This documentary takes you on a detailed journey through Kodak’s history

There’s no shortage of content out there about Kodak’s rise and fall, but this deep dive from Design Docs takes a slower, more granular approach to the story behind the company. The feature-length documentary dives into Kodak’s rise, dominance and collapse, and how a lab engineer’s toaster-sized prototype set the company’s eventual downfall in motion.

The video walks through George Eastman’s early years and the business decisions that turned Kodak into a near-monopoly, from roll film and the Brownie to the marketing machine that embedded “Kodak moments” into everyday language. It also spends plenty of time on the culture around Rochester, including an interesting look at how Eastman took care of his employees and supported the community – in Rochester, New York and beyond – in ways that were well ahead of their time.

Of course, the story wouldn’t be complete without touching on what happened to Kodak with the rise of the digital age, and the documentary also covers that. It digs into the internal politics around Kodak’s invention of the digital camera, the fear of cannibalizing film and the decisions that eventually pushed the company toward bankruptcy. At just under an hour, it’s on the longer and slower side for YouTube, but if you’re willing to settle in, you’ll get a level of detail that most Kodak documentaries skip.

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