This is what I was looking for, where did you see that info?

It&#x27;s more like SiriusXM than broadcast TV, and I would say the SiriusXM model is a lot nicer. I like being able to choose a topic.

This is a good idea for this app, but maybe the least realistic part of the old TV experience. You&#x27;d have maybe 3 &quot;premium&quot; channels of a mix of tv shows, news, talk shows, sports. Maybe a dedicated sports channel and dedicated news channel. A channel more biased towards educational shows. A channel or two of weird low-budget shows (local access). A few channels that don&#x27;t come in well (static and distortion). And add some off-air &quot;colorbars&quot; sometimes. And a channel or two in a foreign language.And then force the user to get off the couch and walk to the monitor to turn a knob when you want to change channel...

Would love a few more sports channels, a local news channel based on your location, and maybe a video gaming channel.

Also diy and maker channel. 
Just add voidlabs, mitxela, some other makers Colin furze, adam savage and some woodworking channels, like four eyes furniture. Some metalworkers like inheritance machining. Just general creative engineering stuff but not documentaries.

This project is very cool. Amazing execution. Other channels I would suggest:<pre><code> - Cooking
 - Family movies (from the public domain?)
 - Baseball</code></pre>

Thinking back to childhood it was all History Channel, PBS, and Cartoon Network &#x2F; Nick. Would be great to see analogues to some of those :)

On the bottom right there is an ID that looks like a YouTube video ID

It&#x27;d be really awesome to have a link to the channel and video that is playing in case I want to find it later.  This is a wonderful discovery tool, but I&#x27;d really love to be able to save the content I discover!

One channel I always appreciate wherever I go, is the low budget non-profit hobby regional channel.Would love to see people just working on projects they have around the house, not taking things too serious.

I just wasted the last 2hrs watching instead of working and I have not even made it past Channel 8. Thank God there&#x27;re only 12 channels, I was afraid they would find me dead from starvation at my workstation in about a week&#x27;s time.

I&#x27;m curious here too, I only flipped through your channels for a minute, but found something interesting immediately.I go to youtube and seem to run out of quality quickly. I even went as far as crawling the HN frontpage for videos - see hacker news TV - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xiliary.com&#x2F;bck&#x2F;hn-tv.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xiliary.com&#x2F;bck&#x2F;hn-tv.html</a>

Going through your comments I see that you answered this elsewhere, and said that videos are handpicked [0]. Congrats for the dedication this implies!So now my question is, how do you imagine this will work going forward? Do you plan on selecting more videos indefinitely, or are you working on some search system?[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41248008">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41248008</a>

Great. Can you elaborate a little on how channels are populated? Do you search YT for tags and order by most recent videos first? Or do you do some manual curation?

Why is this? In my country they start at 1.

Channels really should go from 2-13 instead, but this is awesome.

Channel 1: Science and TechnologyChannel 2: Travel and EventsChannel 3: FoodChannel 4: ArchitectureChannel 5: Film and AnimationChannel 6: DocumentariesChannel 7: ComedyChannel 8: MusicChannel 9: Autos and VehiclesChannel 10: News and PoliticsChannel 11: UFCChannel 12: Podcasts&#x2F;Interviews&#x2F;Talk Shows

Love how you captured the feel of channel surfing. Seems like most videos&#x2F;channels I surfed through were at the midpoint or near completed in their play through (usual if you just hop on the tube at the middle of the hour).

yeah when i noticed this, it blew my mind.

channels are synced so everyone is watching the same exact content at the same time, just like TV.

&gt; I predict this appears as real youtube feature soon.I doubt it would. The modern style of binging on-demand streaming content seems to be too effective at capturing attention. Remember that lots of people get notifications on their phone the instant a new video comes out for a subscribed channel, especially kids and teens who haven&#x27;t developed resistance to these business models.YT would be unlikely to spend any effort implementing an alternate mode that doesn&#x27;t capture attention as effectively; the old model of live channels is likely a niche preference. If somehow this did prove to be more effective at capturing attention, I could see it being implemented, but that would surprise me.

well they already have youtube shorts, which is kinda similar.

Along the same lines, I have a near-terabyte of videos I have downloaded from Youtube, of my own vast and multivariate interests, and having it on random, with a simple pause&#x2F;next&#x2F;prev-style interface, is also a compelling viewer-experience equillibrium akin to the sets of yore ..(cue Buggles..)

I have long wanted Netflix to offer this feature. Just give me a random episode of a low stakes sitcom. Seinfeld, SVU, whatever.My other wishlist item was that Netflix would offer a “shuffle” this series option. For standalone episodic shows, ordering does not matter, and it is a bunch of overhead to pick something.

&gt;I predict this appears as real youtube feature soonI highly doubt it. They&#x27;re going to wait for competitors to implement it and have it for several years before they bother to poorly copy the idea.

They experimented with it for a bit last year. I think Linus talked about it on the WAN show, and for a while LTT had it enabled on their channel.It was essentially a 24&#x2F;7 livestream which played from their back catalogue, with the ability to add &quot;promo&quot; segments in between videos, which they used for products on their merch store.Seemed to dissapear around the same time the whole monoblock scandal and production shutdown happened last year, so I&#x27;m not sure if the YouTube experiment also concluded or if they turned it off during the shutdown.

