Ever since Animal Planet has turned into garbage, the lack of a stream of wildlife documentary programming means I have to actively search for it. (Discovery Channel has similarly disappointed me) I've watched a good portion of the stuff available on Netflix, and a number of the available PBS Nature programs. (as a broke college student, I stick to cheap stuff, ha ha) As an American, I don't really have access to the stuff on BBC streaming. (a shame, since they do have some great nature documentaries) Any good sources of wildlife documentaries you guys can recommend to me?
If you have access to anything by David Attenborough that is great but I am not sure where you would be able to get that in the US. Many wildlife documentaries are available on DVD but those can be quite expensive. Not too helpful I know but I though I would write this anyway.
I do not own a television (and am not willing to pay for any services), so my "television" viewing comes mainly from the free internet tv site Hulu.com. I believe it is US only, but you are in the US. They do not have a lot, but you can search by genre and in the "documentaries" section there is some nature stuff.
I opt to pay the $7.99 for Hulu Plus*, and they have nearly all of the Natural History Unit's output from the past several years. While I own quite a bit of it on video, there were some older things I got to see for the first time. To wit, Wild India Wild Indonesia Life in the Canopy Wild South America & Attenborough's Ark The site also has The Blue Planet The Secret Life of Elephants The Life of Mammals Wild China Madagascar Life in Cold Blood Life in the Undergrowth South Pacific Life in the Freezer Nature's Great Events Big Cat Diary Great Barrier Reef Galapagos ETC. * - The eight bucks a month will still require you sit through about thirty seconds of commercials, but you'll have a much larger library of things to search through. The service used to have all of PBS's NOVA series as well, but I can't find it anymore. And as to the original question, YouTube is a good source if you're not always particular about the video quality.
It can be worth just nosing around on Youtube, there are some old episodes of BBC The Natural World on there (like The Otters of Yellowstone, Earth Pilgrim, Wolf Pack etc), and this user has uploaded a small selection of old Wildlife on One episodes, they're old, but its been good to see some of them again (Shadow of the Hare has stayed with me since I was about 5).
Yes there are a lot of users I know that upload very good wildlife documentary's on youtube. Unfortunately their accounts gets deleted very quickly but they eventually do come back with a different name.
Youtube accounts with uploads of BBC Natural World documentaries: https://www.youtube.com/user/learnenglish10/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAmU2mNdSr2Lugosh09tHjA/videos
PBS's Nature series is almost always very good. Also, you can find a lot of stuff on the NatGeoWild and Smithsonian channels. Some of it is overly dramatized animal fights or predation sequences, but some of it is high quality stuff.
