Free Streaming Video Resources: A-Z List

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting seeks to preserve and make accessible significant historical content created by public media, and to coordinate a national effort to save at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity.

Several hundred early motion pictures are viewable in the American Memory collections from the Library of Congress.

For more than three decades, American Experience has been television's most-watched history series. The series has been hailed as "peerless" (The Wall Street Journal), "the most consistently enriching program on television" (Chicago Tribune), and "a beacon of intelligence and purpose" (Houston Chronicle).

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.
Not all speeches have accompanying videos. Site supported by advertising, and maintained by a speech communication professor.

Part of the Annenberg Foundation, Annenberg Learner funds and distributes more than 100 multimedia courses and workshops to help teachers keep current on the content they teach. Professional development resources provide teachers with research on the most effective teaching strategies along with their connection to national education content standards, and examples of these principles applied in real classrooms. Not all series listed on the site are available for streaming. Many of the videos include closed captioning.

AP Archive is the film and video archive of The Associated Press (AP), one of the largest sources of independent news gathering

The Archaeology Channel (TAC) is a streaming media website brought to you by Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI). ALI is a nonprofit organization devoted to nurturing and bringing attention to the human cultural heritage, by using media in the most efficient and effective ways possible.

The Archive of American Television has conducted over 800 oral history interviews (over 4000 hours) with the legends of television. These interviews chronicle the birth and growth of American TV History as it evolves, and make the interviews available worldwide. The Archive continues to produce new interviews every year. The collection covers a variety of professions, genres, and topics in electronic media history.

Black Film Archive is a living register of Black films. In its current iteration, it showcases Black films made from 1898 to 1989 currently streaming.

Calisphere is your gateway to California’s remarkable digital collections, with access to unique and historically important artifacts--nearly two million digital primary resource items--from over 300 cultural heritage organizations, including public libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and many more throughout the state. A public service of the University of California, developed by the California Digital Library, Calisphere is committed to providing free access to historical resources for research, teaching, and curious exploration.

CAAM is proud to present new and exciting films, including feature-length and short videos, to you every month. As part of our mission to tell diverse Asian American stories and reach the broadest audience possible, we have partnered with public media outlets such as PBS and World Channel, and Comcast.

The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.

The C-SPAN Video Library began in 1987 as a way to archive and index the thousands of hours of congressional coverage produced by the network every year. The project quickly became one of the most comprehensive video archives of governmental and political content.
In 2010, C-SPAN won its third Peabody Award for the Video Library—now a collection totaling over 213,000 hours of programming first made available to the public for free in 2007. In addition, The Video Library records all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Programs are extensively indexed, making the database of C-SPAN programming an unparalleled chronological resource.

DIVA is an open digital collections archive built and managed by Academic Technology at San Francisco State University. It combines unique media, scholarly materials, and hidden treasures from the campus’s historic local impact. From original materials from the 1968 Student Strike to thousands of videos from the Bay Area Television Archive to poetry readings from the world-class Poetry Center, DIVA collections illustrate the campus commitment to social justice and our place in the San Francisco Bay Area community.

The EVIA Digital Archive Project is a 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.

Folkstreams is a non-profit dedicated to finding, preserving, contextualizing, and showcasing documentary films on American traditional cultures. The films were produced by independent filmmakers in a golden age that began in the 1960s and was made possible by the development first of portable cameras and then capacity for synch sound. Their films focus on the culture, struggles, and arts of unnoticed Americans from many different regions and communities. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an institutional partner.

Frontline has served as American public television’s flagship public affairs series since 1983.
Described by The Atlantic as “the best news program on television,” the series has built a reputation for powerful investigative storytelling that tackles the tough, controversial and complex stories that shape our times. More than 180 FRONTLINE documentaries are streaming in full online.

HippoCampus is a free, core academic web site that delivers rich multimedia content--videos, animations, and simulations--on general education subjects to middle-school and high-school teachers and college professors, and their students, free of charge.

“There are few television franchises that have celebrated diversity and given voice to the voiceless as consistently and powerfully as Independent Lens on PBS.” (Baltimore Sun)

Provides more than 1,000 short-form videos, generally under 5 minutes, produced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Search options permit searching by a combination of elements: Category, Country, Year, Language, and Keyword. Categories include: Countries and Regions, Economic Outlook, Speeches and Interviews, Topics and Issues, among others.

The Moving Image Archive contains digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons, concerns, and ephemeral material.

Provides free access to full-length films and television episodes, many in the public domain. Requires sign-in. 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 Burn Archive is a 501(c)3 nonprofit in Chicago that collects, restores, and distributes documentary video and television created by artists, activists, and community groups. Our mission is to use archival media to deepen context and encourage critical thought through a social justice lens.

In the early 1960’s, broadcast journalist Mike Wallace donated 65 recorded interviews made in 1957-58 from his show The Mike Wallace Interview to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. The bulk of these were 16mm kinescope film recordings, some of the earliest recordings of live television that were possible, and that survive today. Many of these have not been seen for over 50 years, and they represent a unique window into a turbulent time of American, and world history. From Senators to strippers, Ku Klux Klansmen to Nobel Prize winners, Mike Wallace has interviewed them all.

Every day, we introduce a new film of the day. From new directors to award-winners. From everywhere on earth. Beautiful, interesting, incredible movies — a new one, every single day. Always chosen by us. Our hand-picked line-up includes double features, filmmaker retrospectives, spotlights on major film festivals and more. Our curators scour film festivals for the most exciting and original new films, which we bring to the big screen with the same care and attention we give to our curated platform. Requires free log-in.

The National Screening Room showcases the riches of the Library's vast moving image collection, designed to make otherwise unavailable movies, both copyrighted and in the public domain, accessible to the viewers worldwide.

Enter a keyword or title search for a documentary. Netflix subscribers have access through this website to selected documentaries. Only those with the designation GRANT OF PERMISSION FOR EDUCATIONAL SCREENINGS may be used for one-time screenings in a classroom. Sample search: Crip Camp.

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.

The Paramount Vault showcases a collection of Paramount full-length films and clips including selections that range from black-and-white to color, comedy to horror, and everything in between. Viewers are invited to explore the vast landscape of cinema’s history, share their favorite films, and discover new ones through this official channel created by Paramount Pictures.

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.
Content aligns with Common Core State Standards.

POV (a cinema term for “point of view”) is television’s longest-running showcase for independent non-fiction films. POV premieres 14-16 of the best, boldest and most innovative programs every year on PBS. Since 1988, POV has presented over 500 films to public television audiences across the country.

Stream full episodes of selected recent content.

Approximately 11,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films.

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.

The National Film Registry is a list of movies deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" that are earmarked for preservation by the Library of Congress. They are not selected as the "best" American films of all time, but rather as works of enduring importance to American culture. They reflect who we are as a people and as a nation. The Librarian of Congress makes the annual selections to the Registry after reviewing hundreds of titles nominated by the public and conferring with Library film curators and the distinguished members of the National Film Preservation Board.

TED is a global community, welcoming people from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world. We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world. On TED.com, we're building a clearinghouse of free knowledge from the world's most inspired thinkers — and a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other, both online and at TED and TEDx events around the world, all year long.

Tubi has over 20,000 movies and television shows from nearly every major Hollywood studio. Tubi gives millions of viewers an easy way to discover new content, which is all available completely free.

Watchdocumentaries.com is a leading online collection of free documentaries. Our mission is to curate informative and educational documentary films and to organise them in an accessible manner. The library is regularly updated with new titles for you to watch and enjoy.

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.

YouTube can occasionally be a source of last resort for out-of-print and hard-to-find content.