Best Documentaries on YouTube: Free, Full and Official

Start with AlphaGo. Google DeepMind put the whole 90-minute film on its own channel, and it follows the 2016 match in Seoul between the Go champion Lee Sedol and DeepMind’s program. If you want something closer to home, the BBC’s Africa Eye investigations Sex for Grades and Sweet Sweet Codeine are both on the BBC News Africa channel in full.

Every film below was uploaded by the people who made it or own it: a broadcaster, a studio, a company or the film-maker. We opened each video’s page on YouTube to confirm the channel, and to confirm it is the whole film and not a trailer. That rule removed most of our old list, which leaned on copies posted by channels with no claim to the films. Copies like that can disappear without warning, and they were never the uploader’s to share.

Best documentaries on YouTube at a glance

Technology and business

AlphaGo – The Movie. Go has more possible board positions than there are atoms in the universe, which made it a grand challenge for artificial intelligence. The film follows the best-of-five match in Seoul in March 2016 that hundreds of millions of people watched. Greg Kohs directs. DeepMind’s description lists best documentary wins at the Denver, Warsaw and Traverse City festivals.

The Thinking Game. The follow-up from the same team, filmed over five years. It follows DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and the work that went from strategy games to AlphaFold and the 50-year-old protein folding problem, which went on to win a Nobel Prize.

Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware. The one film from our original list that is still an official upload. WIRED goes inside Shenzhen’s manufacturing and prototyping scene, looks at how Shanzhai, or copycat manufacturing, changed the usual way of doing business, and asks what the rest of the world can learn from it. It now sits on the WIRED Investigations channel.

Python: The Documentary. CultRepo tells how a side project started in Amsterdam in the 1990s came to power artificial intelligence, data science and some of the world’s biggest companies, and how it nearly disappeared along the way. Guido van Rossum, Travis Oliphant and Barry Warsaw are among the people interviewed. The description calls it a 90-minute documentary; the video runs 1 hour 24 minutes.

Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos. FRONTLINE’s investigation into how Bezos built one of the most influential economic forces in the world, and what Amazon’s convenience costs. It dates from 2020, and the description still calls Bezos Amazon’s chief executive.

Crime and investigations

The Confessions. The closest thing here to classic true crime. FRONTLINE producer Ofra Bikel investigates the Norfolk Four, four US Navy sailors convicted of the 1997 rape and murder of a woman in Norfolk, Virginia. The film looks at the interrogation methods that led each man to confess, the threat of the death penalty and sleep deprivation among them, with no evidence tying any of them to the crime. It first aired in 2010.

Sex for Grades. BBC Africa Eye gathered dozens of testimonies, then sent undercover journalists posing as students into the University of Lagos and the University of Ghana to film lecturers harassing them. Kiki Mordi reports.

Sweet Sweet Codeine. Africa Eye goes undercover to find out who makes codeine cough syrup and who sells it to Nigeria’s students. The BBC’s description cites a Senate estimate of 3 million bottles drunk every day in Kano and Jigawa alone.

The Trap. BBC Eye goes inside the instant loan app scam in India, where easy money turns into blackmail and abuse. The BBC says more than 60 people in India took their own lives in three years after being threatened or humiliated by these apps. The description links versions in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

World’s Scariest Drug. VICE travels to Colombia to look into scopolamine, known as the Devil’s Breath, which VICE describes as leaving a person unable to exercise free will. This was on our original list too, and at 36 minutes it is the shortest film here.

13TH. Ava DuVernay’s film uses archive footage and interviews with activists and scholars to examine the US prison system and how the country’s history of racial inequality drives its rate of imprisonment. It is rated TV-MA. If prisons are your subject, we also have a list of prison documentaries and series on Netflix.

Nature and the planet

Netflix put a group of its documentaries on YouTube when schools closed in 2020, after teachers asked for a way to keep showing them. They are still there, on the Netflix channel.

