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slazaro
thefourthchime
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.
latexr
> 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.
> It’s something truly missing from today’s society.
That feels like a stretch. TV still exists. And it’s mostly garbage.
rr808
I had youtube TV for a while and the most annoying thing is that there were no channel numbers.
sixothree
That and the 50 other terrible design choices they made. What a hot mess youtube tv is.
phil21
The worst part is that it’s the best UI for its product segment by far, and I don’t think it’s even close.
The bar is incredibly low.
blinding-streak
Compared to what? It's easily the best Internet cable TV product on the market IMHO.
danielvaughn
Their TV choices are confounding. I don’t know about other platforms, but the YouTube app on Apple TV is the most useless thing I’ve ever tried. Search is abysmal.
winternett
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't sponsored (paid) all the way to the front pages.
The UI of YouTube hasn't changed in essence for ages, it'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'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'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, & 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't stand watching it on & 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'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.
rr808
I specifically was talking about the Youtube TV content that is cable over ip.
MobileVet
YouTube TV was equal parts awesome and horrifying for the Olympics. It had plenty of great content, including a solid amount of 4k
It 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?!
inquirerGeneral
[dead]
hadisafa
Thank you for the feedback, I'll see what I can do regarding the mono audio issue, and I'll try to add more features as soon as possible.
fletchowns
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
myself248
You can probably do the audio fix systemwide with EasyEffects.
laserDinosaur
>Another thing, although probably outside your control, is that I use a Firefox extension called "SoundFixer" that I use to force the youtube audio to mono
In windows you can also go to "Ease of access audio settings" and click "Turn on mono audio". Useful for games which have positional audio which gets annoying (sf6 training room for example).
brightball
This is incredible and I want this on my TV, hooked up to my remote for exactly this experience.
tantalor
The best part of this is the channel doesn't pause when you flip away from it. It is always "running" and if you flip away you will miss it. That builds in a FOMO trade-off which causes user to automatically/subconciously decide on channel they most want to watch, because they can't watch everything.
angry_moose
I added ErsatzTV to my Plex setup about a month ago and we honestly love it so much. I'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 "whatever is on" (even though I could switch over to the main library and watch any episode I want).
Sometimes I just want a 0-effort/0-decision background noise while I work on something else or browse on my phone.
l72
I'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'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'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.
Cyph0n
ErsatzTV is amazing. It’s actually excellent for settings up kids channels. You can configure start and end times and select a pool of content/shows/movies to pick from.
One nifty feature is that you can configure “filler” content to inject randomly between episodes. I used this to add short educational clips from a kids TV channel in the Middle East.
vundercind
Do you know if that can operate with no transcoding?
I’ve designed my media set-up around Jellyfin on a weak server that can’t handle transcoding, and very-capable clients that don’t need it. This lets me avoid like half the bugs on the Jellyfin bug tracker and all the instability an Nvidia or AMD video card would introduce to the server itself.
I’m very interested in this, but can’t use it if it must transcode.
lackstein
> I also found a ton of old Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Adult Swim bumps
Where were you able to find these? Recreating one of these channels has been a side project I’ve wanted to do for ages.
hadrien01
I'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&W movies, etc.)
archon810
dizqueTv, ErsatzTV... these are the "Chinese company names on Amazon" of TV app names.
enobrev
I've been using Quasi TV (android app) to try out the concept. I remember having something similar back in the boxee / xbmc days. I especially liked that it "just worked" without having to set anything up besides pointing it at my plex. I'm not afraid of hosting something, but I didn't want to go through the trouble if it turned out I wasn't going to use it.
I quite like it. Unfortunately, the app's been a bit buggy - not always picking up the stream at the "current time" 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.
A_Duck
Yep this works really nicely, and psychologically it's somehow way more relaxing than having to curate what you watch
I predict this appears as real youtube feature soon. Since it will also allow them to do a Spotify-style payola approach to scheduling.
digging
> 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't developed resistance to these business models.
YT would be unlikely to spend any effort implementing an alternate mode that doesn'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.
dotnet00
>I predict this appears as real youtube feature soon
I highly doubt it. They're going to wait for competitors to implement it and have it for several years before they bother to poorly copy the idea.
teska
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 24/7 livestream which played from their back catalogue, with the ability to add "promo" 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'm not sure if the YouTube experiment also concluded or if they turned it off during the shutdown.
0cf8612b2e1e
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.
dustincoates
Netflix offered this in France back in 2020[0], but appeared to have removed it in 2022[1].
0: https://www.vulture.com/2020/11/netflix-linear-channels-dire... 1: https://www.numerama.com/pop-culture/1273686-netflix-direct-...
saintfire
I didn't realize how much I would appreciate shuffle until i started using jellyfin.
I use it all the time for shows that have self-contained episodes (e.g. Futurama).
aa-jv
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/next/prev-style interface, is also a compelling viewer-experience equillibrium akin to the sets of yore ..
(cue Buggles..)
Group_B
well they already have youtube shorts, which is kinda similar.
crucialfelix
But that triggers an immediate tiktok dopamine chase. I immediately want to judge what I'm seeing and swipe to move on. I start wondering about the ML training on my every move and hesitation. It's restless
bobbob1921
I hate that if anytime I upload a short video it forces the video to YouTube shorts. Especially since I’m not making content for the public - it’s more a demo video or something to specifically send to a few people. As with so many services nowadays, I like the ability to use YouTube shorts when I want, but I hate that it’s forced upon us with no reasonable and consistent method to not use shorts at the users discretion.
hadisafa
channels are synced so everyone is watching the same exact content at the same time, just like TV.
isk517
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't replicate.
slillibri
> It is always "running" and if you flip away you will miss it.
Throw in some ads and it will be everything I hate about broadcast TV.
notfed
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/videos, there's annoying jingles, silly animations, a redundant summary of what's about to happen in an already short segment, or just useless chatter "hey guys! it's your boy, _. welcome to my channel, remember to smash that like button, we have a great show today".
Because of all this intro bloat, I tend to jump a few minutes into most YouTube videos by default.
ryandrake
This was the first thing I noticed, too. It's amazing how much better it is, simply leaving off all that "what's up guys" introduction.
fmj
It'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.
tantalor
The only thing worse than the intro is the 2nd intro. Just get to the GD content please.
pests
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't even worry about it.
Google TV also has a "Live" tab that collects all the live channels across all your apps and puts it into a TV guide grid. I've installed Fubo and Tubi and others just to build out my TV guide.
Works pretty well.
jondwillis
I was part of Pluto'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.
recursive
I don't see how this is a good thing. It's a totally artificial constraint. It's already impossible to watch everything on youtube. I don't want software I use to instill fear as a design goal, detached from any of the outcomes of user actions.
squeaky-clean
Because like TV, when you're watching something, you know other people are watching exactly the same thing. And that's pretty cool.
lucasoshiro
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'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'm dining alone. My meal gets cold before I start the video
2. Choosing something to watch is stressful. If I'm tired and I don't know what I want to see makes me more tired and frustrated. These are the times that I don't want the freedom to watch I want because they are the times that I don't want to think about what I want
3. The random factor of watching something that I would never watch by myself it's something that makes me go outside my bubble. I can't say how many good movies (or songs, etc) I found by that randomness
I'm not against the freedom of streaming services but there are moments that I just don't want that freedom. So, thank you!
xk_id
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.
Cthulhu_
I think there's merit in both. One thing that is lost from choosing what you want to watch is that you don't get surprised anymore unless you want to be surprised, whereas with traditional TV you'd encounter things you didn't expect, or come across a movie you never heard of before. I think there's space for both.
Or to make another analogy, if you go out and sit at a bench, who knows what will pass by?
lying4fun
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
autoexec
Exactly. I go out of my way to try to make sure that the content is consume is "pulled" and not "pushed" as much as possible. I'm happy to take genuine recommendations from actual people, but I don'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.
lucasoshiro
> Being able to choose is so valuable to me.
I agree, but sometimes I just don't want to choose because I don't have enough time or I'm to tired to do it
llm_trw
>I’d never go back to letting corporates dictate how I engage with content
You do realize that the search function is literally that?
throwaway290
The entire way those platforms work is literally that. Ironically TV didn't dictate how to engage with content because there was not much. Compared to comment sections algorithmically boosting trolls to make you compulsively comment
butlike
WHY is there not an "I'm feeling lucky" button for streaming services. Akin to "give me anything," though, I suspect the answer is the more time spent scrolling, the less data has to be streamed over the wire, so it's cheaper.
epanchin
Netflix had a shuffle button. It wasn’t popular so they dropped it. It didn’t feel the same as this at all.
randomdata
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'll notice that "I'm feeling lucky" on Google simply follows the first search result. Streaming services could take what is already computed as the first result on the "Home" page and use that, for example.
