Steve Brantley's List: Free streaming video resources

A thoughtful collection of links to over 150 Classics, Indies, Film Noir, Documentaries & More. \nThe 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. Highly recommended.\n\nThis list also provides a substantial list of film and archive sites, some of which are reproduced in this list.

Many free videos, but FORA.tv offers "premium" content for pay-per-view. Videos on the People, Issues, and Ideas Changing the Planet

A large ad driven site with an extensive catalog of over 2000 public domain movies, TV shows, TV series episodes, cartoons and feature animations. Features are organized by genre, series, television and animation. The site has a fully functional social network and features tagging and organization by tag cloud. In addition to an impressive catalog, Free Movies Online provides information about the public domain status of its content. The site features a large collection of movie poster images which they have created as downloadable wallpaper. Site also publishes an online magazine, _Cinema Magazine_, blogs about contempoorary film and dvd releases and sections on celebrities organized by actor, actress driector, character, authors and writers.\nThe genre list includes:\n# Adventure\n# Comedy\n# Drama\n# Horror\n# Mystery\n# Sci-Fi\n# Western\n# Series\n# TV Shows\n# Cartoons

Hundreds of films available to view online. Searchable site. Provides resources for educators. Playlists provided by NFB experts and guests, and thematic playlists.

The Ken Loach YouTube Channel is fully branded and looks like an independent site. There are not a large number of uploads at this point, the first being uploaded only three months ago as of July 2010. The individual director is included here to suggest that the similar director's lists could be compiled with relatively simple effort in one of the major video search engines.
From the Site: Sixteen Films is the film production company formed by director Ken Loach and producer Rebecca O'Brien in 2002. Writer Paul Laverty is the Associate Director and the primary function of the company is to make films written, produced and directed by this team.\n\nFILMS\n\nSince its formation Sixteen Films has produced eight feature films: "Sweet Sixteen", "Ae Fond Kiss", "The Wind that Shakes the Barley", "It's a Free World...", "Summer" (directed by Kenny Glenaane), "Looking for Eric" and currently in post-production, "Route Irish" and "Oranges and Sunshine" (directed by Jim Loach)\nWe have also made the Ken Loach sections of the portmanteau feature film "11'09"01", which featured eleven short films made by different directors from all over the world, and "Tickets", a film in three parts, co-directed by Ermanno Olmi and Abbas Kiarostami.

From the site: "Hundreds of films from the BFI National Archive, plus previews of new and forthcoming BFI releases and seasons, expert commentary, interviews and more"

More than 1200 documentary films available for streaming. Subjects are varied and cover a wide range of personal, social, scientific, political, historical topics. The site presents the documentaries in a very useful way, (usually) providing a reasonably long synopsis of the material and the context in which it was originally created. The videos themselves are embedded from other platforms like You Tube. Because of this, the documentaries are often "chapterized" based on platform limitations. For example to watch _Nanook of the North_ you must watch it in 8 sections.
In other cases, the user might need to download a browser plugin to view the film. For example, in order to watch _Grey Gardens_ the famous Maysles brothers cinema verite biography of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie, the user must have the (free) DivX Web PLayer for Windows or Mac.
Top Documentaries adds value by providing site contained comments and suggestions for other documentaries of potential interest.

From the site: "SnagFilms.com is a website where you can watch full-length documentary films for free, but we're also a platform that lets you "snag" a film and put it anywhere on the web." Search-able and browse-able alphabetically or by topic."<br/><br/>Site provides substantive summaries and synopses, user generated comments and partial credits, and the ability to purchase on DVD. <br/> Snagfilms uses third party sites to provide a social networking platform. By allowing the snagfilm application in facebook, MySpace Twitter and 18 other social networking sites (the usual suspects) to access your account information you can have a presence on snagfilm that allows sharing, place-marking within videos and a retrievable list of previously watched videos.