Our Planet: One Planet. The opening episode of the nature series, which shows the planet’s wildlife and how climate change affects every living thing. All eight episodes are on the channel in full, each around 50 minutes.

Chasing Coral. A team that includes an advertising man, camera designers and marine biologists builds the first time-lapse camera able to record coral bleaching as it happens, and fights equipment failures and the sea to get the footage.

HOME. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s 2009 film argues that we have little time left to change how we live before natural resources run down and the climate turns on us. In the description he writes that the film “needs to be free”, and that a patron and the distributor made that possible. His later film HUMAN, built from interviews with 2,000 people in 60 countries, is on its own official channel in three volumes.

History and science

The Sumerians: Fall of the First Cities. Fall of Civilizations began as a history podcast and remakes its episodes as long documentaries on its own channel. This one covers the people who invented writing and mathematics and built some of the largest cities the world had seen, and how their civilisation ended. It runs for nearly two and a half hours, so plan the evening around it.

Cosmic Dawn. NASA’s own film about the James Webb Space Telescope. It follows the telescope from an idea at the Goddard Space Flight Center through assembly and testing to the launch pad in French Guiana, with footage from the Webb film crew that had not been shown before.

Africa’s Great Civilizations: Origins. The first hour of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s six-hour PBS series, which goes to Kenya, Egypt and beyond for the origins of humankind and of early societies on the continent. It first aired in 2017. On YouTube the title is The Real History of Africa They Never Taught You.

Before you press play

• They are free, with adverts. None of these needs a rental or a subscription. YouTube Premium removes the adverts, but you do not need it to watch any of them.
• Countries. Going by the country list YouTube attaches to each video, every film in the table is available in Nigeria, India and the United States. The Confessions is the exception for British readers: the United Kingdom is not on its list.
• Age limits. Black Axe: Nigeria’s Mafia Cult, another full BBC Africa Eye film, is age-restricted, so YouTube asks you to sign in before it plays. That is why it is not in the table.
• Links can change. An owner can take a film down whenever it likes. If one of these has gone, look on the same channel first.

What we left out

Five films from our earlier list are gone from it: Inside North Korea, This is the Zodiac Speaking, The Story of Aaron Swartz, The Extraordinary Genius of Albert Einstein and A Murder in the Family. The full copies we found on YouTube were posted by channels that did not make them.

Two have a proper alternative. National Geographic’s own channel has Undercover in North Korea, a full 44-minute episode with Lisa Ling, though it is not listed for the UK. And The Internet’s Own Boy, the Aaron Swartz film, carries a Creative Commons licence, so the copy on the Internet Archive is a legitimate place to see it.

If you would rather have a streaming service than a search box, our guide to Netflix alternatives covers the free and paid ones.

Where to start

• If you watch one: AlphaGo. It is a complete feature film with festival prizes behind it, and the sequel is on the same channel when you finish.
• If you are in Nigeria: Sex for Grades. It was filmed at the University of Lagos and it is under an hour.
• If you want true crime: The Confessions.
• If you have half an hour: World’s Scariest Drug.
• If you want a series: Our Planet, all eight episodes.

Quick answers

Are documentaries on YouTube free?

The ones here are. They play free, with adverts, on the channels of the companies and film-makers that made them.

What are the best true crime documentaries on YouTube?

From official channels, start with FRONTLINE’s The Confessions, about four men who confessed to a murder they did not commit. The BBC’s Sex for Grades and The Trap are undercover investigations.

Are there good history documentaries on YouTube?

Yes. The Fall of Civilizations channel makes its own long films, the Sumerians one among them, and PBS Documentaries has Africa’s Great Civilizations.

Are there documentaries in Hindi on YouTube?

Yes. DW runs a channel called DW Documentary हिन्दी, and BBC News Hindi has a Hindi version of The Trap.

How do I know a documentary on YouTube is an official upload?

Look at the channel name under the video. It should be the broadcaster, the studio or the film’s own channel. A whole film on a channel with no link to the people who made it is a re-upload.