But at that point why not just click on the first video? Unlike Google, which doesn't give you much until you enter a search query, all of the streaming services I know of have already given you your "lucky" matches by the time a "I'm feeling lucky button" could be presented. Two buttons side-by-side that do the exact same thing doesn't offer much.
autoexec
> More likely it is the inverse: Selecting a random video at scale is the costly problem.
if that feature existed it would never be a random video from all the available videos. It'd be a random-seeming video from a carefully curated selection of videos that youtube wants to push at certain users, and in some cases were paid to promote. Users wouldn't know and wouldn't care anyway because they pushed a button and got content without thinking.
janalsncm
Users probably don’t want a random video, they want a video which is from the smaller subset of videos they were already likely to enjoy.
The reason that might be preferable to just clicking the first result is that the second actually involves a choice since you’ve seen the second item.
butlike
That all makes sense and I never really considered the selection of the video being the costly problem at scale. Thanks!
The only response I have is that purposefully-clicking the 'random' button has a psychological effect over clicking the first video returned which (gut check) makes me think it will be more easily tolerated if it ends up being "off-beat" since I didn't explicitly click the first selection (thus choosing it).
usefulcat
> the more time spent scrolling, the less data has to be streamed over the wire, so it's cheaper.
Google doesn't make money by avoiding sending streaming data; they make money by showing ads, which (mostly) aren't shown while you're scrolling.
Suppafly
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'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'm at someone's house or a doctors office and catch a snippet of some random car show or cooking show.
lucasoshiro
> 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't say the same about music, I'm stuck for years hearing almost the same bands, which is kinda sad...
> I usually forget about it until I'm at someone'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't need to pay too much attention because I don't care about the subject, but can entertain me while I do other things... Here in Brazil that kind of shows that "we watch, we like but we don't know why" 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)
massysett
> I can't say the same about music, I'm stuck for years hearing almost the same bands, which is kinda sad...
I like SiriusXM for this. I'm often finding new channels to listen to, and once I pick a channel I don't have to pick out songs.
Apple Music has some features that can work similarly, such as radio stations (though a lot of theirs are really more like podcasts) or they have lots of playlists of recommended hits from different genres and you can shuffle them.
Suppafly
>Here in Brazil that kind of shows that "we watch, we like but we don't know why" 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)
Are those public access type shows that are meant to be somewhat educational?
archon810
What I am really missing is a "Play random episode" or "Randomize episodes" 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.
ksynwa
Jellyfin has this. Very nice feature for comedy shows.
Cthulhu_
Part of that is because of the trend from the past few years (ever since Lost I believe but there's probably previous like soap operas) that TV shows are continuous. But even the 90's TV shows would have some continuity, referencing previous events. That said, I'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.
rubslopes
I hadn'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.
asveikau
> Sometimes I only want to see something in the 15 minutes that I'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.
Suppafly
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 'reruns' 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.
asveikau
My kids mostly watch on tablets which are their own. On the TV, they have separate profiles on all the streaming apps. We don't do YouTube much on TV but when we do, I've always been sure to give them a different device that is not logged into my account.
If I lend them a device to watch YouTube I usually do it in the browser in incognito.
butlike
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't easily press 'skip' with a plate of pasta in one hand and a fork in another, and I don't want to watch two 2:30 leading ads, so I guess I'll just go somewhere else.
cuanim
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't let us switch preferences. But well results in me spending less time on youtube so a win heh
sircastor
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.
Cthulhu_
Yeah, digital TV feels like a step back in that regard, but on the other hand it makes you reconsider switching / browsing channels. And of course the advantage is higher image quality and more channels.
