Once upon a time, there was the promise of substantial savings for viewers who wanted to stop paying for cable TV. “Cut the cord,” the story began, and use streaming services to customize your viewing options.
For many, though, the fairy tale of cheap TV turned into a story of rising bills as the cost of those services began to add up, sometimes to more than the cable bill itself.
Enter Johnson County Library, with a variety of high-quality, widely diverse video streaming services available all for the low, low cost (actually zero!) of a Library card.
“The cost of streaming platforms has become unmanageable for many people,” said Samantha Chinn, the e-Resource Collection Specialist for Johnson County Library. “This is an important resource for our community. The quality of content is deep.”
There are four different video streaming services available to Library patrons:
- Kanopy - This is the most popular and integrates easily with most smart TV platforms. It provides an amazingly large collection of documentaries, Oscar winners, classics and films from around the world. You also get access to Kanopy Kids which provides unlimited use of a rotating selection of kids favorites from entertainment to education.
- Indieflix - This service is best known for providing diverse voices and both well-known and more obscure content.
- Naxos Video Library - This provides an extensive collection of classical musical performances, including opera, ballet and live concerts. There are also master classes taught by world-famous musicians among the 3,600 full-length videos.
- UK National Theatre Collection - You can choose from 50 filed productions of this troupe, including “Peter Pan,” “Frankenstein,” “Twelfth Night,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and more. Special archival materials allow you to dig deeper and go behind the scenes of some performances.
Chinn said the Library saw a big jump in the demand for streaming services with the COVID pandemic of 2020-2021. That demand, she said, has continued. In January, for instance, Johnson County Library patrons visited the Kanopy site more than 55,000 times, with a total of 8,000 items checked out. BBC studio content is always popular, but the variety is immense. January’s top selected movies included “Pride and Prejudice” and “The Hunt for Red October.”
Chinn said she expects the use of streaming services to grow in the future.
“Some movies aren’t going to DVD at all. They are going straight to streaming,” she said.
In addition to entertainment, Chinn said she knows of film study students who access the Library’s streaming platforms to complement their education.
Regular users of the Library streaming platforms rave about the variety, the ease of access and the cost … or lack of cost to be more accurate.
“It is important to know that you don’t need cable, or YouTube TV,” said Paula McCarthy, who has been using Kanopy for the past few months. “There are so many ways to watch quality TV without having to pay for it. There is so much content that you could never see all of it.”
McCarthy, like many users, was using a popular streaming platform and kept returning to it out of habit, and perhaps obligation because she was paying for it. She heard about the Library services and decided to broaden her horizons.
“I want to watch some of Shakespeare’s plays, and I love documentaries,” she said. “I was frustrated when the cost of my streaming service went up $10 a month and I was only watching it for old movies. So Kanopy is perfect for me.”
“Plus, they show me new movies too that I have missed. It’s the best of both worlds.”
And so, with your Johnson County Library card, video watchers can live happily ever after. Not only do you get to enjoy a wide variety of quality streaming content, you can watch without any fees. If you don’t already have a Library card, you can sign up today.