Today, newsreels seem like a thing of the past — an outmoded medium that feels ancient in comparison to the way we consumer media today. But they dominated much of the 20th century, and now the AP and British Movietone have uploaded more than one million minutes of them to YouTube.
The new upload contains 550,000 videos dating back to 1895, spread across the two organisations’ YouTube channels. On British Movietone you’ll find an enormous amount of early 20th-century material, while the AP’s channel spans more than the full century, including plenty of colour footage and semi-recent current events. “At AP we are always astonished at the sheer breadth of footage that we have access to, and the upload to YouTube means that, for the first time, the public can enjoy some of the oldest and most remarkable moments in history,” the AP’s director of international archive, Alwyn Lindsey, said in a statement.
Browsing thought them would take hours, but those would be hours well-spent — here are a few interesting moments we found while browsing today.
[Associated Press on YouTube; British Movietone on YouTube]