Fellow Wichita Public Library patrons, our long municipal nightmare is over.
OK, I’m exaggerating, the library is great and it’s always been great. But now it’s even greater, because at long last, the library has made the Kanopy movie streaming service available.
Kanopy—that’s “Kanopy” with a “K”—is a service that lets you log in with your library card to stream any of something like a billion movies right through your laptop, phone, or whatever device you’ve got hooked up to your TV. I’ll repeat—all you need is your library card and something to stream the movies on.
The service has been around for years, and a helpful Twitter user reminded me that almost four years ago I was bugging the library about it, because I really wanted to watch Ex Libris, a three-and-a-half hour documentary about the New York Public Library system from the great Frederick Wiseman. I did see that eventually, by the way, and it’s astonishing, as long as you’ve got just a little patience.
And that’s on Kanopy! But don’t just assume these are all movies about libraries. The service has stuff from all over the place, from a ton of genres—just looking at my front page right now, I’m seeing The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Hereditary, Parasite, and even some pretty new movies like the lovely little platonic romantic comedy Together Together, that played at this year’s Sundance Festival. The site will let you search by genre, country of origin, the era the movie was made in, whatever you want. And what’s more, there’s a whole other part of the site that has educational tools based in pretty much anything you can think of—architecture, midwifery, career development, food technology, language studies, you name it.
I guess if there’s a drawback it’s that you’re limited to watching seven movies per month, plus additional availability for the educational materials, but really, who’s complaining about those things? Whether you’re a crazy person who already subscribes to basically every streaming service like I do, or even just a really casual viewer who doesn’t quite have the budget for all those random movie platforms, Kanopy is kind of a gift from the movie gods.
