Kanopy is an award-winning streaming service that offers documentary and independent films from valued cultural collections such as The Criterion Collection and The Great Courses, as well as films from thousands of independent filmmakers. Instructors must request that the library purchase a license to a film before it can be made available for viewing.
Kanopy films can be viewed in any modern web browser, on their mobile app, and even on Roku and Amazon Fire devices.
When you search for films in Kanopy, results are returned in two sections. The top section are films Drake has licensed, and these can be viewed immediately. Below that are films that must be requested, because we do not yet own a license. Currently, the library only accepts requests from instructors for films that are required viewing in their courses (see How to Request a Film, below).
The easiest way to find Kanopy films is to simply search by title. As you type, a list of matches will begin to appear, and you can click on a match at any time to be taken directly to that film:
Options and features for viewing Kanopy films differ slightly depending on whether you're viewing in a browser or app. The Kanopy support site has useful tips for viewing, enabling captions and transcripts, creating clips, and creating a free account. The site also has technical help for the most common issues you might encounter.
Kanopy has marketed itself as "just like Netflix, only free." In reality, neither part of that statement is true. While Netflix is a subscription-based service, for which you pay a flat annual fee to access all of the content available on the Netflix platform, Kanopy charges the library for each film.
In order to most responsibly use the funds we have available for Kanopy films, the library only allows instructors to request films, and we ask that all requested films be part of a course's required curriculum.
More details about our Kanopy access are available in this January 2020 blog post.
Instructors Only. You can ask the library to purchase a Kanopy film in one of two ways:
Kanopy offers 1-year and 3-year licenses to most films in its catalog, and the library's cost for those licenses is $150 and $350, respectively. If you intend to use a film as part of your course materials for at least 3 consecutive years, please let us know so we can save a little with a 3-year license. We do our best to honor all requests, but we also attempt to determine if a film is available for free from another source before purchasing a license.
The panel on the right lists all of the Kanopy films we currently license, ordered by expiration date. Click on the Title column header to re-order the list by title.
Most Kanopy films include public performance rights (PPR), so they can be used in classroom or non-classroom group settings, provided there are no admission costs and no profit is made from the screening. More about Kanopy's PPR policy.
If you plan to screen a Kanopy film to a non-classroom group, please contact the library so we can verify with Kanopy that the film includes PPR.
Access to streaming video content has become increasingly important, and the library does its best to meet the curricular needs of Drake faculty who need such content. Access to streaming videos is expensive and, in most cases, temporary, so we must be careful when determining which and how much content to license.
While the library has not set a specific limit on how many streaming videos we will license for a particular course, please consider the following:
Includes Kanopy and Swank titles