Yep this works really nicely, and psychologically it&#x27;s somehow way more relaxing than having to curate what you watchI predict this appears as real youtube feature soon. Since it will also allow them to do a Spotify-style payola approach to scheduling.

I&#x27;ve done the same thing with dizqueTv for my grandmother. On her Android TV, I was able to integrate the IPTV channels on the same channels list, so she can simply use the remote to navigate between the digital channels and the IPTV channels (30 for Hercule Poirot, 31 for classic B&amp;W movies, etc.)

I&#x27;ve also been using ErsatzTV with my jellyfin setup. It can take a while to setup channels how you want them, but I love my sci-fi channel which is going through all the Star Treks, Stargates, and Twilight Zones.It is so much easier to flip it on to my Sci-fi Channel, animation channel, movie channel, or James Bond marathon channel then to decide what to watch. And since I&#x27;ve seen all this content, it is often kinda nice to start in the middle of an episode.I also found a ton of old Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Adult Swim bumps that I use as some filler content if I want episodes to start on the hour.I&#x27;ve been thinking a lot about setting up some kids channels with specific hours (like channel comes on at 7am, goes off during part of the day, comes back on in the afternoon, and goes offline at bedtime) for my siblings kids, as I think letting them just browser youtube kids is terrible.

I&#x27;ve been using Quasi TV (android app) to try out the concept. I remember having something similar back in the boxee &#x2F; xbmc days. I especially liked that it &quot;just worked&quot; without having to set anything up besides pointing it at my plex. I&#x27;m not afraid of hosting something, but I didn&#x27;t want to go through the trouble if it turned out I wasn&#x27;t going to use it.I quite like it. Unfortunately, the app&#x27;s been a bit buggy - not always picking up the stream at the &quot;current time&quot; and sometimes navigation gets wonky. But it was a good test run and that, along with your post, has convinced me to give Ersatz (or something like it) a try.

I added ErsatzTV to my Plex setup about a month ago and we honestly love it so much. I&#x27;ve got 2 sitcom channels, British panel shows, Taskmaster, all Star Trek all the time, British sitcoms, cartoons, and a few others.Its really nice to just sit down and watch &quot;whatever is on&quot; (even though I could switch over to the main library and watch any episode I want).Sometimes I just want a 0-effort&#x2F;0-decision background noise while I work on something else or browse on my phone.

The only thing worse than the intro is the 2nd intro. Just get to the GD content please.

This was the first thing I noticed, too. It&#x27;s amazing how much better it is, simply leaving off all that &quot;what&#x27;s up guys&quot; introduction.

It&#x27;s no longer functional, but in the past if you appended the parameter t=wadsworth to a YouTube URL it would skip the first 30% of a video.

Another observation: with this setup, you essentially randomly jump into the middle of videos, skipping what is usually the most grating part of the show: the intro.In the intro to most shows&#x2F;videos, there&#x27;s annoying jingles, silly animations, a redundant summary of what&#x27;s about to happen in an already short segment, or just useless chatter &quot;hey guys! it&#x27;s your boy, _. welcome to my channel, remember to smash that like button, we have a great show today&quot;.Because of all this intro bloat, I tend to jump a few minutes into most YouTube videos by default.

Because like TV, when you&#x27;re watching something, you know other people are watching exactly the same thing. And that&#x27;s pretty cool.

I don&#x27;t see how this is a good thing.  It&#x27;s a totally artificial constraint.  It&#x27;s already impossible to watch everything on youtube.  I don&#x27;t want software I use to instill fear as a design goal, detached from any of the outcomes of user actions.

The FOMO would only work if the content was exclusively available during that livestream, and not re-posted later.That being said, I think the last thing society needs is to make these platforms more addictive. The algorithms already do a good enough job of keeping us glued.

&gt; It is always &quot;running&quot; and if you flip away you will miss it.Throw in some ads and it will be everything I hate about broadcast TV.

That is what it was like in the 90s! Although you could use your VCR to record the other channel.

I was part of Pluto&#x27;s launch team. We used to literally just be 95% YouTube embeds that were forced into a live-like experience client-side. Getting simple YouTube or even HTML5 video API calls to work reliably in 2013 was quite a feat. Loads of people still had Flash, mobile browsers were a crapshoot, and I caused many many thousands of early Amazon Fire TV hard restarts due to crashing their (kernel?) video decoder somehow.Fun times.

I use Pluto for this. Quick download, no sign up required, and tons of topic-specific channels to switch to. I put it on all my devices and don&#x27;t even worry about it.Google TV also has a &quot;Live&quot; tab that collects all the live channels across all your apps and puts it into a TV guide grid. I&#x27;ve installed Fubo and Tubi and others just to build out my TV guide.Works pretty well.

Each channel displays the video code for the YouTube video its playing so if you see something interesting you can easily access the video. I really like this as a curated discovery tool, there is something up flipping thru channels and catching something at just the right time to peak your interest that viewing a clickbaity thumbnail and video title just can&#x27;t replicate.

Similarly I find I sometimes enjoy listening to the radio more than Spotify because I don&#x27;t feel forced to min&#x2F;max my enjoyment. I have to listen to whatever is on.

The best part of this is the channel doesn&#x27;t pause when you flip away from it. It is always &quot;running&quot; and if you flip away you will miss it. That builds in a FOMO trade-off which causes user to automatically&#x2F;subconciously decide on channel they most want to watch, because they can&#x27;t watch everything.

Haha this is really well engineered, it feels honestly like TV and not a cheap iframe embed

I mean you realize there were many more ads per hour on TV though right? What makes the youtube ones more intrusive?

With real TV and a DVR you haven&#x27;t had to see a single commercial in the last 25 years if you didn&#x27;t want to.We don&#x27;t talk enough about how streaming has forced us into a much worse experience with ads that are unskippable, privacy-invading, and now I hear they&#x27;re being dynamically inserted into programming mid-scene.

I&#x27;ve long since concluded that YouTube&#x27;s ads are merely a way of persuading me to upgrade to Premium. Given that they actually seem to be pretty good at recommending content to me I am mystified by why the ad selection is so awful.

It&#x27;s still trivial to block these though with a combination of uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock. Despite Google&#x27;s ongoing efforts to make this impossible.

have you forgotten how bad commercials were back then, and still are?I haven&#x27;t watched TV in years and years and years, because of the ads. I have a YouTube premium subscription and I am not ever going to watch broadcast or cable tv again. ever.

Given how full of crap content and intrusive ads YouTube is these days, I actually kinda miss tv from back then. About the only benefits at this point are time shifting and pause&#x2F;rewind.

Or if they could simulate an antenna rotor and you had to turn it towards the station.

if we&#x27;re talking about stuff to make it more authentic, how about looking up my local weather if there&#x27;s a strong storm the quality drops + more static, and a small 
(rng) chance of it completely breaking if the antenna upstairs got completely broken by the strong wind.

Even better: make not-porn videos with vegetables, but when it&#x27;s obfuscated it would look like porn. Repetitive motions will help.

A Girls Gone Wild channel on channel 13 that only starts past 10pm.

For real accuracy of tv of a few decades ago they could add a 13th channel that takes content from Pornhub, but then adds a bunch of filters so you can barely see anything.

Integrate a Kinect &#x2F; Realsense camera that estimates your body pose, so you have to stand in front of the computer and hold your arms in a specific way to direct a weak signal into the rabbit-ears...

I really like how there are only 12 channels, and you don&#x27;t get to choose what&#x27;s on. The only way to make it even more like tv from a few decades ago would be if half of the channels were static.

This seems like it&#x27;d be great to have playing at an old folks home. I know my grandparents watch the Johnny Carson&#x2F;Tonight Show channel for a taste of their old culture

Also discussed on HN:- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36906022">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36906022</a>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25973955">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25973955</a>

Perhaps you like this nostalgic TV as well then: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;90s.myretrotvs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;90s.myretrotvs.com</a>. It also uses Youtube as a source and plays uninterrupted like an old-school channel.

This is neat! Feels just like old cable, the static transitions being a good touch.

I understands what you&#x27;re trying to replicate, but I believe this would distract from the charm since users could then just visit YouTube [directly] and search for things scheduled.The randomness and uninterrupted playback is why this is so cool =D

The channels are on a schedule, everyone is watching the same exact video at the same timestamp!

You should make the channels change the video they&#x27;re playing on a schedule, and link to a tv guide listing that shows the schedule.

Wow this is really cool. I&#x27;d love to have specific channels for Ai, NBA highlights, etc, all of which are readily available on Youtube.

Its the discovery aspect I miss, even cable had channels you could look at shows of a type - scyfi or Arena etc. Even free to air had reliable shows pre picked for you that you could rely on being decent. Now there&#x27;s a fire hose of shows on Netflix, some good, some bad finding something to watch is now a task.

Are we going full circle from TV to streaming back to TV? Probably not, but I do really enjoy the discovery aspect as well as reducing the overwhelming options of streaming down to a few channels.This has a super smooth feel and throws you directly in, really well done.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.jonathanbobrow.com&#x2F;YTCH-Guide&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.jonathanbobrow.com&#x2F;YTCH-Guide&#x2F;</a>

Can&#x27;t you just embed the youtube videos?

By what I understood there&#x27;s only front-end code.
Ignoring the file server, of course.

Is there an open source code repo for this?

There&#x27;s a project called DizqueTV[0] that lets you set up &quot;channels&quot; of media to be streamed to a Plex server, which then lets you send that onto a TV.It&#x27;s not quite the same as straight TV channels. But it&#x27;s pretty close![0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vexorian&#x2F;dizquetv">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vexorian&#x2F;dizquetv</a>

I know of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ersatztv.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ersatztv.org</a> which I used a while ago. With a Kodi frontend you can play on TV. Not sure it does podcasts and music though but I used it successfully for movies and TV shows.

