While PBS does offer hundreds of videos for online streaming, not every program that airs on your PBS station will be available for streaming. PBS must obtain the streaming rights separately from television broadcast rights for every program. In some cases, we are only able to offer full episodes for online streaming for a limited period of time, and then the episodes must be taken off of our site.
Any program or piece of television on PBS is a piece of intellectual property. With any piece of intellectual property come certain rights and allowances for the creators, distributors, and consumers. Many of these rights include requirements for offering videos for online viewing. If a program is not available for viewing on pbs.org, it is because of the specific streaming rights associated with that show, and often, these rights vary from show to show, and can even vary from season to season for one show.
While Passport does allow us to offer more content for online streaming, we are unable to offer every program for online streaming indefinitely due to the aforementioned streaming rights.
You may encounter a show page where the full episode is unavailable for streaming but clips and previews are still listed. PBS does continue to offer clips and previews for some programs as these are not as restricted as full episodes, and many of our viewers are still interested in viewing these clips and previews.
While these episodes may be unavailable for free online streaming, we recommend visiting the PBS Store or a third party such as iTunes or Amazon Video if you are interested in purchasing episodes of these programs.