Moments caught by cameras that never blink.
THE DECISIVE MOMENT is a video channel built around footage from fixed cameras — security cameras, dashcams, doorbell cameras, body-worn cameras and monitoring instruments. Incidents and the response to them, rescues, and natural events that no one was standing by to film.
Watch on YouTube →Where the footage comes from
Every clip is taken from material released under a free licence or released into the public domain, mainly by public agencies and from Wikimedia Commons. We do not use material whose licence rests on an uploader's self-declaration, and we do not take material from social platforms, where there is no reliable way to establish rights.
The source and its licence are credited at the end of every video and in the video description.
How we treat the people in the footage
Faces are blurred
Faces of people caught in the frame are obscured before publication, and each finished video is checked again before it goes out.
We do not ask you to identify anyone
The point of each video is the method and what can be learned from it, never the identity of a person on camera.
Only what officials have published
Descriptions stay within what the releasing agency has stated. We draw no conclusions of our own about individuals.
How videos are published
Editing and publication are handled by our own software, which is used only by us and is not distributed to anyone else. It uploads finished videos to our own YouTube channel through YouTube API Services, and sets the thumbnail, description and caption track for each one. It does not read, collect or display anyone else's YouTube data.
See our Privacy Policy for what that software stores and for how to contact us about removal.
Contact
Questions, licence enquiries, and requests to take a video down: [email protected]