All languages in the catalogue

His Girl Friday (1940)Aandhi (1975)Muradan Muthu (1964)Desa Drohulu (1964)Ganagandharvan (2019)Picnic (2008)Ladi Lakhni Saybo Sava Lakhno (1990)Security Tight (2007)Pratyaghat (1993)Muhru Cin

Why English is the longest shelf

English leads with 79 films, and the quality of the cinema has nothing to do with it. The cause is American copyright law. Anything published in the United States in 1930 or earlier is now in the public domain outright. For films from the following decades, copyright had to be renewed after its first term, and for a great many pictures nobody filed the renewal, so the protection simply lapsed.

A few lost it even sooner. Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968 without a copyright notice, and under the law of the time that alone put it in the public domain.

The outcome is a large pool of English-language film that anyone in the United States may show, and the Internet Archive keeps copies of much of it. 75 of the English entries stream from there with no ads. The other 4 come from a studio channel, so even the oldest shelf here is not entirely old.

Where the other languages come from

None of the other 9 languages had a copyright accident on that scale, or at least not one that left free copies lying around the open web. Their films reach this catalogue by a different road: a studio or label deciding to publish its own back catalogue on YouTube and earn from the advertising. Across the site that means 16 channels, each one belonging to the company that holds the rights.

Going by channel: Hindi comes from Shemaroo Movies, Ultra Movie Parlour, Goldmines and NH Studioz; Tamil comes from Rajshri Tamil, Eros Universe Tamil, Sun Life and Eros Universe South; Turkish comes from AE On Demand; Telugu comes from Volga Video, Shemaroo Telugu, Aditya Cinemalu and Eros Universe South; Gujarati comes from Ultra Gujarati; Punjabi comes from Shemaroo Punjabi; Malayalam comes from Eros Universe South; Marathi comes from Ultra Marathi; Bengali comes from Shemaroo Bengali.

A shelf fed by one or two channels is fragile in a way the English shelf is not. If a channel reorganises its uploads or withdraws a title in some countries, a whole language page can shrink in a week. The reverse happens too: when a channel adds complete films that pass the tests, they appear on their language page at the next catalogue review. Either way the number on this page follows, because it is computed from the films that are actually listed.

What a short page tells you

Bengali currently has the shortest page, with 1 film. That says nothing about the size or age of Bengali cinema. It says how many Bengali films could be found that the owner had published in full, that play without an account, and that run long enough to be the whole picture.

Plenty of films in every one of these languages are online for free without being legal, and plenty of legal ones cost money. Neither sort is listed. If a title you want is missing from its language page, the likeliest explanation is that its owner has not put it out free.

Kannada and Bhojpuri

Two languages people often look for have no page here yet: Kannada and Bhojpuri. Both industries release well over a hundred films a year, and a great many of them are on YouTube. Many of those uploads, though, come from channels that do not own the film, or are cut, or are trailers and song compilations posted under a full-movie title. None of that is listed.

So far no complete Kannada or Bhojpuri film published by its own rights holder has passed the tests, and a language gets its page only when its first film does. Until then the 10 shelves above are where the free films are. Someone after Kannada film will find the nearest neighbours on the Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam pages; for Bhojpuri it is the Hindi page.

Reading a language page

Films are listed by title. Every row shows the running time and whether ads are involved, so you can rule things out before clicking anything. Open a film and you get the provider, the legal basis for the free offer, the account position, the countries the stream covers and the date the offer was last confirmed.

Two of those lines deserve a closer look. The rights basis tells you how long the offer is likely to last: a public-domain film will still be free in ten years, a studio upload only for as long as the studio keeps it up. The country list matters most for the studio films, since a channel can publish worldwide and still hold a film back from a handful of countries.

How each offer is tested is written out in full on the about page. To pick by mood or length instead of language, the full catalogue filters by genre, language and running time, and the collections gather films from several languages around one idea.