TV Garden

by vkdelta • 1 year ago

789 124 1 year ago

jaqalopes• 1 year ago

This is pretty amazing. I clicked on a Luganda-language channel in Uganda and it was a concerned-looking woman being interviewed for a news segment about a "for men" testosterone supplement. Kind of heartening to see that people everywhere are the same, for better and for worse.

forks• 1 year ago

One of those things that's so cool it's hard to believe it's legal

caseyy3• 1 year ago

There are many broadcasting laws worldwide, many quite archaic. Even Radio Garden got meaningfully restricted in the UK (only licensed national radio stations are allowed by a high court ruling). I worry for projects like TV Garden but they are undoubtedly very cool.

lxgr8• 1 year ago

Wait, what? Receiving foreign web radio streams in the UK is prohibited?!

How is that even enforced?

lxgr8• 1 year ago

Why not? Public broadcast TV stations want to be viewed, just like web radio streams!

That said, the first one I tried (a German public broadcaster) was showing a static image of “this programme is currently unavailable for legal reasons”. (I believe they do IP-based geofencing for legal/broadcasting rights reasons.)

crazygringo• 1 year ago

Yeah, just because a channel is public broadcast doesn't mean some of the content it shows hasn't been commercially produced, and a license purchased for that country's geographical area only.

mcflubbins4• 1 year ago

You can watch NHK World from anywhere, they make it available on their website: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/live/

They show the news at the top of every hour so we check in pretty regularly.

gosub1002• 1 year ago

There was a high profile court case in about 2018 where a start-up was trying to sell rebroadcasted public TV and it was ruled illegal and held up on appeal. They even tried "renting" miniature TV antennae to users with the legal theory that they never made a "copy". Sad to see it was shot down.

vault• 1 year ago

Thanks. I could spend hours watching distant cultures. Their colours, environment, technical equipment... I saw some people in Somalia using DJI microphones, those that in the West are mainly used by YouTubers.

I also see TVs that are normally subject to fees. I'm aware the FAQs say it's only public streams, but I fear this won't last long.

lxgr8• 1 year ago

Non-public streams wouldn’t be published without DRM, or at least not as publicly retrievable (i.e. without any authentication) M3U playlists, would they?

cadamsdotcom• 1 year ago

Yes - for some of these you can stream if you know the URL, but you're only able to discover the URL after making an account.

larfus2• 1 year ago

I think its inevitable death will be from all that unrestricted pornography. That being said, these kinds of projects usually hold up for quite some time.

pavel_lishin• 1 year ago

Where are the pornographic channels? You know, so I can avoid them?

sepositus• 1 year ago

My children were interested in playing with it, but this was my fear. Is there actually pornography streaming on it?

dkh10• 1 year ago

The definition of "public" in this context is not straightforward. I, too, doubt the site is long for this world, and due to its ease-of-use could possibly also draw the broadcasters' attention to all the unprotected streams they may have either not known about, or not cared about because they were only really discoverable/usable by a relatively small group of geeks

magicmicah85• 1 year ago

Love the website design. Very neat to just drop in on a country, see what’s on. Was watching two guys in Afghanistan acting goofy in a commercial. Just fascinating.

thundergolfer• 1 year ago

One of those projects that has me wondering what I was doing instead of building this. The end result is great, and the technical details seem like they'd be interesting. TIL about Internet Protocol TV: https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv

phantomathkg2• 1 year ago

What you see in that repo is not truly true IPTV[0].

What you see in the repo is a lot of different HLS manifest[1], which in turn pointed to different questionable sources of all the OTT streams around the world.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_IPTV_Forum [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

anjel• 1 year ago

So the cable pirated TV to IPTV reflector streams are being re-pirated or maybe just Liberated?

pests• 1 year ago

I have a friend who purchased some sketchy IPTV service for $100/year. Basically all the cable and premium channels from around the world. Navigating the channels are difficult as there are many duplicates or all the local channels around the country. Interesting to watch the news in different areas and sometimes a little unreliable and probably illegal but it was a TIL for me too.

yard20102• 1 year ago

Thanks for the rabbit hole, and making me realize I need one.

esskay3• 1 year ago

I had something similar a few years ago. I ended up having to write a little script to pull out just the channels I wanted as nothing could handle the 18 thousand stream options it provided (total insanity that its bundled up into 1 file like that in the first place but seems to be the norm for dodgy IPTV providers).

Nowadays theres better tools for the job. StreamMaster* for example can handle thousands of IPTV sources and let you organise them nicely into something that can be read by Plex, Jellyfin, etc.

*Sadly recently abandoned but still available on github.