For music I setup a micro pc at my place connected to a radio transmitter. I have a music library on it and set it to shuffle. I can have normal radios around my house, tune to my station, and it’s always something I like with no commercials. I don’t have multiple stations to flip to, but that’s ok. I like the simplify of turning on a radio without having to pick what’s playing. I can also turn on multiple radios and it works just like those fancy setups for multi room music streaming at a fraction of the cost&#x2F;complexity. Something like Sonos or AirPlay requires a lot to do what a radio could do decades ago.The transmitter seems pretty weak, to maintain a legal status with the FCC, so some days it works better than others. I probably need to experiment with placement or other frequencies. I’m in a pretty congested area from that perspective. I found a website that suggests the best one based on the city a user us in and just went with that.I wish there were reserved frequencies for personal use that would make home transmitters better to use. I have 0 hope for that now, but during the era of FM transmitters being popular in cars, it would have been nice if it had gotten some attention.

I’d love something like this where I can configure channels to have podcasts, music, movies and it all streams to my tv.Is there something like this? I’ve heard of other users mentioning side projects like this.

I download videos and schedule them as channels with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ersatztv.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ersatztv.org&#x2F;</a> to watch through Plex locally to get the same effect. I usually want some noise on the background and in that mode I can&#x27;t be stopping frequently to choose the next video or mess with playlists.

It looks like the static is tiled.  So it&#x27;s random (enough) within a tile, but you can perceive the tiling.

This is great, but the static doesn&#x27;t seem random? It just bugged me a tiny bit. Otherwise, I love this.

Oh I love that idea, a signoff message followed by an image of a test pattern for several hours, until they sign back on the next morning.

Must be my crappy internet connection that lets me watch the white noise for an unbearable amount of time. It&#x27;s a very annoying white noise. Also, I wonder if some channels send a sign-off sequence once they run out of content.

Closed captions would be really awesome so I can watch without sound.

don’t add too many features, one of the usp of this is simplicity and suspense.

I&#x27;ll add more control options soon :)

Wish it had video settings like captions, video quality etc

The recommendation algorithms suggests things that are related to what I watched before. And I still need to choose one of the options that it recommends.

Yeah, for me loading the homepage and clicking the top-left video is almost an automatic reflex at this point.

I wish my YouTube recommendations were anywhere good enough to do this.

This works pretty well for YT when it knows your preferences, but for streaming TV services like Netflix I find it&#x27;s a box of chocolates full of shit. It&#x27;s just going to be whatever is being &quot;promoted&quot; at the time and has the most widespread appeal, not something interesting.

Why can&#x27;t you pick randomly from your home page and let auto play do its thing?

I have so many subscriptions on youtube that the home recommendation is actually a quicker way to find something interesting if I have limited time, since the subscriptions are full of shorts and &#x27;reruns&#x27; now where creators try to monetize old videos in new ways.The only issue is that my youtube is the one on the main tv, so sometimes the suggestions get messed up when my kids watch. Youtube probably has a really confusing set of conflicting beliefs about who I am.

My youtube recommendations on my laptop are just short videos(all are below 3 mins with a few exceptions ;-;)
I get so much better recommendations by using youtube tv but it sucks that they don&#x27;t let us switch preferences. But well results in me spending less time on youtube so a win heh

YT is the best choice for something random for a small amount of time, but is absolutely maimed at the free-tier by 2 leading ads requiring 1+ user interactions to skip.I can&#x27;t easily press &#x27;skip&#x27; with a plate of pasta in one hand and a fork in another, and I don&#x27;t want to watch two 2:30 leading ads, so I guess I&#x27;ll just go somewhere else.

&gt; Sometimes I only want to see something in the 15 minutes that I&#x27;m dining alone.I think the YouTube recommendation algorithm you get from opening the app or viewing the front page is good for this. They have a lot of random content and when the algorithm gets to know you, it will suggest things of interest that can be consumed this way.

&gt; The solution to a lot of those is to just have a goto show that you watch.Cool! I have a list of movies to watch that I write from several recommendations sources, so I can try focus in watching instead of choosing. I can&#x27;t say the same about music, I&#x27;m stuck for years hearing almost the same bands, which is kinda sad...&gt; I usually forget about it until I&#x27;m at someone&#x27;s house or a doctors office and catch a snippet of some random car show or cooking show.Another good point, watching something that I don&#x27;t need to pay too much attention because I don&#x27;t care about the subject, but can entertain me while I do other things... Here in Brazil that kind of shows that &quot;we watch, we like but we don&#x27;t know why&quot; is a recurring joke, and we have three main ones: one about farming (Globo Rural), one about fishing (Pesca Alternativa) and one about trucks (Siga Bem Caminhoneiro)

The solution to a lot of those is to just have a goto show that you watch. Before netflix removed The Office, that is what I always did when wanting something to watch while eating a snack on the couch or to have noise on in the background. I&#x27;d just fire up netflix and resume whatever episode it was last one.We ditched cable forever ago, but I do find that I miss just watching 15 minutes of some random show like I used to. I usually forget about it until I&#x27;m at someone&#x27;s house or a doctors office and catch a snippet of some random car show or cooking show.

More likely it is the inverse: Selecting a random video at scale is the costly problem.You can certainly fake it as a workaround. For example, you&#x27;ll notice that &quot;I&#x27;m feeling lucky&quot; on Google simply follows the first search result. Streaming services could take what is already computed as the first result on the &quot;Home&quot; page and use that, for example.But at that point why not just click on the first video? Unlike Google, which doesn&#x27;t give you much until you enter a search query, all of the streaming services I know of have already given you your &quot;lucky&quot; matches by the time a &quot;I&#x27;m feeling lucky button&quot; could be presented. Two buttons side-by-side that do the exact same thing doesn&#x27;t offer much.

