Kanopy
Kanopy has more than 26,000 films in its collection - including leading producers such as Criterion Collection, The Great Courses, New Day Films, California Newsreel, Kino Lorber, PBS, BBC, First Run Features, The Video Project, Media Education Foundation, Documentary Educational Resources, and more. For more information about licensing and access please see below. NOTE: At the end of the 2018/19 academic year, we began to mediate access to Kanopy films. Previously, all films were available to watch immediately. This access has changed and is described in more detail below.
Most Kanopy films are licensed with Public Performance Rights. Films can be embedded into Canvas and users can create clips and playlists.
Finding & Viewing Films
Licensed & Licensing Films
All films that have been licensed and are available to view immediately will appear on the F&M College Library Kanopy site here. Most films are licensed for one year (some have been licensed for multiple years). Kanopy does not display this information on its site; however, if you look up a specific title in Discover, the library's catalog, you can find out when a license expires as explained on the previous page.
If a film has not yet been licensed by the College Library, you can request access to the film. If you click on the Kanopy link for an unlicensed film in Discover, of if you search for a film that we do not own on the Kanopy Website, you will be prompted to fill out a request form, which gets sent to the library.
In most cases, we will approve the request and send it along to Kanopy. Please keep in mind the following when making requests:
- Before making a request, please check our other streaming film platforms or look up the title in Discover to find out if we already have access elsewhere.
- Provide as much information as possible on the request form, including the reason for the request (class assignment, research project, etc.) and give the name of the class whenever applicable. Please include the date by which you need the film. In some cases, if we do not have enough information, we will follow up with a Google Form asking for additional information as needed.
- When requests are made Monday-Friday during normal business hours (9 am- 5 pm, EST), the turnaround time can be very fast--less than 24 hours. However, it is best to plan ahead and make your request well in advance of the date the film is needed.
- Unfortunately, there is no preview capability for unlicensed films.
Why Mediation?
Kanopy has good content and is very popular on campus. The unmediated model, however, is not sustainable. The costs are difficult to predict and hard to control. Before we went to mediated access, anytime a film was viewed at least three times for a minimum of 30 seconds per viewing, a one-year license was automatically triggered for that film. By limiting access, we can ensure that the content we are licensing is needed by faculty and students for educational use.
Kanopy does not make its mediated access particularly user friendly. It is not easy to browse all available content and there is no preview feature for unlicensed films. We are here to help if you are having trouble finding what you're looking for.
For more context on mediated acess to Kanopy in academic settings, please read this article from Film Quarterly: