Classic films have never been harder to find. A free streamer offers hope
Despite the myriad streaming services that have landed in Australia over the past decade, finding classic films has often proved a problem – but a new service is now offering thousands of titles reaching back to the earliest days of cinema. And it's free.
Established by the non-profit community behind Wikipedia, Wikibooks and Wikiversity, WikiFlix demands no subscription fee, no sign-up and no ads. It joins a growing number of free Australian streamers, some of which are ad-supported, offering non-mainstream films.
WikiFlix offers more than 3,800 films from across the world that are in the public domain - not restricted by copyright - dating back to such early classics as Passage de Venus (1874), A Trip To The Moon (1902), Nosferatu (1922), Battleship Potemkin (1925), Metropolis (1927) and The Jazz Singer (1927).
As well as Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock films, it also offers the screwball comedy Charade, It's A Wonderful Life, Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali and Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Developed in Germany, WikiFlix promises 'access to a vast library of freely licensed films and aims to provide an alternative to commercial streaming giants, while complementing public broadcaster media libraries'.
Berlin-based spokeswoman Lydia Pintscher says an editor at Wikimedia, the community behind Wikipedia, suggested branching into film to build on its existing data.
'There are all these sources of those movies on the internet, like the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons and YouTube, of course, where you can watch all these public domain movies,' she says. '[The thinking was] let's make that more accessible to people and provide them with a friendly way of accessing [those films].'
What has been under-represented as streaming services have multiplied is early cinema, as well as Hollywood and foreign-language classics up to the 1960s, especially in black and white.
While the Hollywood side of that equation has improved, with HBO's Max including Turner Classic Movies, WikiFlix is a welcome arrival for cinephiles, filmmakers and students.
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