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The AP adds 550,000 old newsreel clips to YouTube
The Associated Press has teamed up with British Movietone to share more than a century's worth of newsreel footage with the denizens of the internet. The pair will upload more than a million minutes of archival clips to YouTube with the intention of creating a "view-on-demand visual encyclopedia" for the world. The 550,000-plus stories range from footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake through to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's not the first time that a news organization has used YouTube to take its archives online. Last year, British Pathé uploaded more than 85,000 newsreel clips from between 1896 and 1976 to the site. Users can feel free to embed the clips in whatever story they're working on, but we assume that re-editing the work isn't permitted. Which is a shame, because we were hoping for some cheeky dance remixes of the footage of Prince Charles getting frisky at the Rio Carnival. Which, for no reason at all, we've embedded below...
Watch 80 years' worth of bizarre and historic moments thanks to British Pathé
Between 1896 and 1976, British Pathé documented the everyday lives of Britons and events around the world with its pioneering newsreels. After a National Lottery grant enabled it to digitise over 3,500 hours of footage in 2002, the company decided it was high time to move its entire archive of moving images over to YouTube, where it's uploaded a total of 85,000 new videos. So what can you expect to find there? Well, there's incredibly vast amount of footage from both World Wars for starters, as well as interviews with survivors of the Titanic and videos cataloguing when Beatlemania hit the US. Not only do the videos give you a taste of how news was presented in the early 20th century, you might also enjoy a little history lesson at the same time.