Almondsetat
Why can't you pick randomly from your home page and let auto play do its thing?
digging
This works pretty well for YT when it knows your preferences, but for streaming TV services like Netflix I find it's a box of chocolates full of shit. It's just going to be whatever is being "promoted" at the time and has the most widespread appeal, not something interesting.
lukas099
I wish my YouTube recommendations were anywhere good enough to do this.
s1artibartfast
Agreed, my recommendations are extremely narrow. Usually videos from the same three content creators, and ones that I've already seen or in there chronological queue that I already plan to watch.
lucasoshiro
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.
Almondsetat
They recently introduced an anonymous mode
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Mathnerd314
Yeah, for me loading the homepage and clicking the top-left video is almost an automatic reflex at this point.
hadisafa
Channel 1: Science and Technology
Channel 2: Travel and Events
Channel 3: Food
Channel 4: Architecture
Channel 5: Film and Animation
Channel 6: Documentaries
Channel 7: Comedy
Channel 8: Music
Channel 9: Autos and Vehicles
Channel 10: News and Politics
Channel 11: UFC
Channel 12: Podcasts/Interviews/Talk Shows
thruway516
I just wasted the last 2hrs watching instead of working and I have not even made it past Channel 8. Thank God there're only 12 channels, I was afraid they would find me dead from starvation at my workstation in about a week's time.
bambax
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?
bambax
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?
freddref
I'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 - https://xiliary.com/bck/hn-tv.html
hathawsh
This project is very cool. Amazing execution. Other channels I would suggest:
- Cooking
- Family movies (from the public domain?)
- Baseballpineaux
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.
its-summertime
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.
ks2048
This is a good idea for this app, but maybe the least realistic part of the old TV experience. You'd have maybe 3 "premium" 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't come in well (static and distortion). And add some off-air "colorbars" 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...
hathawsh
It'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.
dbingham
It'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'd really love to be able to save the content I discover!
denysvitali
On the bottom right there is an ID that looks like a YouTube video ID
ollybee
This is what I was looking for, where did you see that info?
hadisafa
I made the thing :)
harshaxnim
May be you could put it up in the site too
edm0nd
This is such a neat project that you made!
anarcat
I think they built it. :)
kajecounterhack
Thinking back to childhood it was all History Channel, PBS, and Cartoon Network / Nick. Would be great to see analogues to some of those :)
klaussilveira
I'll never understood why Netflix, Hulu and others haven't done something similar to this. It's a much more natural way of "finding out" what you want to see. Create a bunch of channels based on existing tags or categories, have thing playing on a schedule, and allow me to zap through.
Bonus points if you allow me to zap as efficiently as I was able to back when we had analog TVs and cable. I was the master zapper, zapping through hundreds of channels in seconds. Just buffer the adjacent channels and calculate the maximum input latency.
mholm
My guess would be that the primary users would keep it on as background noise in some room or another, and it would take a significant amount of data for comparatively little benefit.
jagged-chisel
How is the cost any different than “binging” a series kept on as background noise?
If this new feature would cost the streaming companies more money, they just need to tweak the business model or subscription pricing to cover it.
rck404
Instagram tried this with IGTV. I actually liked the format too but they did shutdown due to lack of interest https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/20/17484436/instagram-igtv-v...
thruway516
Likely from a lack of engaging longform content on IG. Who wants to watch a continuous reel of mind-numbing shorts for hours. Youtube has enough quality content to make a more compelling product in this format
Tallain
The streaming service Shudder has it and it's one of my favorite features on any streaming platform.
imposter
I think this is the reason why "shorts" , or tiktok style videos work. I think YT shorts does this in a way, where you get a snippet of a long video as a shorts
Thebroser
I used to love this chrome extension back in the day, unsure if it still works but same idea:
rickreynoldssf
There was a startup called RheoTV started by ex-Apple people that did exactly that and it didn't work out.
There was also something called NeverThink that had the same fate.
madrox
Well done. My team built this at Disney six years ago when we were trying to solve content discovery problems. The problem with endless carousels of thumbnails is that it really doesn't draw you in. Sometimes you just need to drop people into content like it's channel surfing.
Netflix tried something similar a few years ago, but in my opinion it missed a critical ingredient, which was dropping people into the middle of content at a compelling point.
