Associated Press to publish massive historical video library

Recent history has been memorialized on video, and the Associated Press wants to make sure you and everyone else can watch those videos. As such it is working with British Movietone to upload 550,000 or so videos to YouTube — collectively amounting to more than a million minutes of digitized footage — across two channels. This represents the biggest upload of historical video footage to the video website, and will aid in reliving big moments, studying history, verifying facts, and more.

The videos will be scattered between the Associated Press's YouTube channel and British Movietone's channel, the latter of which now contains the organization's full video archive. It isn't clear when the Associated Press will wrap up its own uploading, though the process will be continuous as future important moments will also be uploaded.

The footage covers notable moments in recent history — everything from extreme weather events, political speeches, tech innovations, historical moments, sporting coverage, entertainment, things related to the "evolution of eating and drinking habits", and more. The earliest content is from 1895.

Anyone can watch the content, both what is already available and what is inbound. Said YouTube director Stephen Nuttall, "It's an historical treasure trove that will give YouTube users around the world a moving window into the past and I can't wait to explore it."

SOURCE: AP