Lacey Mason, wtop.com
WASHINGTON – If you’ve run out of options in your Netflix queue or are craving educational entertainment, today’s Website of the Week is for you.
Documentary Heaven offers hundreds of, you guessed it, documentaries — all free for the viewing. The site does have ads, but the films themselves can be viewed uninterrupted.
According to Documentary Heaven, the site was set up in 2009 with a goal of providing a large collection of documentaries for free. There isn’t a hidden agenda and Documentary Heaven has even been voted one of Jabber’s sites of the day.
There are almost too many documentaries to count, but they are separated into convenient categories. Some are from YouTube, while others are available through Google Video (though Google is working to phase Google Video into YouTube).
Documentary Heaven acts as a convenient resource to bring videos from different sources together.
Nearly 50 documentaries about the events of Sept. 11 are available, and as the 11th anniversary of that tragic day approaches, any number could be helpful for purposes of education or remembrance. Click here for a full list.
Some of the documentaries are obscure, while others are fairly well known, such as 2003’s “Living With Michael Jackson”.
Along the lines of Jackson, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of celebrity biography and arts and entertainment documentaries offered. One favorite, which visitors to Documentary Heaven rated 9.9 out of ten, is “Queen: Days of Our Lives”.
Click here for more music documentaries.
There isn’t a specific section for kid-friendly documentaries, but “The Emotional World of Farm Animals” proved to be an interesting, if obscure, look into where some foods come from, without showing images that would be scary to a child.
Another kid-friendly documentary is BBC’s acclaimed “The Cat Connection”, which takes a look into the secret lives of cats and how they became the most popular domesticated pet.
All in all, whether you’re interested in real-life crime stories, space exploration or religion, Documentary Heaven has a little something for everyone.
Check out “The Cat Connection” below.
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(Copyright 2012 by WTOP. All Rights Reserved.)
