Ladies and gentlemen, there are now a million more ways to kill time on the Internet – Lord help us – as the
Associated Press has officially uploaded its entire catalog of archive video footage to YouTube. That's over a million minutes of historic events recorded for posterity, accessible to anyone and everyone in the world with an Internet connection, for free.
For those counting, there are over 550,000 individual stories represented in this video archive. Some, as you'd likely guess, are more significant than others. Or more relevant, or whatever. Some are completely inane and ridiculous, like this one, of a panda riding a go kart at a circus in Beijing. A few are old but terribly interesting, like this human circus performer who helped General Motors gather crash-testing data or this one of Niki Lauda testing a Ferrari F1 car just weeks after a terrible, life-altering accident. Still others are more recent, such as this one, which covers the massive recall Toyota went through a few years back for accelerator pedals.
We've spent the last few hours scrolling through just a tiny sampling of what's now available in the AP Archive, and some of our findings can be seen below. Fair warning: This video footage is sure to become one of the supermassive black holes that make the interwebs a great, wonderful, and terrible place, all at the same time. We've embedded a dozen videos below in addition to the panda above (sorry, couldn't help ourselves), and we could easily find hundreds worth watching. Go ahead, blow a few hours, but be sure to get out and enjoy the rest of your weekend... preferably outside the confines of your laptop screen, at least for a little while.
For those counting, there are over 550,000 individual stories represented in this video archive. Some, as you'd likely guess, are more significant than others. Or more relevant, or whatever. Some are completely inane and ridiculous, like this one, of a panda riding a go kart at a circus in Beijing. A few are old but terribly interesting, like this human circus performer who helped General Motors gather crash-testing data or this one of Niki Lauda testing a Ferrari F1 car just weeks after a terrible, life-altering accident. Still others are more recent, such as this one, which covers the massive recall Toyota went through a few years back for accelerator pedals.
We've spent the last few hours scrolling through just a tiny sampling of what's now available in the AP Archive, and some of our findings can be seen below. Fair warning: This video footage is sure to become one of the supermassive black holes that make the interwebs a great, wonderful, and terrible place, all at the same time. We've embedded a dozen videos below in addition to the panda above (sorry, couldn't help ourselves), and we could easily find hundreds worth watching. Go ahead, blow a few hours, but be sure to get out and enjoy the rest of your weekend... preferably outside the confines of your laptop screen, at least for a little while.
