Show HN: TV Explorer. Adding advanced UI to free online TV

dtagames

I built this app for myself after being disappointed with the options for viewing IPTV online. Thousands of global channels broadcast their streams but there's no great way to find, filter, save, and share them. Since it was launched during the war, comparing news broadcasts from different countries and perspectives became the number one use case. But not far behind was language learning , something I used TV for as a kid when I was an exchange student to Spain. Several technical challenges had to be overcome to make this work: - How to get channel data and keep it updated? - How to handle geoblocking or off-air channels? - How would users save channels and share them with friends or across devices? - Could you operate your living room TV with your phone as a remote ? I'm pleased to say that TV Explorer addresses all of these issues, and lots of other ones like different devices sizes and orientations, browsers, and user preferences. To connect a user across all the apps developed with my platform, called Watson, TVE uses common authentication and user login for all Watson apps -- itself a challenge to develop and implement. Here's how those things were handled: - Channels are loaded live from a public repo on git, maintained by an established community. - A graceful scanning interface detects dead or blocked channels and keeps their status for users. - Deep linking (with screenshots on mobile!) encourage viral sharing. - Yes, you can! I call it the $1,000 remote. TVE acts like a search and channel changer for your living room set. I'd love to hear what you think... and what challenges you've had deploying your side projects!

cwharris

This is awesome! We need more projects like this! I'm sitting here watching music videos from Mongolia, having a legitimately cool digital experience. It just _feels_ different, like I'm a kid in the 90's scanning cable channels, finding whatever's interesting. Roulette-like, but with results filtered by what different cultures find generally acceptable. Very early-internet vibes on this, but with modern quality and presentation. I love it. I have no reason to love it. But I do. And that's the best part.

ItemId48325624

This is great! I like it a lot better than tv.garden Two issues i had: 1. Closed captions didnt work on firefox (windows) - the menu did appear where im suppposed to be able to select a cc option but i cant actually click on any of them 2. Closed captions did work on chrome (windows) but i could only just barely click the menu icon; putting the mouse over most of the menu buttons caused them to disappear, so i had to click the very lowest part of the button but otherwise terrific, especially if this is updating from github live as you say; lots of channels were dead on tv.garden (maybe its different now - i dont actually watch tv that often unless an event is going on like moon landing or something)

lobf

Love this. I’ve been working on a couple of options for better IPTV viewing and curating too, so this is wonderful. Thanks!

phusuke

Is there a better way to browse through the list? Currently the player takes up most of the screen and I can only see like 2 channels in the table and it's hard to scroll.

zuzululu

thank you for this! now I can watch Korean TV and learn Korean. I do wonder why the video keeps buffering and timeline is in a loop, it loads a segment then timeline jumps back. Other than that this is lovely I can use it as sort of something in the background while i work and also explore other countries.

oknosoknos

Really nice, great project, thanks! How about an „I feel lucky“-button for random discoveries?

IcyHordr

This is VEEEERRY GOOD!

dysoco

Hey this is pretty cool, I think probably the best iteration of these I´ve seen so far. I´m surprised to see so many regional channels in my country I´d never guess existed. I think a nice addition would be a filter to easily see the most relevant/national channels of a country, so I don't have to scroll through many regional ones.

sidhusmart

The first thing I do in a hotel room is turn on the TV and browse through all channels. I’ve watched folk dances in Romania, dubbed Indian shows in Bulgaria and even soft porn in Albania. This gives me that same feeling without the travel and hotel room! Can you share more about the Watson framework - is that something one could use for their own ideas? I’m going through other websites you’ve built as well - very cool ideas!

tamimio

I loved it! It’s also interesting going through different channels across multiple countries, and after some time you notice you have either state sponsored channels or corp sponsored ones in most cases. State sponsored are either brainwashing through news and such, or distracting with some funny shows while the country is in ruins. Corp sponsored are riddled with ads and such, and also a bit of first category. Edit: it would be great to add some maybe big buttons at the bottom or similar, so you can navigate with a remote on a TV, or better, make it a PWA and installable on TV boxes, maybe kodi addon.

2OEH8eoCRo0

I like it! I was looking for something like this just yesterday.

nathancahill

I would have killed for this when I was learning languages. Bookmarking it for when I learn French.

tt_dev

need this on the cheap roku tvs

knuit

Would love a native Apple TV app for this, or even just the ability to Airplay the video which doesn’t seem possible right now.

abailin

This is an amazing product. One of the coolest things about this is that there’s no commercials. Where the commercial time would be on BBC Earth, it’s a loop of animals with soothing music. 10/10 experience Why not window.history.pushState like https://tvexplorer.live/tv?channel=bbc-earth - that way browser back/forward acts as changing the channel

daveevad

I like this a lot and I've just been watching the default BBC Earth and it's amazing. edit: It appears to be Seven Worlds, One Planet narrated by you know who.

hombre_fatal

This is great. I've been wanting a nice way to put on various TV shows to practice a different language, especially in a way I can quickly put one on in the background and then tune into it here and there, yet every time I'd try to look into "ip tv" the search results were full of crapware and spam. Request: Add a "Health" header to the `healthy | dead` column that we can click like the other columns to filter it. What happens is that I end up with a lot of channels known to be dead and don't want to keep having to scroll past them.