Cool! Newsplayer.com Offers Video Access to Over 100 Years of History

Since video search is all the rage these days, allow me to add another impressive video search tool for historical material.

The service is called Newsplayer and it has been around for years. Newsplayer is a fee-based service. However, it’s very inexpensive. A one year personal subscription costs only 4 pounds/year. It’s possible to pay for your subscription in British Pounds, U.S. Dollars, or Euros. With the conversion rate, my subscription cost $6.50. Registration is very easy.

Content
Newsplayer offers searchable access to digitized film of historical events from the past 100 years (more or less). Over 14,000 news clips are available. The material itself comes from the ITN/Reuters news archive.

Search
It’s possible to search for and retrieve clips by keyword, topic or date. Your search is of metadata associated with each clip.

Since Newsplayer comes from the UK, it’s heavy on UK content but that doesn’t mean it will not be of interest to those outside of the UK. Here are just a few clips I found running a few quick searches.

+ Winston Churchill?s ?tribute to civil defence? speech
+ US pictures from Telstar satellite received in UK
+ US presidential primary elections for Democratic party, 1992
+ Beer festival in Munich, 1927

View
Material is viewable via Microsoft Media Player. You can also choose to stream in in high or low bandwidth mode. Some content is raw footage (no audio) while other content offers an audio track. The quality of the video stream is very good.

If you’re a history buff, this is one database you should know about. Even though it’s fee-based, it’s low price makes it more than worth a look.

Finally, last weekend I posted about another video database that you might want to know about. The British Pathe News Archive offers free (for non-commerical use) thousands of hours of both stills and streaming content.