaries, select feature films, and previously unpublished fieldwork.
Intended to be a visual encyclopedia of human behavior and culture, online in streaming video. Contains classic and contemporary documentaries; previously unpublished footage from working anthropologists and ethnographers in the field; and select feature films. Includes footage from every continent and hundreds of unique cultures. Thematic areas include: language and culture, kinesthetics, body language, food and foraging, cooking, economic systems, social stratification and status, caste systems and slavery, male and female roles, kinship and families, political organization, conflict and conflict resolution, religion and magic, music and the arts, culture and personality, and sex, gender, and family roles.
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.
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.

Check both the Barnard AND Columbia links via CLIO, since both libraries have different videos in Kanopy.
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.
Projectr
"Projectr partners with educational institutions and public libraries throughout North America to present a curated and ever-expanding collection of acclaimed movies, archival restorations, award-winning documentaries and artist-made works from around the world."

Historical Sources

Alexander Street Video
Streaming video in a variety of areas from Alexander Street Press. Most have transcripts available.
The HistoryMakers
The HistoryMakers is dedicated to preserving African American history as the missing link in American history. Focused on American history, oral history and education in general and more specifically on African American history, education, music, law, the arts, science, technology, media, medicine, entertainment, fashion & beauty, business, the military, politics and sports, The HistoryMakers is a combination archive, library, museum, stock footage collection, on-line educator and educational PBS/TV programming. Its topics include but are not limited to African American organizations and associations, slavery, reconstruction, the labor movement, the civil rights movement and black authors.
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.

Performing Arts

Alexander Street Video
Streaming video in a variety of areas from Alexander Street Press. Most have transcripts available.
Audio drama: The L.A. Theatre Works collection
Contains more than 300 important dramatic works in streaming audio from the curated archive of the nation’s premiere radio theatre company. The plays - which include some of the most significant dramatic literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries - are performed by leading actors from around the world and recorded specifically for online listening. Specialized indexing at the track level for over half of these recordings links individual segments of plays to specific academic disciplines and subject keywords. Critical essays, annotated playlists, and scene-level indexing
The plays are performed by leading actors from around the world and recorded specifically for online listening. The collection presents classics of the Western canon, modern works by American luminaries, originally commissioned plays, and high profile docudramas by both renowned and emerging playwrights. The plays are chosen not only for their literary significance, but also for their ability to challenge presumptions and examine complicated moral and ethical questions. by known figures in medicine, academia, politics, and other fields will draw connections from the plays to issues and topics in the humanities, social sciences, theatre, hard sciences, law, medicine, and other fields of study. Audio Drama's teaching tools include playlists, permanent URLs for electronic course reserves, and optional downloads.
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
Dance in Video
Searchable database containing streaming video files of dance productions, interviews, coaching sessions, and documentaries by influential performers and companies from around the world. Selections cover ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance. Videos can be browsed by people, role, ensemble, genre, and venue. Material types include documentaries, editorials, instructional, interviews, and performances. Database users may create their own custom playlists and video clips.
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.
Drama Online
Drama Online is a digital library of plays from Aeschylus to the present day. It also includes critical analysis, contextual information, A-Z reference and practical texts.
Includes the full text of plays from across the history of the theatre, ranging from Aeschylus to the present day, in addition to some video production of plays and audio recordings. Includes non-English-language works in translation, scholarly and critical editions, first night program texts, and critical analysis and contextual information. Critical interpretations, theatre history surveys and major reference works on authors, movements, practitioners, periods and genres are included alongside performance and practitioner texts, acting and backstage guides. Also includes images from the Victoria and Albert Museum's archive of production photos.
Educational streaming site / EAI
Also known as Electronic Art Intermix, EAI's Educational streaming site is a special subscription-access layer of the EAI online catalogue and provides access to full-length streaming videos for selected artists from EAI's full collection.
Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive
Online exhibit of brief video performance excerpts spanning from 1930s dance pioneers to today's most exciting artists recorded at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Massachusetts. Browse videos by artists, genres, or era. This website is a public project of the Virtual Pillow initiative which aims to build audiences and appreciation for dance and Jacob's Pillow.

Jerome Robbins Dance Division Audio and Moving Image Archive
Explore the Dance Division's digitized moving image and audio recordings.
Hemispheric Institute: Collections
The Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL) is the first major digital video library of performance practices in the Americas. Created in 2005 in partnership with NYU Libraries, and with the inaugural support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, HIDVL began as an effort to preserve political performance works from the Americas, making these cultural documents available worldwide. This growing repository guarantees historical preservation and free access to over 1000 hours of documentation.

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."
medici.tv
Offers over 1800 HD webcasts from many leading festivals, including Aix-en-Provence, Saint-Denis, Aspen, Glyndebourne, and Lucerne, as well as from such music venues as the Opéra National de Paris, Auditorium du Louvre, Cité de la Musique, and Salle Pleyel in Paris, and Milan's La Scala. Many operas and concerts have been webcast both as live events and later as video-on-demand.
Met Opera on Demand
More than 450 Met performances. Dozens of Live in HD productions, classic telecasts from the 1970s, '80s, '90s, and '00s, and hundreds of radio broadcasts dating back to 1936.
National Theatre Collection
Drawing on 10 years of NT Live broadcasts, alongside high-quality recordings never previously seen outside of the NT’s Archive, the National Theatre Collection makes this rich body of work available to students in schools, universities and libraries around the world.
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.