From the site: "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." Almost 295,000 items. Given the size of the archive, you will definitely want to review the sub-collections and the moving image archive blog to navigate the massive library.

(from the Web site) NBC News Archives on Demand (Higher Ed) is specifically tailored to the needs of college and university students and instructors. Comprised of 26 collections including Biology, Psychology, Forensic Sciences, Environmental Sciences, U.S. History, Business, Economics, Urban Studies, Women's Studies, and many more.\n\n * Universal Newsreels from 1930s - 1960s\n * Primary source documents from 1600s - Present\n * Current events updated regularly\n * Downloadable and embeddable videos\n * Personalized playlists for research\n * Revolutionary flippable media player\nThis is commercial content but any user can sign up for a 30 free day trial.

Sixteen motion picture collections from the Library of Congress digital library, American Memory Project.

TED talks is a collection of 739 (and growing) 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. TED also features performances from instrumentalists and vocalists from around the world. From the site: "We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. This site, launched April 2007, is an ever-evolving work in progress" TED

Big Think seeks to compile talks and interviews from experts on a broad range of topics including the following.
Arts & Culture | Belief | Business & Economics | Environment | Future | Health & Medicine | History | Identity | Inspiration & Wisdom | Life & Death | Love, Sex, and Happiness | Media & Internet | Politics & Policy
Science & Tech | Truth & Justice | World

While Big Think wants to provide a balanced viewpoint, this is not an objective site and reflects the political values of the mainstream.

Less developed than the American memory project, nevertheless the LOC You Tube channel presents 569 videos and 14 playlists featuring filmed LOC lectures from the LOC Center for the Book and several others including: <br/>Books and Beyond - 39 videos
Theodore Roosevelt - His Life and Times on Film - 67 videos
America at Work, America at Leisure - 121 videos
Early Films: Westinghouse, 1904 - 21 videos
Early Films: Edison Companies - 85 videos
2008 National Book Festival - 13 videos
Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment - 44 videos
Origins of American Animation - 27 videos
Journeys and Crossings - 9 videos
2009 National Book Festival - 62 videos
Digital Preservation - 4 videos
Kluge Center Series: Prominent Scholars on Current Topics - 9 videos
Law and the Library - 12 videos
Music and the Brain - 6 videos<br/>From the channel: "Timeless treasures and contemporary presentations from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. As the world's preeminent reservoir of knowledge, we are the steward of millions of recordings dating from the earliest Edison films to the present. In addition, we sponsor events, lectures and concerts that are free and open to the public. More about the Library: http://www.loc.gov/about "

A Project of the School of Library and Information Science at UNC Chapel Hill. From the site: "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. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries."

A link to video content available in any and all Institutional Repositories that have contributed metadata to the OCLC OAIster database using the OAI-PMH (Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting)

From the site: "Television News of the Civil Rights Era, 1950-1970, aims to collect, digitize, and present in streaming video format over the World Wide Web television news footage from the period and to make these valuable materials available to scholars, teachers, and students. The current archive contains films from the nightly news from two local television stations in Virginia--WDBJ (CBS) Roanoke and WSLS (NBC) Roanoke. In this initial installment we have digitized over 230 films. This rare footage includes full speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, the governors of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as well as original footage of school desegregation, public meetings, local debates over civil rights matters, and interviews with citizens."

From the site: "A National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures
streamed with essays about the traditions and filmmaking. The site includes transcriptions, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites."

A commercial site selling videos of lasting importance on art and architecture, many clips and some full films are available to stream and embed for free.

From the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections.
"AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials AdViews is a digital archive of thousands of vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. These commercials were created or collected by the ad agency Benton & Bowles or its successor, D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B). Founded in 1929, Benton & Bowles was a New York advertising agency that merged with D'Arcy Masius McManus in 1985 to form DMB&B. Major clients included are Procter & Gamble, Kraft, Schick, Vicks, and Post, among others. " Warning: requires iTunes