A Collection of PBS Videos Solves a Tricky Rights Issue

The PBS Video Collection: Fifth Edition (the Fifth Edition), offered by Alexander Street Press, a Clarivate company, is a collection of films and documentaries produced by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), curated for the academic community. The collection is available as a subscription or for purchase. The purchase model provides permanent access, a significant issue since PBS loses the rights to approximately 200 videos every year.

Product Overview/Description

The Fifth Edition offers diverse content spanning disciplines from history, science, and literature to the arts. Release dates range from 1979 to 2026, with most titles from the last 10 years. Notable programs include American Experience, Finding Your Roots, NOVA, Frontline, Nature, and Ken Burns documentaries. The complete list of tiles is available on the Fifth Edition’s website.

The collection does not include all content broadcast by PBS. Instead, PBS sends Alexander Street a list of titles that have been rights-cleared for educational distribution. Alexander Street then chooses titles that they think will be of most interest to academic libraries, faculty, and students.

The collection is exclusively available on Alexander Street’s video platform. New content will be added every quarter through 2026; when completed, the collection will include over 1,600 videos.

Clarivate’s licensing agreement with PBS must be renewed about every three years; with each renewal, Alexander Street releases a new edition of the collection. Once completed, an edition is closed and not open to purchase.

Subscribing libraries can move to the next edition. Perpetual customers can purchase the new content being added to the next edition while retaining access to everything in the edition that they already purchased.

Subscription content is dynamic, with approximately 200 titles replaced yearly, largely due to PBS’s inability to rights-clear elements like still images, music, narration, etc., for educational distribution. Libraries that opt to purchase the collection, on the other hand, own all the titles permanently. PBS does a good job of rights-clearing their most prestigious franchises, including NOVA, Frontline, Nature, American Experience, American Masters, Art21, Ken Burns documentaries, and Finding Your Roots. That said, every year, significant titles get removed. Recent examples include the We Shall Remain series, Ebola Outbreak, Empires of Gold, Namibia: Painted People of the Desert, and Secrets of the Forbidden City. Libraries can request a list of title removals.

User Experience

The collection is hosted on Alexander Street’s video platform, which also hosts the popular Academic Video Online (AVON) subscription (reviewed in 2020 in The Charleston Advisor).

The PBS collection is seamlessly integrated into the AVON subscription for libraries that have access to both. Libraries with AVON that purchase the PBS collection retain access to titles even when they cease to be available in the AVON subscription.

Alexander Street Press has demonstrated a strong commitment to accessibility. Its video platform adheres to industry standards including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 and Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act. This commitment is evident in features like captioning and searchable transcripts for 95 percent of videos, keyboard navigation, and compatibility with assistive technologies. They check the platform using tools like WebAIM’s WAVE and test it on the latest versions of the most popular browsers and operating systems. Readers can read their accessibility statement and view the full Accessibility Compliance Report for the video platform at https://support.proquest.com/s/article/Alexander-Street-Video-Platform-Accessibility-Statement?language=en_US.

Contracting and Pricing Provisions

To access the collection, libraries must sign the master ProQuest/Alexander Street License Agreement. The terms are standard and can be viewed at https://alexanderstreet.com/page/license-info. AVON customers can sign an addendum to add the collection to their license.

Pricing is based on FTE, with many customers eligible for a discount. Subscribers pay an annual fee with a minimal annual increment. Purchasing libraries pay once up front for all the content that is currently available and that will be added, in addition to a small annual maintenance fee, which covers the cost of technology updates, MARC records, maintaining metadata repositories, etc. Alexander Street will not waive this fee for existing AVON customers. Readers can contact their ProQuest representative for a quote.

Libraries that have purchased a particular edition are offered custom pricing for new content added in subsequent editions.

Libraries can access COUNTER-compliant usage statistics in the administrator portal. MARC records are provided for the collection.

Authentication Models

The Alexander Street video platform supports all standard authentication methods including IP and SSO options.

Competitive or Related Products

Other popular academic streaming services, including Kanopy and Films on Demand, offer PBS videos with subscription, purchase, a la carte, and Demand Driven Acquisitions (DDA) options. Alexander Street’s Academic Video Online subscription includes over 2,400 PBS videos. But only Alexander Street’s PBS Video Collection offers the option to purchase perpetual access to a large collection of PBS titles.

Kanopy offers 1,300 PBS videos that can be turned on as part of a DDA program. Libraries are charged for a one-year subscription after 4 views of 30 seconds or more of a title. They also offer the option to purchase PBS videos with one- or three-year licenses and perpetual purchase when available.

Films on Demand offers PBS videos as part of their Academic Master subscription package. It includes over 1,300 PBS videos. As with Kanopy, libraries can also license individual titles on the platform without subscribing to the Academic Master Package. Films on Demand sends an annual email to Academic Master subscribers alerting them to titles, including PBS titles, that will be removed from the platform, with the option to purchase them when available. Unfortunately, the PBS titles being removed are rarely available for purchase. This is, most likely, due to the reasons outlined above—the loss of rights to a section of the video.

Critical Evaluation

The Fifth Edition offers an array of high-quality PBS documentaries and programs covering a wide range of subjects. The collection has been carefully curated by experts at Alexander Street and includes much of PBS’s most powerful programming, making it a valuable resource for students and faculty.

One drawback is that libraries are not able to choose any programs or individual titles.

Another consideration is overlap with other streaming services. Many libraries provide access to multiple streaming services, including Kanopy, Films on Demand, and/or Academic Video Online. These collections all overlap significantly with the Fifth Edition. Libraries may want to run an overlap analysis to determine how much unique content the collection offers, especially if choosing the subscription option. I ran an Alma Overlap and Collection Analysis between the Fifth Edition and AVON using Community Zone collections and found that, at the time of writing, there was 93 percent overlap, with 130 titles unique to the Fifth Edition. The number of unique titles will grow as videos are swapped out and the collection builds through the end of 2026.

However, one of the great benefits of the collection is the perpetual purchase option. The annual loss of a significant number of titles can be incredibly frustrating to users. Once access to a particular PBS video is lost, it is very unlikely to become available again, as it is often impossible to contact or even determine who the original rights holder is. The purchase option solves this issue.

Recommendation

I recommend the Fifth Edition for libraries seeking to build a stand-alone collection of PBS videos. The extensive library of high-quality documentaries and programs offers a wealth of information on a wide range of topics, from history and science to literature and the arts. Alexander Street does an excellent job of selecting and curating the collection by adding vetted content quarterly. However, libraries that currently subscribe to PBS content through services like Kanopy, Master Academic from Films on Demand, or AVON may want to weigh the cost of the collection against the potential for significant overlap. The exception, of course, is for libraries seeking to maintain permanent access to PBS content. A library would need to evaluate the title list of the collection and determine if it is worth the cost.

References

Beck, T. J. (2020). Academic Video Online (AVON). The Charleston Advisor, 22(2), 5–7. https://doi.org/10.5260/chara.22.2.5

PBS Video Collection: Fifth Edition. (2024). Alexander Street. https://alexanderstreet.com/products/pbs-video-collection-fifth-edition