Netflix had a shuffle button. It wasn’t popular so they dropped it. It didn’t feel the same as this at all.

&gt; the more time spent scrolling, the less data has to be streamed over the wire, so it&#x27;s cheaper.Google doesn&#x27;t make money by avoiding sending streaming data; they make money by showing ads, which (mostly) aren&#x27;t shown while you&#x27;re scrolling.

WHY is there not an &quot;I&#x27;m feeling lucky&quot; button for streaming services. Akin to &quot;give me anything,&quot; though, I suspect the answer is the more time spent scrolling, the less data has to be streamed over the wire, so it&#x27;s cheaper.

I hadn&#x27;t watched actual television for years. Then, in a visit to my parents house, I randomly got to watch a band in a talkshow that later became a band that I love.

Jellyfin has this. Very nice feature for comedy shows.

Part of that is because of the trend from the past few years (ever since Lost I believe but there&#x27;s probably previous like soap operas) that TV shows are continuous. But even the 90&#x27;s TV shows would have some continuity, referencing previous events. That said, I&#x27;ve been rewatching Star Trek DS9 (and may do so with Stargate as well) and the main overarching plot beats often happen at the start and end of a season, the episodes in between can often be randomised.

What I am really missing is a &quot;Play random episode&quot; or &quot;Randomize episodes&quot; button on TV shows. I want to just flip on Seinfeld or Family Guy and watch random episodes, not in order. Such a missed opportunity for Netflix, etc.

For Seinfeld fans, there&#x27;s one site streaming it 24&#x2F;7: WatchSeinfeld.net.

Sitcoms solve this. Just watch your favourite one again.

&gt;I’d never go back to letting corporates dictate how I engage with contentYou do realize that the search function is literally that?

I’m both, at times I don’t want to choose, at times I want full control. I didn’t have TV for years (was pushing a decade), but ~2months ago I got myself an analog antenna that has local channels and it’s been a blast: I caught some olympic games, watched Euro cup, couple of movies (I caught “Decision to leave” from my watchlist——tremendous movie), I saw some Anthony Bourdain shows and now I know who the guy is and i enjoyed the show, saw a documentary on war in my country, watched some live streams of city council meetings… Also, I wanted to say this somewhere in this thread I’m not trying to sell tv to you, you caught a stray bullet, but also I’m sharing that I watched it with a different curiosity after so long of not having it, and did have a great time just with those 17 channels of uncurated content, which was the main motivation——to have uncurated content

Exactly. I go out of my way to try to make sure that the content is consume is &quot;pulled&quot; and not &quot;pushed&quot; as much as possible. I&#x27;m happy to take genuine recommendations from actual people, but I don&#x27;t care what companies want me to see or listen to, and I resent it when they limit my options to try to force my hand.

I think there&#x27;s merit in both. One thing that is lost from choosing what you want to watch is that you don&#x27;t get surprised anymore unless you want to be surprised, whereas with traditional TV you&#x27;d encounter things you didn&#x27;t expect, or come across a movie you never heard of before. I think there&#x27;s space for both.Or to make another analogy, if you go out and sit at a bench, who knows what will pass by?

&gt; Being able to choose is so valuable to me.I agree, but sometimes I just don&#x27;t want to choose because I don&#x27;t have enough time or I&#x27;m to tired to do it

How strange, I’m the complete opposite. I’d never go back to letting corporates dictate how I engage with content; I even avoid recommender algorithms for the same reason. Being able to choose is so valuable to me.

Yeah, digital TV feels like a step back in that regard, but on the other hand it makes you reconsider switching &#x2F; browsing channels. And of course the advantage is higher image quality and more channels.

I miss channel surfing (a little). But from when the cable box was a dumb pipe and the picture would switch near instantaneously. The 3 seconds between channels in the last couple of decades was super obnoxious to me.

Get Plex. There&#x27;s a ton of free live streaming channels for a ton of tastes and genres. Some of them I think to myself &quot;This should have been a steaming channel years ago&quot;.

Cause the energy spent paying attention to the show is non-zero, and ideally I get _some_ enrichment out of what I watch.

Why are you stressed about what to select, when it is guaranteed that any selection you make will be better than something a network would select for you to watch? Just pick anything.

This is something I always wonder... Something that I really miss from TV on internet content (YouTube, movie streamings and so on) is turn it on and watching what&#x27;s being transmitted without thinking about what I wanna see.Three reasons:1. Picking something to watch takes time. Sometimes I only want to see something in the 15 minutes that I&#x27;m dining alone. My meal gets cold before I start the video2. Choosing something to watch is stressful. If I&#x27;m tired and I don&#x27;t know what I want to see makes me more tired and frustrated. These are the times that I don&#x27;t want the freedom to watch I want because they are the times that I don&#x27;t want to think about what I want3. The random factor of watching something that I would never watch by myself it&#x27;s something that makes me go outside my bubble. I can&#x27;t say how many good movies (or songs, etc) I found by that randomnessI&#x27;m not against the freedom of streaming services but there are moments that I just don&#x27;t want that freedom. So, thank you!

