Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Professor Simon Schaffer presents the amazing and untold story of automata - extraordinary clockwork machines designed hundreds of years ago to mimic and recreate life. The film brings the past to life in vivid detail as we see how and why these masterpieces were built. Travelling around Europe, Simon uncovers the history of these machines and shows us some of the most spectacular examples, from an entire working automaton city to a small boy who can be programmed to write and even a device that can play chess". All the machines Simon visits show a level of technical sophistication and ambition that still amazes today. As well as the automata, Simon explains in great detail the world in which they were made - the hardship of the workers who built them, their role in global trade and the industrial revolution and the eccentric designers who dreamt them up. Finally, Simon reveals that to us that these long-forgotten marriages of art and engineering are actually the ancestors of many of our most loved modern technologies, from recorded music to the cinema and much of the digital world.

It is one of the most baffling questions that scientists can ask: how big is the Universe that we live in? Follow the cosmologists who are creating the most ambitious map in history - a map of everything in existence. And it is stranger than anyone had imagined - a Universe without end that stretches far beyond what the eye can ever see. And, if the latest research proves true, our Universe may just be the start of something even bigger. Much bigger.

The biggest rabbit-hole in history: the search of the smallest thing in the Universe. It is a journey where things don't just become smaller but also a whole lot weirder. Scientists hope to catch a glimpse of miniature black holes, multiple dimensions and even parallel Universes. As they start to explore this wonderland, where nothing is quite what it seems, they may have to rewrite the fundamental laws of time and space.

Right now, you're hurtling around the Sun at 64,000 miles an hour. In the next year, you'll travel 584 million miles, to end up back where you started. In this spectacular series, presenters Kate Humble and Dr Helen Czerski follow the Earth's voyage around the Sun for one complete orbit, to witness the astonishing consequences this journey has for us all. From seasonal extremes to destructive weather, they travel the world to experience the great events that are shaped by our journey around the Sun." They venture back in time to show how the Earths orbit has changed, and the astounding effect this has had on the planet. For the first time ever, this astonishing series charts the progress of the Earth as it undertakes its incredible annual orbit around the Sun. From stunning space imagery to in-your-face storm chasing, this series showcases the incredible power of our planets epic journey around the Sun. In this first episode they travel from July to the December solstice, experiencing spectacular weather and the largest tides on Earth. To show how the Earth's orbit affects our lives, Helen jumps out of an aeroplane and Kate briefly becomes the fastest driver on Earth.

Video Games: The Movie, aims to educate & entertain audiences about how video games are made, marketed, and consumed by looking back at gaming history and culture through the eyes of game developers, publishers, and consumers. It is not just another film about the games industry, but attempts something much more ambitious; the question of what it means to be a 'gamer', a game maker, and where games are headed. Storytelling and the art of the video game medium are also explored in this first of it's kind film about the video game industry & the global culture it has created

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer monetary system in which all transaction records are public. Participants can use its open-source software to transfer virtual currency to one another as easily as they might send an email. Bitcoin opens an uncharted world of new possibilities to explore. We'll follow the stories of entrepreneurs and startups that are helping shape the new financial frontier. We'll look at the competitive mining market and the various subcultures within the Bitcoin community." You'll encounter a variety of characters and opinions as we examine the social and political impact of an open-source digital currency. Will the rise of Bitcoin bring a monetary paradigm shift that will forever change the world? Supposedly invented by a mysterious Japanese man named Satoshi Nakamoto (whose current whereabouts are unknown). Because it is designed to have an absolute ceiling of 21 million Bitcoins in circulation (not anticipated until 2040), and the system has no central depository or administrative authority, it has great appeal to libertarians and others who seek alternatives to a perceived corrupt, manipulative banking infrastructure and excessive government regulations. Its low processing fees compared with those of mainstream credit-card companies also hold considerable allure for merchants.