Show HN: Channel Surfer – Watch YouTube like it’s cable TV

There is something absolutely oddly satisfying about using this app. Though there are a handful of channel -- this feels far more "bounded" that using Youtube as is. I spend so much more time on YT over other streaming services and platforms (and have YT premium too). I feel YT natively does a very terrible job of presenting "recommendations" to me. I can't put my finger on what it is, but your cable TV style wrapper feels very home :) Couple of questions

- How did you achieve the grainy cable TV style texture on your videos ?

- Are the videos curated ? Sometimes I waste a lot of time looking for quality content, or sometimes its good quality but you just don't vibe with the presenter or their style - so you continue to click around.

It just so happens I'm right in the middle of trying to change how I watch YouTube at my computer. Despite my best efforts, I find myself getting sucked into shorts, so I'm starting investigate if I can take advantage of YouTube RSS syndication. I recently build yt-dlp and got all the dependencies sorted out, so I can bring videos to my machine locally. I'm also checking out elfeed[0] which is an Emacs based RSS reader, and elfeed-tube[1] which further customizes the elfeed experience for YouTube as well as adding an mpv integration that lets you control video playback directly from Emacs.

[0]: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed

[1]: https://github.com/karthink/elfeed-tube

This is mindblowingly beautiful! Thanks for making this. Many a times, I open YouTube, get overwhelmed by repeated recommendations that I had already decided not to watch, and eventually close without watching much. Now that this site puts it into 40 different genres, I can decide which one am I in the mood for and keep surfing to others if I don't feel like it! Brilliant app.

Reminds me of https://ytch.tv/ which I really like for its simplicity.

This is so good! Have you done something with the sound as well? I swear that also sounds very 'cable-y' somehow but can't really describe it. Or maybe it's just one of those mind games induced by those CRT lines...

This reminds me of a similar project called Hypertext.tv, but instead of YouTube videos, it shows websites. It's an interesting take on channel surfing since each airing is interactive

http://hypertext.tv

It took me a minute to realize you are recreating the cable menu too. It's a nostalgic hit. All it's missing is a chunky remote and annoying siblings to fight with.

I really like this. Often I just want to watch something but YouTube insidiously steers me towards doom videos, even after clearing cookies. I like that this bypasses the algorithm and lets me just watch stuff, and if there's nothing interesting playing, I can just go do something more productive.

It reminds me of this project, that used old clips from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, to create a TV-like experience from back in the day:

https://70s.myretrotvs.com/

Original HN post 2 days prior (0 traction then): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47336100

Recent media coverage:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/12/channel-surfer-watch-youtu...

https://www.theverge.com/tech/893598/this-is-immediately-my-...

https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube/this-web-app-...

https://hackaday.com/2025/10/17/channel-surfing-nostalgia-ma...

This is super cool, I love the aesthetic. The biggest thing I want out of something like this is curation (and it seems like there's at least some degree of that happening here among the various categories).

I love this. I miss TV from my youth. I often work on our sofa and just have something on our TV from YouTube. This will be the perfect thing to have in the background instead of YT recommendations. I'm gonna put this on now and take a nap.

As others have noticed, this is similar to ytch.xyz.

What ytch does better is that it is mostly keyboard navigable (with minor annoyances), which also makes it usable with a remote control, unlike this.

I actually do use ytch (alongside Kodi and YT Leanback mode) on my Raspberry Pi HTPC that is controlled by remote only. Works fine. Chromium, kiosk mode, entry in ~/.local/share/applications/ytch.desktop, and you're good to go.

I guess you could use this with a remote if your remote can emulate mouse, mine doesn't. Mine is just some old otherwise useless remote recycled from the junk drawer, and made useful again by a cheap IR receiver diode from Amazon.

I'm not too crazy about the UI of Channel Surfer in general, but others have noted that it reminds them of cable services they used, I guess that was the goal.

I'll check out Channel Surfer in a few months. I wish you luck and lots of users :)

I love this. At a glance, here are some dynamics this reveals:

1. You can share a channel with a friend and know that they see the same thing as you. What's on at 5:03pm on channel 4 is the same for everyone.

2. The decision of what to watch is topical and greatly simplified. It extracts the decisions from "the algorithm" and gives you agency again.

3. There's a lot of stuff you never see on Youtube's recommendations because the algorithm doesn't show you those videos. Ever.

> a very first-world problem

Actually I really wish this had existed while my father was still alive! Toward the end of his life, he had developed pretty debilitating Alzheimers, but he still liked to watch TV. The problem was, modern TVs were way too complex for him to use. My mom had to come in the room and put on DVDs for him pretty much all day. I'm sure he could have figured out how to channel surf by himself if that had been an option.

Why would you want to do that? I'm so happy I can search exactly what I want among heaps of long tail stuff, I would never want to go back to a "live tv" interaction model.