Really like the execution here. YouTube take note.
steve_adams_86
Part of the issue with endless carousels of thumbnails now is that the thumbnails are almost invariable clickbait now. What will I actually get? I have no idea. Even YouTube channels I genuinely enjoy use thumbnails which are entirely different from the actual content. I suppose sensationalism has taken over.
madrox
You can't blame creators for playing the game. All they have is that thumbnail to market their content.
steve_adams_86
No, I don't blame them at all. I make the odd YouTube video and the choice not to use these thumbnails is essentially a choice to stay irrelevant. Not to say sensational thumb nails would help; I make boring videos. But even if they were meant to be more interesting, that choice would clearly be self-sabotaging.
consf
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scotty79
I think the user intent matters. When I go to Netflix to choose what I want to watch the last thing I want is to be dropped into the middle of random content. I hate auto playing videos when I'm trying to decide if I even want to watch this.
On the other hand when I go to tiktok I get thrown into a random content at every finger flick and I'm delighted because that's exactly why I went there.
If Netflix had well personalized mini tiktok mode serving interesting scenes from the movies you can watch there it could do wonderfully.
Interesting movie scenes is entire genre of tiktok videos. Another movie related genre is narrated summaries of weird movies. This requires bit of work to prepare but still could do well.
newswasboring
Can you give any insight into why these projects were canceled at Disney or Netflix?
madrox
I can't speak to Netflix. At Disney the willingness to experiment with streaming UX was thin on the ground six years ago. It was about making something that felt like a direct Netflix competitor. Other experiments have shipped since then, like co-viewing.
I actually believe TikTok is more of the spiritual inheritor of this kind of project more than any other platform.
newswasboring
I guess what I am trying to ask is why was UX research "thin on the ground" (lovely expression, never heard it before). Was it a profit loss thing or more like the progress wasn't fast enough
maxglute
TikToks has a bunch of channels playing juicy clips from random movies and shows. always have to pop into hashtag or comments to find out what. Maybe they got axe, I don't see them in my feed anymore, but more than a few times I wished there was one click to keep watching optinos. There's always short form video that gets people side tracked, why not side track into an episode of a show.
itslennysfault
This Netflix feature drives me crazy. Now I always mute my TV when browsing Netflix because as you highlight items they play and it is super annoying.
confused_boner
could that be solved by finding and using the 'most replayed' mark timestamps for each video and using that to find the best start points for each video
madrox
Depends on the content and how it tends to be consumed. That might work for YouTube but maybe not, say, Netflix or services that stream movies.
We did a mix of human curation and random selection, noting which random selections were successful and which were not. It was effective enough. The thing about an experience like this is that it doesn't need to be perfect. Like channel surfing, if it doesn't catch you then just switch the channel.
a1o
Uhm, only if this mark doesn't get affect by it being streamed here or it was be less relevant later.
r3vrse
Neat! I have wondered how much of a foothold "retrograde" tech will take in the next 10-20 years.
Decision fatigue, nostalgia, attenuation — call it what you will. At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.
A very modern malaise. Excuse the armchair philosophizing.
FullstakBlogger
> At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.
I don't think there's enough useful and organized information to evaluate. There's no reason for everyone to be stuck in a vast ocean of content labeled with a handful of vague categories, except that that's just the way that someone decided to make it.
If I want to figure out if I want to try a game, I can go to steam and watch a trailer, look at the tags, and still have no idea if the game is worth playing. How do I make a decision?
If I just watch 3 minutes of a lets play, or a live stream, I can get an idea of what the game is like. This youtube channels thing is giving us exactly that experience.
Opening a youtube video directly, on the other hand, is an entire ordeal. It's slow to load, takes up a bunch of ram, puts the video in your history and messes up the minigame of trying to micromanage the algorithm so you don't end up with bad recommendations. It's hard to just simply watch a few seconds of a bunch of videos to get a vibe.
There's so much low hanging fruit in terms of content organization/discovery, it drives me insane that the experience is generally so bad, and getting worse.