AnotherGoodName• 1 year ago

For me the site is incredibly snappy. Amazing. As in i clicked Australia, clicked ABC TV and it all loaded in milliseconds.

emmelaich• 1 year ago

It's missing a few major channels, Seven and Nine afaics. Maybe they don't offer free iptv.

dkh10• 1 year ago

Most of these are being "offered" in a way not intended or desired by the broadcaster

NKosmatos• 1 year ago

There’s also Radio Garden https://radio.garden/

gosub1002• 1 year ago

HN brought me there over 5 years ago and I've been using it regularly ever since.

vivzkestrel• 1 year ago

maybe we need a podcast.garden now

dkh10• 1 year ago

Most [public] podcasts are registered in Apple's podcast registry, which is what most podcast apps with a global search/discovery feature queries, and why these apps can all turn up the same podcasts. There are also things like https://podbay.fm that put give it a more general web frontend.

I suppose that the not public podcasts could be aggregated somewhere, but I'm less of a fan of that, and there's also some technical reasons why this would be more difficult than it was to aggregate these IPTV HLS streams.

Being able to view them by country or whatever is interesting, though I think perhaps less so for podcasts than something like live news, but not a bad idea

steelegbr• 1 year ago

It's worth remembering that Radio Garden is now gubbed for transatlantic listening from the UK due to music licencing issues. The same problem also impacts TuneIn.

jjbinx007• 1 year ago

"Station Unavailable

Users in the United Kingdom are restricted from tuning in to stations outside of the UK for an indefinite period due to copyright and neighboring rights related matters that require clarification.

Stations situated in the UK continue to be available.

For more information please read the statement in the 'Settings' section."

indoor47• 1 year ago

tv.garden might witness similar issues :/

LightBug1• 1 year ago

That was literally in my top 10 favourite websites until the UK f'd it up ... actually, I haven't tried using it with a VPN

blueflow• 1 year ago

Go to Germany, select "KIKA" and you can see the depressed bread.

j_french• 1 year ago

I have so many questions. Why is the bread depressed? Why is it in space? Why is the soundtrack so cool?

ternus• 1 year ago

The bread is the mascot of the TV channel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernd_das_Brot -- an article surprisingly full of gems such as this:

The reason for Bernd's depression was revealed in the 85th episode of the series. In his telling: "[...] A long, long time ago I fell in love with a beautiful, slim baguette. She was so unbelievably charming and funny. But unfortunately, my affection was in vain. She only had eyes for this perfect stranger, a multigrain bread. It was so devastating. [...] My heart has been a dry clump of flour ever since."

Late at night (i.e. right now in the US), KiKA plays a "late night loop" starring Bernd.

netsharc2• 1 year ago

1 month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43205563

singularity2001• 1 year ago

For me Germany and Estland are confused de/ee !?

xobs• 1 year ago

"KIKA" just shows an infinitely-looping 10-second clip of a sign swinging that translates to "Unfortunately, you can only watch the current video if you are in Germany."

hei-lima• 1 year ago

Just a great project!

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

Cool project. Unfortunately I get infinite spinners on all non-Youtube videos in Firefox. Works in Chrome.

lxgr8• 1 year ago

Works for me in Firefox!

mcflubbins4• 1 year ago

Checks out.

Clicked on a channel in the Philippines and immediately had to sit through 5 soap related commercials, precisely what I recall from my time there.

airstrike• 1 year ago

Same here. Clicked Brazil, SBT and they're showing Chaves (El Chavo del Ocho) reruns, just like they were 30 years ago...

ThatMedicIsASpy• 1 year ago

I have a hard time recalling the last time I watched ads outside of Cyberpunk 2077 where I watched, listened and actively search for them in my first hours.

But now I want to actively want to know how ads look all around the world.

mcflubbins4• 1 year ago

I made some mix tapes a couple years ago for my wife (Filipino) with some of her favorite Filipino artists. I searched for radio bumpers and commercials from the stations we used to hear on the radio and in taxis to put in-between every couple songs as if it were a radio station it was so much fun and made her feel like home, reminded me of my years spent there too!

DaiPlusPlus• 1 year ago

had to sit through 5 soap related commercials

Not the skin-lightening kind, I hope? Those ads were... odd.

I spent the late-1990s in Manila, for me it was Jollibee ads, and an oddly recurrent anti-corruption PSA which, I think, made corruption look quite appealing, actually.

lawgimenez• 1 year ago

Skin lightening products are famous here for social status. It’s so fake.

mcflubbins4• 1 year ago

Nope, a couple of Pride Bar commercials one for Safe Guard and a couple of laundry detergent ones.

