Seattle Public Library Has Got Your Netflix-Style Streaming Right Here

I’m streaming African Queen on my iPhone for free right now, and you can, too. “I’ll perish without a hair of the dog!”

Seattle Public Library has gone, well, public with their streaming media partnership with Hoopla. The collection — of movies, TV shows, albums, and audio books — is Hoopla’s, which is why I’m watching African Queen. They have 10,000 films and TV titles, Netflix has 60,000 (counting each TV episode as title makes sense here because you have a title limit with Hoopla).

In movies, Hoopla is heavy on classics or things of a vaguely educational nature: James Franco in Howl, John Malkovich in Klimt. When you browse through, you’ll understand why some 81 percent of these titles are not found on Netflix. Music is much better, with 300,000 titles ranging from Bruno Mars and Macklemore, to Mumford & Sons and the Les Miz soundtrack — that’s just the Ms, obviously. You can also listen to the audiobook of A Confederacy of Dunces or Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.

Download the free Hoopla app for your Apple or Android device. (On the desktop, they support  Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.) You have to sign up before you can sign in, using your Seattle Public Library card number, and registering an email address. Then you can stream or download up to 20 titles per month. You can check out a music title for one week at a time, videos, for three days (72 hours from download).

The library told MyNorthwest that they have had to try to estimate demand, since they have an overall borrowing budget themselves. (Each title borrowed costs the library about $1.70.) They’re happy with Hoopla’s pay-as-you-go scheme because they’ll only pay as borrowers actually use the service, and several patrons can watch or listen to the same title at once. It’s all configurable, so at some point they could loan out the same number of titles per month, but cut the per-patron borrowings to ten from 20 per month.