Clay Shirky gave a talk on this years ago (also I think it's a blog post) called "It's not information overload, it's filter failure". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
stuxnet79
There's certainly a market for it among the older crowd, but for those who've spent their formative years consuming content in the Netflix / Youtube era ... you can't miss what you've never had. I do echo the decision fatigue complaint - there is simply too much content out there to meaningfully engage with. The downsides of living in such a connected world ...
pineaux
This is actually very untrue. It sound right but it's not. A lot of the younger crowd takes to analogue devices as bees to honey when they've had a chance to use it. Vinyl is a growth market. Tapes are being collected. Even film roll companies are experiencing year over year growth. Since their demise 10 years earlier. I think it's because all these things are not "nothing" you can destroy them, lose them, sell them, buy them, own them, give them away, hold them, they are unique and hard to copy.
eddd-ddde
I'm fairly young. One of the first things I want to do now that I start to get grown-up money is buying a decent record player and some vinyls.
trinsic2
This is actually making me think about how I watch programs when I dont really need to focus in on anything. I wonder if there is a plug-in where you can spin the wheel between types of media to watch and it selects one for you.
jeffhuys
Also works on localhost, run these commands:
`wget -r -np -k https://ytch.xyz` - downloads the website recursively
`wget https://ytch.xyz/list.json` - download the list of what every channel plays and will play (I'm not sure if this ever really changes. The real website adds ?t=<time since epoch in ms>)
Then for instance run `python3 -m http.server` and visit localhost:8000
:)
hadisafa
When a channel reaches the last video, list.json will be fetched to get an updated list of videos.
jeffhuys
I see that you're the creator, I absolutely love what you made :)
I'm curious, do you generate that list on-the-fly, based on the current time/day? Or is it more static?
newswasboring
How are you making this list? The thing I surprisingly miss about tv is that what to watch was someone else's problem. YouTube overwhelms me with choices, TV was simple, I liked maybe 4-5 channels and (I later realized) I was implicitly trusting them to have something good on.
If I was allowed to dream, I imagine a world where that specialization is brought back. People curating a feed, which was on average good.
jeffhuys
The author was replying to everyone, even me, but didn’t respond to my question about how the list is made.
This makes me assume that it’s hand-made. If so, it’ll probably get 1 or 2 updates (if even that many) and then remain static as the creator loses interest. Wouldn’t be the first time.
EDIT: list has changed. Trying to track it, we'll see what happens. I really hope the author has some way to search Youtube for trending videos based on some query/tag, and re-generates a list once a day or something like that.
stevemk14ebr
Even better, host it on github pages - then you mirror the code too https://stevemk14ebr.github.io/YTCH/ . Author, how do generate the list
thom
Am I the only child of the 80s that hates this? A bunch of stuff I'm not interested in, and then I switched off. The moment TiVo was available we had it in our house and it was great. I still like the occasional shared experience of big sporting events or Eurovision or something on broadcast TV, but outside that it's just the equivalent of doomscrolling. If you look at your plethora of streaming options today and can't find anything to watch, just do something else. The wonder of the modern age is the sheer volume of stuff you can ignore entirely and never care about.
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dpcx
You're not. Though on a recent vacation, one of my kids only had access to cable and absolutely loved the randomness of what was available.
thruway516
I'm a child of the 80s too and I haven't watched TV in a decade, save for the occasional TV in hotel room. I do miss the luxury of occasionally having what you watch already decided for you and the serendipity of discovering something engaging by accident. Lately it has started to feel like all the choices we have in modern life and the decision paralysis that entails is causing more not less stress. I'd hazard the biggest problem with the old format was not so much the lack of control as the lack of quality content and paradoxically having too much choice with the explosion of cable tv channels. I think there's space for a refined version of something like this to coexist with all the modern options - something like a personalized curator that picks quality content tailored to your tastes and just plays it without you having to decide exactly what to watch beyond flipping (a limited number of) channels.
DougWebb
I really like how there are only 12 channels, and you don't get to choose what'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.
Tiktaalik
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.
jagged-chisel
Even better: make not-porn videos with vegetables, but when it's obfuscated it would look like porn. Repetitive motions will help.
newswasboring
Is this an American thing? This sounds hilarious
edm0nd
A Girls Gone Wild channel on channel 13 that only starts past 10pm.
zikduruqe
Or if they could simulate an antenna rotor and you had to turn it towards the station.
myself248
Integrate a Kinect / 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...
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gryn
if we're talking about stuff to make it more authentic, how about looking up my local weather if there'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.
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loloquwowndueo
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/rewind.
arethuza
I've long since concluded that YouTube'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.
randomdata
1. If the ad selection is too good, people will fall into the uncanny valley. They have to make it terrible enough to maintain user confidence.