What would that do?It seems flipping away is effectively a downvote, stating to watch is effectively an upvote. I’m not sure why we feel like everything needs to be actively voted on these days.

It just needs upvote and downvote buttons and it would be perfect.

I love that this is a small amount of plain html and js, as I think the instinct for a lot of folks these days in creating this would have been to invest a lot of time in using the frameworks du jour.

Well done. Do you&#x27;ve plans for further development to grow this?

Two requests!1. unique urls per channel so I can send it to a friend and say &quot;check this out&quot;
2. up + down keys for changing channels

- There is no backend, just html, css, and js- yes channels are based on categories(science, travel, documentaries, etc.)- yes there is a schedule, each video is scheduled to play at a certain time, so everyone is watching the same exact thing.

Also really enjoyed it and echo these execution questions.

Really cool with great execution.Out of curiosity, I&#x27;d love to know more:- how the backend look like?- Are the channels are based on a static pool of videos by category?- Is there a &quot;schedule&quot; for a channel or picked at random?

You&#x27;re showing your age there, hadisafa, with that static simulation :)Awesome work.

It&#x27;s unpleasant because of the repeating patterns, IMHO. If it actually looked like NTSC or PAL snow it&#x27;d be quite nifty.That&#x27;s probably one of those things that&#x27;s harder to generate dynamically than it sounds like it would be, though. Perlin noise might be the right approach.

Awesome! But please remove the static fuzz it&#x27;s really unpleasant.

you can record it though. OBS Studio becomes your VCR.

Is there a reason it&#x27;s not a direct link? I just right-clicked &quot;Search Google for...&quot; but still...

you can copy the video id (below the controls) and watch it later on youtube

This hooked me right away!   I wish it had pause though because I discovered a show I wanted to watch and had to work.  :(

I like UIs like this when just one thing is in the focus....I think few years ago here on HN someone did something like this but for Twitch; where you could switch back and forth between live streamers which had only 1 viewer. This format is definitely good for fast and easy discovery.

This is what makes the experience for me. You can tell someone &quot;check out channel 12&quot; and you&#x27;ll both be watching the same thing just like we used to do.

These are just youtube videos but they are synced so everyone is watching the same thing at the same time.

Are those livestreams or videos? They seem like videos but if they would be livestreams it would be cool if you could speak to a livestream and then it would speech to text type it in the streamer&#x27;s chatbox.

I worked at Google ~ 2010 and I distinctly remember playing with a TV like experience like this that Youtube was working on (it was part of the Google TV efforts at the time). I don&#x27;t remember if it made it to the public but it&#x27;s probably in the large graveyard of cool products Google killed.

So neat! I&#x27;ve been thinking of something similar to this where content creators would join their content to form channels in the original sense of the word and users would browse much like how they would on a normal TV

this is phenomenal, i love it, it genuinely feels like flipping TV channels. really excellent work!

+1 would love to read a writeup about how this was made. Very cool.

This is cool and really well done, I&#x27;m kinda blown away. Would love to hear from the creator on what inspired them and how they designed and made it retro yet also minimal and so smooth. It&#x27;s been awhile since I saw something so well polished!Imagine if it also included to an index channel like the old Cable TV Guide programming schedule screen, with the blue background and time slot cells. Some versions of this even had a PIP (Picture-in-Picture) sort of capability.E.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.redd.it&#x2F;ygxao2bj0jz81.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.redd.it&#x2F;ygxao2bj0jz81.jpg</a>

I guess what I&#x27;m getting at is, we shouldn&#x27;t expect this hand-picking to continue indefinitely, since this isn&#x27;t a paid service. I&#x27;m guessing the playlists will start to loop before too long?

The videos are hand-picked and are scheduled so everyone is watching the same thing at the same time.

This is awesome! How are the videos being chosen? Without any monetization, I guess we shouldn&#x27;t expect anything more than a loop of the same videos, right?

This is awesome since it removes decision fatigue completely. It turns YT into a TikTok with quality content. Great.

Thank you for the feedback, I&#x27;ll see what I can do regarding the mono audio issue, and I&#x27;ll try to add more features as soon as possible.

You can probably do the audio fix systemwide with EasyEffects.

Not the parent, but with similar view on panned audio. If it&#x27;s music where it&#x27;s done on purpose, no problem. But talking with audio in one ear? I&#x27;m out. Not sure why exactly, but it&#x27;s very jarring.For me, it&#x27;s one of the worst audio quality issues a video can have.

In the real world you almost never hear something on one ear but not the other. Even if something is on your left, your right ear still hears it (differences in timing and volume inform your brain on the sound source location). Exception being if it&#x27;s something really quiet right next to one ear, but that&#x27;s relatively rare.So when things are mixed &quot;improperly&quot; (it&#x27;s subjective), it&#x27;s very distracting to me. I don&#x27;t need to force mono everywhere, but it&#x27;s very common in amateurish channels, and surprisingly also in movies and TV shows. Big productions tend to mix assuming you&#x27;ll play on speakers (where it&#x27;s fine to have something playing on just one channel&#x2F;speaker, since both your ears will hear it), but when it mixes down to stereo and you listen on headphones, it&#x27;s soooo common for them to pan something 100% to one channel when the source is supposed to be on that side. Like, somebody speaking to the left of the camera, and it comes 100% on the left channel and 0% on the right one. It&#x27;s so unnatural and annoying to me.