I'll plug a similar project that I found last week, its an emulated TV Tuner (HD Homerun) of your Plex/Jellyfin content. Its great having an easy option to throw something on for background noise.

https://tunarr.com/

My first impulse was when pressing the channels that it wasn't working. I then realized I had to hold down my thumb for it to then give me a prompt to tune to the channel. That user experience needs to be improved.

Other than that, this totally fits the nostalgia of old school cable channel surfing!

Well done!

Shameless plug but I think this shares a lot of the same reasons why I built this time-traveling radio: https://anthrology.site/

There's something to be said about tuning into some program that is already "on", instead of requiring on-demand decision about what to watch (or listen to!)

This is the kind of thing I used to tell myself that I needed to exist before I'd be able to drop cable. The ability to just mindlessly turn on the TV and drop yourself right into the middle of something and leave it on throughout the day was... habit-forming, I guess.

Though ultimately it was not that difficult of a habit to drop.

I wonder how cool it would be to have a live ephemeral chat for each channel?

One thing I love(d) about live TV (or even live radio) was the community around knowing other people were watching the exact same thing I was watching (and then the watercooler chat around it afterwards).

If there was live chat attached to each of these "stations", it could spark some interesting chatter/community.

I know this already exists OOTB with YouTube Live, FB Live, etc.

But this would be for things that were simply uploaded, and now streamed live like you're doing here.

Obviously, that only works if there's enough viewership/participation.

I like the idea of everyone getting fed the same content. But I also especially love being able to discover new videos and channels that are hopefully curated by humans.

It might be better to just turn this on when I'm wanting to watch something than open YouTube and look at my homepage.

This reminded me of Ersatz TV [1], which on checking appears to have gone into maintenance mode a few weeks ago.

I had wanted to use something that lets me set up an EPG with all of the YouTube channels I watch, to see their live streams in a TV guide and see their upcoming streams in a nice grid format. It's probably harder to do this with live stuff than it is to have a set of videos like this site uses.

[1]: https://github.com/ErsatzTV/ErsatzTV

This would be amazing to be able to use on a TV with a remote!

I love this concept. I was recently thinking about how I used to be able to skip from one channel to another when an ad break came on. I would love the harness on a smart device to be like this so that I may switch between the Hulu and Netflix apps at will. Why should I have to restart the app each time I navigate in? Why do the apps even know that I am switching around?

Great work! I had wanted to do something like this for all the Star Trek series’ back when Netflix US had them up but never got around to it. Great to see a similar thought with a much cooler implementation.

It says "Subscribe to unlock channel import. Get weekly weird sites delivered to your inbox. Free forever.".

> Quickly import your subscriptions in the browser via a bookmarklet

I don't see any mention of bookmarklet anywhere on the page

I want to automate a feed of text summaries of videos from YouTube channels and playlists, and then fetch full transcripts of the ones that interest me.

Any idea if this is possible without having to query the YouTube API?

Literally Pluto TV v1 à la 2013/14.

Source: me. I built it with some folks.

This is so weird because yesterday, or the day before I was trying to think of some sample code to work on, and I did want to simulate a TV set with youtube. Not exactly like yours, no channel guide, but the basics and I think there is a weird reason besides inside knowledge why prediction markets "work"!!

Looks great!

Ah, it's interesting but if you really want the cable TV experience, there is pluto.tv which works in a browser, and is generally installed on most streaming boxes/sticks/TVs.

Does this avoid YouTube ads or pass them through? I somewhat wonder if this kind of thing is the reason that YouTube wants to progressively lock down their platform. (They don't want users avoiding their algorithms and their ads.)

not super mobile friendly (as i’d imagine for an app made for tvs) but amazing aesthetic nonetheless

Would love a way to get this on my tv! Casting from a browser would be too much

There's a nice interview with Stallman where he's asked about this: what are people's motivation for contributing to Free software.

https://youtu.be/ucXYWG0vqqk?t=1889

I find him speaking really soothing.

Clicking any of the videos/channels doesn't cause the videos to play. What am I missing?

I love how 'Music 80s' is channel 29, which was MTV on cable when I was growing up in the tri-state area in the 80s ;)

Also reminds me of Bob Dylan's "How Does It Feel" website:

https://video.bobdylan.com/

Which has folks from The History channel, Pawn Stars, etc

I want something like this for Plex, where I can just turn it on and have some of my favorite shows play random episodes, and I wish Plex made that easy to do.

My initial reaction to the headline was, "cable TV is terrible, why would anyone want to watch YouTube like it's cable?!" But I actually love this!

A similar site used to exist that had really high quality curated content called neverthink, it was acquired in 2021 and eventually killed but I always thought it was a great idea.

Similar project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247023

I'd love an Inter-dimensional Cable channel, just weird surreal stuff

Ha, this is amazing. We need a version for Android TV!

Similar to the ytch.xyz project

I love this. Thank you.

Can I create and curate my own channels?

Is there an app for this I can download on my Apple TV?

Any way to toggle full screen?

made this when youtube api dropped around 2007 in flash. was called TraumTV