2, They may not have anything better to select from. Quickly start/stop the ads a few times and it will usually (but not always) give up on showing any ad at all, which suggests to me that the available ad pool at that point in time is being exhausted.
UncleOxidant
I got a f'n Trump asking for money ad on YT last night. The algorithm should know better than to serve me something like that.
aAaaArrRgH
The ad placements aren't tailored to you. They're tailored to the advertiser's wishes.
add-sub-mul-div
With real TV and a DVR you haven't had to see a single commercial in the last 25 years if you didn't want to.
We don'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're being dynamically inserted into programming mid-scene.
randomdata
We talked about it plenty back when the legacy media companies were refusing to move online. "The ad spend isn't nearly a high online." they would say, with "Yeah, but people actually watch the ads online. Give it a few minutes." in response.
At some points topics become stale.
dbspin
It's still trivial to block these though with a combination of uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock. Despite Google's ongoing efforts to make this impossible.
naikrovek
have you forgotten how bad commercials were back then, and still are?
I haven'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.
Baljhin
> have you forgotten how bad commercials were back then
Most weren't 'bad', just noise.
Sure there were some cringy ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts0XG6qDIco
But some were GREAT!
-- Remember 'CH-ch-ch Chia Pet!' ?? ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzY7qQFij_M
-- How's about local commercials, like in Philadelphia: "Krass Brothers - Store of the Stars!!" ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5R4rNxSWFw
tracerbulletx
I mean you realize there were many more ads per hour on TV though right? What makes the youtube ones more intrusive?
vFunct
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qwertox
This blew my mind, it's such a different experience. Currently watching the music channel (8, The Lumineers - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)).
Since the author is reading here, one feature request: Please put a volume slider on it and also make a mouse wheel scroll on any part of the page change the volume.
I think it's the lack of timeshift which triggers me so much, since it's a somewhat standard feature on TVs. No way to pause makes me a bit anxious. I have a bad habit of nesting YT videos, where I pause one, watch another, pause that one, watch another, when it finishes I go back to the previously paused one and so on until I end up watching the first video to the end.
Theoretically you could add a per-client timeshift feature.
colecut
If you really like a video and want to watch it later, it displayed the video ID.
I really like the no pausing / everyone being in sync aspect, it's maybe the best feature
thwarted
I've always wanted a recreation of 80s Saturday morning cartoons, you can choose one channel to watch and if you switch away to another channel, it's gone, just like this. You have three primary channels and two secondary or "local" channels (and maybe a PBS) to choose from. It's a 5½ hour block, to simulate starting at like 6am and going until 11:30am. You get a bunch of half-hour kid and pre-teen shows for a few hours, and then you get some more older teen-oriented shows (like Saved By the Bell), and a 1½ hour block of the cartoon variety-hour shows like The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show. CBS would always have some kind of wild-animal showcase. Throw in some toy commercials, School House Rock, the Time for Timer PSA ("A hanker for a hunk of cheese!"), and those bumpers that showed you how to make the "come back can" and how to whistle with an acorn top.
It's the delivery and the format that I'm nostalgic for, it doesn't need to be the vintage material. It would be cool to have some modern School House Rock and PSA and mini-craft projects.
Grab a big bowl, a box of cereal, and a carton of milk and just veg out in your pajamas on the couch on a weekend morning.
two-sandwich
I did this in Plex using DizqueTV. It was a blast to set up, schedule, and insert a selection of toy ads from the era to make it feel real.
Of course, I only watched it once or twice before I realised I am not capable of sitting through 6 hours of cartoons any more. The sugary cereal made me feel sick, too.
Strongly recommend.
sralbert
Toonami Aftermath is very similar to this, but for late 90s/early 2000s.
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I'd echo the sentiment that this is amazing, and that a TV guide would be awesome.
I'd also suggest maybe adding the channel names (like the comment you posted here) to the app itself (although i think it's cool when it's unnamed and you get the old-school feeling of channels just being numbers).
Also, I'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're watching right now.
Another thing, although probably outside your control, is that I use a Firefox extension called "SoundFixer" 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/right and it's super distracting), but it doesn't seem to work on this website, probably because of the way they're embedded. I don'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's probably too niche and hard to do though.
Also I don't seem to find any volume control except mute?