&gt; since a lot of channels are annoying to me using headphones, they pan the audio sources too hard left&#x2F;right and it&#x27;s super distractingI find this interesting. Are you oversensitive? I&#x27;ve never even considered that this could be an issue. Do you experience the same problem with other things like music and games?

This is incredible and I want this on my TV, hooked up to my remote for exactly this experience.

&gt;Another thing, although probably outside your control, is that I use a Firefox extension called &quot;SoundFixer&quot; that I use to force the youtube audio to monoIn windows you can also go to &quot;Ease of access audio settings&quot; and click &quot;Turn on mono audio&quot;. Useful for games which have positional audio which gets annoying (sf6 training room for example).

iOS and macOS too, found in accessibility settings.

If you are using windows, it allows you to switch sound to mono

That and the 50 other terrible design choices they made. What a hot mess youtube tv is.

YouTube TV was equal parts awesome and horrifying for the Olympics. It had plenty of great content, including a solid amount of 4kIt also had the worst search UX I have ever experienced.Most importantly, recording an event did not guarantee you got the whole thing! There were numerous events I was watching from my ‘library’ that did not include the final 10-30 min of action. WTH? Did you really record based on time stamps alone? What year is this?!

Interesting, This is apparently a TikTok-like scroller for youtube channel content, which they should have done natively many years ago...I suspect they never did this because they never wanted to make YouTube compete directly with cable TV. YouTube content is displayed in a drab click-click UI because they want users to not scroll deeper for the content that isn&#x27;t sponsored (paid) all the way to the front pages.The UI of YouTube hasn&#x27;t changed in essence for ages, it&#x27;s still page based with only a few (shrinking) trending lists.I think the reason they do that is because it allows them to control what is prominently displayed across YouTube -- The same concept is used across most social apps, where there are few features for discovering new content. The pages display embarrassing low view metrics on non-sponsored accounts, even when they may have really great content, it&#x27;s really a backwards way of controlling what trends, and subsequently what makes money for the platform and sponsored creators.If real choice was allowed on most of these platforms, we&#x27;d see literally endless (new) options for interesting new content on a wider variety of topics from creators none of us know, but right now, with shrinking choice, we only see manufactured and heavily co-opted content creators like Mr. Beast, Kai Cenat, Joe Budden, Pewdie Pie, (etc)-- they are usually sanitized, coached, &amp; trained personalities picked based on who sponsors them and based on what makes the most ad profit for the platform. Most of that content seems to be very rigged and fake to me, as they clearly have staff working out of view. I find most of that manufactured (Picked YouTube Influencer) content to be drab and over-scripted... I can&#x27;t stand watching it on &amp; off YouTube personally.Interesting channel scroller... The way it plays content also seems to look far more lively than watching YouTube on the regular site for some reason. I&#x27;d love to easily see the option to customize what is displayed based on the YouTube channels I already follow, and links back to subscribe to channel content I like while watching. A feed for specifically music-related content (by genre maybe) would be highly useful.

I had youtube TV for a while and the most annoying thing is that there were no channel numbers.

Regarding sound, if you are on a Mac you can use Audio Hijack to made the sound do anything you want.

Bonus points if the TV guide is not interactive like they are today, but rather the old style that slowly scrolls at a fixed rate

&gt; There’s something incredibly important about not having the option and just going with the flow, which I think a lot of people won’t admit they like but actually do.Personally, I hate it. I can easily get glued to it and watch any random junk. And because it keeps going ad infinitum, I lost track of time and kept wasting my time, even if I was angry at how bad the program was.With the internet, I always have to make a choice regarding what to watch next, and for every thing I pick the runtime is clearly visible. It helps me make conscious choices and figure out when to stop.&gt; It’s something truly missing from today’s society.That feels like a stretch. TV still exists. And it’s mostly garbage.

Before Netflix, there was Blockbuster. If we’re old enough, we remember going there and wandering through the aisles, trying to find something we would commit to. It was just as hard as picking something to watch today. There’s something incredibly important about not having the option and just going with the flow, which I think a lot of people won’t admit they like but actually do. It’s something truly missing from today’s society.Actually, now that I think about it, I believe this is why TikTok succeeds so well, along with all the doom scrolling—it’s exactly like this. You don’t know what you’re going to get next. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t, and that’s okay. You’re just flipping through it.

I&#x27;d echo the sentiment that this is amazing, and that a TV guide would be awesome.I&#x27;d also suggest maybe adding the channel names (like the comment you posted here) to the app itself (although i think it&#x27;s cool when it&#x27;s unnamed and you get the old-school feeling of channels just being numbers).Also, I&#x27;d love to have permalinks for the channels. Not for the individual videos themselves, but just a link that when sharing would bring somebody else to the same channel you&#x27;re watching right now.Another thing, although probably outside your control, is that I use a Firefox extension called &quot;SoundFixer&quot; that I use to force the youtube audio to mono (since a lot of channels are annoying to me using headphones, they pan the audio sources too hard left&#x2F;right and it&#x27;s super distracting), but it doesn&#x27;t seem to work on this website, probably because of the way they&#x27;re embedded. I don&#x27;t know if this can be changed somehow, or have a mode to force mono audio (which would be also oldschool like old TVs with one speaker only!). It&#x27;s probably too niche and hard to do though.Also I don&#x27;t seem to find any volume control except mute?

