I was so excited the other day when I found out about History Vault, which is a PAID streaming service provided by A&E Network’s History Channel that gives you unlimited access to an ever increasing amount of historic films and documentaries. It pretty much has nearly every actual show that was ever on the History channel, minus the silly reality crap.
I used to love the History channel, but as I already mentioned, its full of reality shows now. I do love American Pickers and Pawn Stars, but I really love actual historic shows and documentaries as well, and these are becoming so rare on the channel. H2 used to be where they’d keep all the interesting shows on, but recently that changed to some channel for Leftist Propaganda — again, nothing interesting.
So, I was immediately interested when I saw the commercial for History vault on tv, which sad:
HISTORY Vault
Access hundreds of hours of historical videos to explore the world’s most fascinating subjects.
- Commercial free
- Content updated weekly
- Monthly and annual subscription options
- $4.99 / MONTH or $49.99 / YEAR, after a 7 day Free Trial
I immediately got online and signed up for the monthly plan.
Currently they only offer access via a Roku, and iOS app. Soon they’ll have an Android app, and a Web player where you can watch it from your browser.
I signed up around the 15th Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks, so the main page on Vault was decided to 9/11 footage.
The way the guide works is it has “Collections”, which is basically categories for videos, for example, you’ll have 9/11 collection which is where all the 9/11 videos are stored, Presidential Collections for related videos, Ancient Discoveries for videos about Ancient Egypt, etc.
There is so much interesting footage, for example, there are even old Presidential Campaign ads from the “From The Campaign Trail” collection, and the JFK adds are very cool. Takes you back in time.
I have had zero problems with streaming videos. There has been zero downtime, nor any buffering issues for me , and I’ve watched hours upon hours of footage so far. Everything instantly loads, and all footage seems to be good quality, given that much of the footage is very old, and alot of the shows were produced years ago.
As advertised, there are zero ads or commercials, just pure content, which is amazing.
Something I really love is the resume feature. It service remembers the exact moment where you left off in a video, which is something I wish Sling would get right (resuming kinda works on Sling, but barely and rarely, and fast forwarding doesn’t work so in order to finish watching a show, you have to rewatch the entire thing, AHH! But not the case on History Vault).
The Roku app looks nearly identical to the iOS app, and works great.
If you’re a history fan, this is a must have service, at least try it with the 7 day trial (credit card required, cancel before trial is up). No complaints!
Update: 9/22/16 – I have found a problem, which is there seems to be no search functionality. I wanted to find videos about a certain subjection, but was unable to do something. Hopefully they add this functionality in the future.