I agree the skin lightening soap was weird for me too. Its kind of interesting how people yearn for what they don't have (pale light skin women in the west tanning, tan darker skinned women in the east lightening...)

alabhyajindal• 1 year ago

Wonderful! Works surprisingly well!

thomasfromcdnjs• 1 year ago

Love it

financetechbro• 1 year ago

TIL There’s a Mr. Beast channel in the US

trompetenaccoun• 1 year ago

Is there? Or is that just his Youtube channel on a loop?

dkh10• 1 year ago

It's both. It's a FAST channel being used by I think Pluto.TV and Roku to give them another "live 24/7" "channel" for their catalogs, but underneath is just looping playlist of YouTube content.

That's actually what a huge number of the channels on this site are, and I do wish they were labeled and filterable that way.

onionisafruit• 1 year ago

Crazy that I can change channels on this faster than on youtube tv

DecentShoes• 1 year ago

It's cool, but are you not worried about a huge lawsuit from rebroadcasting copyrighted content without a licence?

dkh10• 1 year ago

My guess is this was launched to get some attention or as some sort of proof-of-concept or whatever, and that it perhaps is not intended to be a sustainable platform, at least not in this form. And they probably assume if there's a problem, they'll just get a cease & desist notice and have to take the channel down (which is probably true).

Definitely has to be a bit of a #yolo project launch though. Other concerns as well including GDPR compliance

exogeny• 1 year ago

We've got -- nothing better to do! Than watch TV! And have a couple of brews!

hombre_fatal• 1 year ago

Can someone explain the economics of this?

So, there are a bunch of open http endpoints serving free video feeds and they don't care about bandwidth?

It's not like radio where you broadcast it and people passively receive the signal.

This is a great service for language practice, though. Wish it had a login + favorites system.

hsuduebc22• 1 year ago

I wouldn't they don't care. It just wasn't problem for them. But basically yes. I blindly checked few of the TV's listed for my country and every one of them had live stream on Google publicly available somewhere.

But is this really a concern for them? If they are making money from advertisement this just add them justification for higher price of an ad.

dkh10• 1 year ago

They aren't making money from this, but they are likely operating at a scale where they either don't notice if 1000 nerds on the internet are piggybacking their feeds, or don't care all that much.

It is not likely useful to them in negotiating ad rates, at least not with how advertising is usually bought/sold, because the broadcaster has almost no information (if any) about anyone watching these streams, including if it's even a person. It's possible they could fold it into a more general ad package that places a lot of weight on total view/viewers numbers, but that is a lot less common these days, and when it is done, the rates tend to be much lower

hunter2_• 1 year ago

I never got into this aspect of networking, so I truly don't know what I'm talking about and wish someone will correct me, but on some level, IP does indeed have broadcast/multicast capabilities that cause the sender's egress traffic to remain independent of the number of recipients rather than being equal to the sum of recipients' ingress traffic, right? Does this only work downstream of the last router, and therefore has limited usefulness on the internet?

acomjean• 1 year ago

I think you are right. Multicast is typically udp and only available on your local net if the router is configured for it. I haven't used multicast in along so I might be wrong. I remember network updates breaking it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast

keeperofdakeys• 1 year ago

IP does indeed have broadcast/multicast capabilities that cause the sender's egress traffic to remain independent of the number of recipients rather than being equal to the sum of recipients' ingress traffic, right?

Yes multicast, however you can't do multicast over the internet. In practise the technology is mainly used in production and enterprise scenarios (broadcast, signage, hotels, stadiums, etc).

Instead big streaming platforms like netflix or twich use CDN boxes installed locally at major ISPs. Also with so much hardware acceleration on modern NICs these days, it's surprisingly easy to handle Gbits of throughput for audio/video streaming.

al_borland• 1 year ago

Wish it had a login + favorites system.

The URL updates with the channel you’re watching. Your browser bookmarks could be used as your own favorites system.

derac• 1 year ago

This is awesome. If the site owner is reading this, favorites would be cool.

cbozeman2• 1 year ago

As someone mentioned, each channel has it's own unique URL. Create a Bookmarks / Favorites folder in your browser of choice and just add.

totetsu2• 1 year ago

There are some conspicuous erasures of countries on the data used to make this map.

joshuaturner• 1 year ago

I was really hoping to catch up on Real Housewives of Vatican City

totetsu2• 1 year ago

and Survivor Palau. I noticed New Zealand was missing and Island, Cyprus had no Türkiye on it, Gaza was part of Israel, etcetc

sexy_seedbox• 1 year ago

How to select Hong Kong?

philsnow• 1 year ago

https://tv.garden/hk

cbozeman2• 1 year ago

Thanks to this website I learned that ABC 25 Waco TV (KXXV) has some incredibly good interlude music.

abhishekY495• 1 year ago

Clicked on a channel and it started playing the video pretty quickly. There is also https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv but your UI is much better.

matt3210• 1 year ago

Very nice!

nit: country label appears under the mouse. Edge Browser, Mac

pleyr• 1 year ago

this is very clean..

hi from Pleyr, https://pleyr.net/

morsch2• 1 year ago

An option to sort stations by (some reasonable measure of) popularity instead of alphabetically would be nice.

genewitch4• 1 year ago

So, all China and India for 16 pages?

morsch2• 1 year ago

I was thinking within a country. But sure, that would make more sense than only alphabetical sorting for the global listings as well. Hadn't even noticed those.