Maybe an atlas, or a selection of (larger) sprites to choose from, displayed in random order

Need a larger &quot;static&quot; sprite so it&#x27;s not obviously a sprite.

Feels way better without the likes, comments, ads and recommendations.

Awesome. Now I can just flip between channels constantly. &quot;Doom scrolling&quot; the kids call it.

TIL alternative front-ends are a thing.[1]I wonder what an alternative commercial culture might look like, to enable a monetized FRAND ecosystem of UI diversification and evolution.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mendel5&#x2F;alternative-front-ends">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mendel5&#x2F;alternative-front-ends</a>

It does take much longer than I expected to load (~15 seconds), but it does work for me

Similar experience using Firefox. I don&#x27;t have extensions or userscripts specifically blocking html5, but I&#x27;ll check my user.js settings.Til then, still getting the static.

In Brave, even disabling ad blocker, all I get is static on all 12. Did we kill it?*edit - oops, I have an extension to stop autoplaying html5 videos. Disabling that did the trick.

I see channels 1-12 = static. The status of each says Unstarted.Same experience with a different browser. Also same after shifting location.

Wow this is really cool! Such a simple idea but very well executed and definitely hits the nostalgia factor too. As others have mentioned, I do miss the &quot;stress-free-ness&quot; of not having to pick a specific content to watch and how everyone is getting the same stream at the same time.

This is amazing! I want this on my TV as the default firmware!

even the mainstreaminess is well-captured

I love this! This is how I want to watch stuff sometimes, very relaxing to take away all the functionality and (mental) noise that comes with it. Thanks.

In a similar vein: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;radio.garden" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;radio.garden</a>

this is great but I wish I could customize or disable the flashing between channel changes, it&#x27;s really strobe effectish when changing quickly and hard on my eyes

This is amazing. Let&#x27;s hope youtube doesn&#x27;t block it.I already pay for YT Red and would love this to be an official feature.

Amazing! Are you generating the list.json and just pushing new data when it&#x27;s due to run out? Or is there some logic that loops it?

There is no backend, just plain html, css and js. The source is public.

What a different experience than default UI. Are you making the source for this public, and&#x2F;or is it based on an existing project?

Hey, this is great! Could you make it so clicking on the video ID in the bottom right corner opens the full video in a new tab? It would be nice to be able to like &#x2F; save the whole video for later. Kinda like DVR.

So amazing and so well executed. Brings a tear to my eye. I&#x27;d love this app on my tv. I hate deciding what to watch.

Cable tv and even Amazon has “channels” for some YouTube stars.

Encountering this reminds me of the earlier days of the internet when finding novel things like this was a common occurrence. Reminds me of something you&#x27;d find using StumbleUpon.

I attempted a similar one 3 years ago actually (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tv.istasyon.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tv.istasyon.app</a>). It was a weekend project and I left it as is since then.

This is the kind of brilliant idea that seems so completely obvious in hindsight that it&#x27;s hard to believe no-one has done it before

Oh no.(This is great. Just... it&#x27;s too easy to get lost in this!)

Very cool, I like the old school feel of watching whatever is on. That said I immediately noticed the lack of volume control, which IMO is essential.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;tv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;tv</a> used to be this, but they closed it down.

This is perfect. Can it be customized (with custom channels and schedules)?I was looking for exactly this to control my (and my kid&#x27;s) TV habbits. My TV is only for YouTube. Everything we like watching is on Youtube.But with remote in hand, it NEVER STOPS. We (and my kid) keep jumping from one video to another. When I watched TV as a kid, I only had to be in-front of TV on a schedule. I would be doing something else in other times.THIS is the YouTube TV that I need.

This is awesome, it really gives you the feeling of flipping through channels and stopping up and just watch something random that you might not have otherwise.Much of YouTubes potential is pretty much wasted, because of the monetization policy. It permeates the platform, even if you&#x27;re a &quot;Premium&quot; subscriber. Rather than optimize for &quot;engagement&quot;, it would be nice, even if it was a Premium feature, to be able to say: &quot;I want to watch content that will help improve my health, teach me to become a better developer or &quot;On Friday evening, I want long format retro computing content&quot;.

This is amazing! It brings back old school feelings. Just turn it on and let it run in the background. The limited choice is sooo freeing.

To everyone saying this needs this feature or that feature: it really doesn&#x27;t, it&#x27;s perfect as it is. Please don&#x27;t complicate it OP!

In the UK. I&#x27;m sure the US would create something similar but more obnoxious.

If youtube had channels you&#x27;d need a TV license to watch it.

Goodness. I never realized how nostalgic it would feel to flip channels. Your project took me all the way back to being a kid in the 90s and clicking through channels on the TV at my grandparents&#x27; house after school.I love it when I unexpectedly encounter something that turns on the nostalgia in such a deep way. Awesome project.Do I love it because of the nostalgia, or is there something novel here worth exploring further?

Loved this. Would it be possible to add subtitles?

Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels