January 30, 2026

Over 100 Free PBS Documentaries on YouTube

Earlier this month, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting shut down after the U.S. federal government cut its funding. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and went on to fund more than 1,500 locally owned public radio and television stations, including PBS and NPR stations. While the future of PBS and its numerous PBS member stations remains to be seen, we thought we’d highlight some of the educational documentaries from PBS that are available on YouTube. Browse our playlist below of over 100 free PBS documentaries available on YouTube:

Over 100 PBS Documentaries on YouTube

For this list, we went through the national PBS YouTube channels like American Experience, American Masters, NOVA, Nature, and the main PBS YouTube channel to pick out full documentaries being offered. We also browsed around the many PBS member station channels that are on YouTube from cities and states across America to find documentaries that might be interesting to a wider audience. Because many of these channels change their offerings frequently on YouTube, we won’t list all the documentaries here that are on our playlist. But we’ll keep adding to our YouTube playlist as new PBS documentaries become available, so bookmark the playlist on YouTube if you want to see updates.

We didn’t include documentaries from the PBS FRONTLINE series as those usually stay up on YouTube and there’s already a good PBS playlist of them with over 300 documentaries available:

FRONTLINE Full Documentaries on YouTube Playlist

And for PBS Podcasts and Documentaries that we feature on LearnOutLoud you can check out their publisher page here:

Free PBS Documentaries & Podcasts on LearnOutLoud.com

Long live PBS!