If you wanted -- and you had the data, which you probably don't -- you could make the sorting criteria the share of viewers (ie. percentage as opposed to absolute numbers), that way countries with unusually large audiences wouldn't always appear at the top. Though that comes with its own issues.

jonathanlydall• 1 year ago

Pretty cool overall. On South Africa some of its listings are radio stations "broadcasting" over YouTube.

devnexus16• 1 year ago

Intriguing concept! Combining TV with virtual world exploration opens up fascinating possibilities. The demo is impressive, but I'm curious about plans for content beyond scenic walks. Interactive experiences? Educational journeys? With the right partnerships and creative direction, this could become a compelling new medium for immersive storytelling.

temp0826• 1 year ago

Feels like I got an inter-dimensional cable box from Rick&Morty

netsharc2• 1 year ago

Isn't that what TikTok is, or Instagram real? Swipe up and it's something completely different.

Then again, the "algorithm"(TM) is geared to showing you what captures your attention in order to keep you watching and get those ad impressions out of you, so the videos end up being very same.

Also it's curious, a few days after that hurrican/flooding in a few months ago, a lot of the videos being shown were about houses being swept away in water. A few days ago a lot of the videos were of water falling off infinity pools and that collapsing skyscraper in Thailand (RIP).

pete1302• 1 year ago

I spent hours watching French Drama, I don't know any French.

yard20102• 1 year ago

Same but with Indian drama. I found out that matlab in hindu means "what do you mean?". I wonder what "numpy" means..

memalign• 1 year ago

Heck yeah, they have ReBoot:

https://tv.garden/us/qRH5QbLVuLvQQR

londons_explore2• 1 year ago

Really notable that all the youtube feeds work and load fast, whereas all the other feeds are 50/50 if they work or not, and if they do load they're slow, laggy and bad quality.

Props to the youtube engineering team I guess!

aa-jv• 1 year ago

Not to be confused with https://radio.garden/ ... must resist urge to make Buggles joke ..

ctm92• 1 year ago

The name is ironic, as there is a german TV show called Fernsehgarten (basically television garden). It's broadcasted live every sunday morning during summer season on ZDF, basically it's a outdoor studio with music and other things around a topic every week.

Mostly targeted to elderly people, but funny to watch every once in a while. You can even go there in person for quite cheap

whoisstan• 1 year ago

The name is probably inspired by TV Garden from Nam June Paik from the 70s

nkanaev• 1 year ago

Checks his own country: "No channels available."

Damn, even Afghanistan has a dozen available.

bookofjoe• 1 year ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43505838

INTPenis• 1 year ago

So it's only getting videos from youtube that claim to be from Sweden. But very few of them actually were. The very first images I saw was a racoon, not common here at all.

jccalhoun• 1 year ago

Pretty fun. Reminds me of the 90s when my parents had a big satellite dish and I would spend time going from satellite to satellite seeing what was being broadcast in the clear. There's something about discovering something weird that you never knew existed. There are some b-movie channels on roku that i love just because I never know what kind of weird movie they will play

I do wish there was some kind of Shazam for movies/tv shows because there are times when I flip on one of those in the middle of a movie, get into it, and then have the hardest time trying to find the name of it.

danvoell• 1 year ago

"Shazam for movies/tv shows" - We watched a Spanish Game Show while abroad this spring break. There was a team that kept winning and my family got behind them. I returned home and figured we could jump right back in and watch it remotely. After searching for hours, I'm not sure the show ever existed and might actually be a figment of my imagination even though we have photos, clips from it, and even know the name of the show. There could definitely be a need for this. Maybe shazam meets low cost pay per view for "low demand licensed content".

Chihuahua0633• 1 year ago

Is there some way to find a stream url to toss into VLC - if you wanted to easily watch this on your actual TV?

geostupid• 1 year ago

This is fantastic! One of my favorite things about traveling is experiencing their media--it gives me that same feeling.

Also, as someone that studied Geography extensively, it's an excellent review in that respect as well. One can quickly jump from one place to another.

Bonus points for using a globe, and not a map!

TV Garden

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