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📂 **Category**: Apps,Media & Entertainment,indie,YouTube
✅ **What You’ll Learn**:
There’s a new and fun way to watch YouTube: by channel surfing like a boomer on cable TV. This creative idea came from London-based developer Stephen Irby, who has just launched a web app called Channel Surfer, which presents interesting YouTube videos in an interface that resembles an old-looking TV guide.
In the app, you can browse through different channels focusing on the topic and tap on them to listen to them as if you were watching live TV.
At launch, there are 40 of these specially designed ‘channels’ to choose from, including those focused on general topics such as news, politics, sports and lifestyle content, as well as a selection of music and other channels with a greater focus on technology.
The last group includes channels such as “AI & ML”, “Code & Dev”, “Space”, “Retro Tech”, “Tech & Gadgets” and “Gaming”.
As you move between channels, you join the video playing in the middle of the broadcast. At the same time, the guide informs you of upcoming content on all channels and what time of day it will be played. You can also scroll ahead to take a look at the programs planned for the next 24 hours.
This makes watching YouTube a lot like watching old-school live TV — an experience that’s proven popular on free streaming services like Plex, Pluto TV, Tubi, and others, which offer a lineup of live channels showing TV shows and movies. Meanwhile, YouTube itself dominates broadcast television in the United States
Additionally, there’s a small counter at the bottom of the screen that keeps track of how many other people are currently watching YouTube with you.
Irby says he came up with the idea of building a similar experience on streaming devices, but for YouTube videos, because finding something to watch can still be difficult.
“I built Channel Surfer because I was tired of algorithms and tired of indecision,” Irby told TechCrunch. “I miss channel surfing and not having to decide what to watch. I just want to sit down and watch what’s on and not think about what to watch next.”
“My baby boomer mom watches cable TV. I want the same thing, but with my YouTube channels instead. It’s also weirdly comforting to know I’m watching with other people,” he said.
The project is one of many new experiments conducted by Irby, a 40-year technology industry veteran who has spent the past decade traveling the world.
“I have a lot of creativity from my long, strange journey. I can’t stand the idea of being a Jira ticket monkey anymore,” he said.
The app appears to have been a hit, with Irby noting that the brand-new Channel Surfer site saw more than 10,000 views on its first day.
Under the hood, Channel Surfer is, at the moment, a static Next.js site that uses PartyKit and is hosted on Cloudflare. The channels and music it offers are from Ibry’s carefully selected catalog. GitHub Actions are used to run a script that updates data daily. There’s no back end yet.
Although Claude helped with the coding process, the site is not “lively coded,” Irby says.
The channels themselves essentially run YouTube embeds, including YouTube ads, so the app shouldn’t be in violation of the policy. Eventually, Irby says he would like to bring the app to TV platforms, such as Fire TV, Google TV and others. (It also works on mobile devices and tablets, but it needs more work.)
At launch, Channel Surfer was a free service offering access to 175 YouTube channels and 25 music playlists. But if you subscribe to the Irby newsletter, you’ll be given the option to import your YouTube subscriptions into the app.
It’s a quick and dirty process to do this: You drag a “Channel Surfer” bookmark to your bookmarks bar, open your YouTube subscriptions, and tap the bookmark. The process begins by directing you back to the application where you paste the copied JSON text into a box and then click the “Import” button. This adds your own channels to the existing Channel Surfer list, potentially giving you hundreds of additional channels to watch in this format.
The site’s existence dates back to the days before the web, when it was full of fun experiments and creativity. For Irby, that’s the point.
“I’m obsessed with showing the world that the old web is still alive and well,” he says. “It’s buried under a cliff.”
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