Numeridanse
Numeridanse offers free access to filmed performances, documentaries, interviews, fictions, dance videos. Many genres are showcased here: butoh, classical ballet, neo-classical ballet, baroque, Indian, African, flamenco, contemporary, traditional dances, hip-hop, tango, jazz, circus arts, performance, etc.

OntheBoards.TV
Provides access to films of full-length performances by artists working in dance, theater, music and other forms that defy categorization.
Routledge Performance Archive
Contains interviews with key figures in theatre history and contemporary practice; masterclasses with specialist actor trainers from around the world; unique footage direct from the legendary practitioners themselves; excerpted and full-length contemporary productions; and documentaries previously unavailable to global audiences. The video material spans more than fifty years of documented work direct from practitioners and specialists.
Royal Shakespeare Company Archives
The RSC Live Collection launched on Drama Online with 17 films of live productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company performed between 2013 and 2017.
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.
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.

Video Data Bank
Launched in 2015, VDB TV is an innovative digital distribution project which provides free, online streaming access to curated programs of video and media art.
Sourced from the historically significant archives of the Video Data Bank, VDB TV includes work from early video pioneers active in the 1960s and 70s, through to emerging contemporary artists. VDB TV offers viewers across the United States and beyond access to rare video art, the opportunity to engage with programs conceived by a wide range of curators, and original writing, all while ensuring that artists are compensated for their work.

Movement and Training

Dance in Video
Searchable database containing streaming video files of dance productions, interviews, coaching sessions, and documentaries by influential performers and companies from around the world. Selections cover ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance. Videos can be browsed by people, role, ensemble, genre, and venue. Material types include documentaries, editorials, instructional, interviews, and performances. Database users may create their own custom playlists and video clips.
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.
Human Kinetics Dance Technique
Featuring more than 500 videos and 800 audio clips alongside ebooks and images, Human Kinetics Dance Technique is a dynamic collection that presents instruction-focused material and fills in the gaps of dance in digital learning. Recently updated with newly published ebooks and video clips, the carefully curated content supports students developing their dance technique and provides instructors with valuable tools that can be implemented within their curriculum.
Routledge Performance Archive
Contains interviews with key figures in theatre history and contemporary practice; masterclasses with specialist actor trainers from around the world; unique footage direct from the legendary practitioners themselves; excerpted and full-length contemporary productions; and documentaries previously unavailable to global audiences. The video material spans more than fifty years of documented work direct from practitioners and specialists.
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.

Open Access Sources

American Indian Film Gallery
The AIFG presently contains over 450 non-fiction films that document Native lifeways from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, with a large concentration on peoples of the Southwest. The films range from a 1922 silent newsreel to recent footage of pow-wows and political meetings in 2011. The majority of the films date to the golden age of U.S. educational and sponsored filmmaking, after World War II up to the advent of portable video. Interestingly, the video age marks a shift in the collection from films about Native peoples to films by Native peoples. This historical span, then, allows for study of Native representation from outside and inside indigenous communities across the Americas over nearly a century. As such, it is an incomparable teaching and research tool for examining historical attitudes, representations, and understandings of indigenous populations across the Americas.
Black Film Archive
Maya S. Cade is the creator and curator of Black Film Archive and a scholar-in-residence at the Library of Congress. She has been awarded special distinctions by the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics for the Archive. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, The Paris Review, Vulture, among other publications. She is the fall 2022 programmer in residence at Indiana University’s Cinema and was the fall 2021 research fellow at Indiana University's Black Film Center & Archive. Originally hailing from New Orleans, Maya is based in Brooklyn.
Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
National Screening Room
The National Screening Room showcases the riches of the Library of Congress's vast moving image collection, designed to make otherwise unavailable movies, both copyrighted and in the public domain, accessible to the viewers worldwide. The majority of titles in the National Screening Room are freely available as both 5 mb MP4 and ProRes 422 MOV/Quicktime downloads.
Open Culture
Curated collection of online movies and media from across the web.
Open Vault
Welcome to Open Vault! On this website, GBH Archives provides online access to unique and historically important content produced by the public television and radio station GBH. Open Vault contains video, audio, images, searchable transcripts, and resource management tools, all of which are available for individual and classroom learning.
Video Data Bank
Launched in 2015, VDB TV is an innovative digital distribution project which provides free, online streaming access to curated programs of video and media art.
Sourced from the historically significant archives of the Video Data Bank, VDB TV includes work from early video pioneers active in the 1960s and 70s, through to emerging contemporary artists. VDB TV offers viewers across the United States and beyond access to rare video art, the opportunity to engage with programs conceived by a wide range of curators, and original writing, all while ensuring that artists are compensated for their work.