TV Garden

[thundergolfer]

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

[phantomathkg]

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

[pests]

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.

[NKosmatos]

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

[gosub100]

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

[steelegbr]

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.

[LightBug1]

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

[vivzkestrel]

maybe we need a podcast.garden now

[mcflubbins]

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.

[ThatMedicIsASpy]

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.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> 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.

[airstrike]

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

[jaqalopes]

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.

[londons_explore]

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!

[vault]

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.

[dkh]

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

[lxgr]

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?

[larfus]

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.

[AnotherGoodName]

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

[emmelaich]

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

[jccalhoun]

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]

"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".

[blueflow]

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

[j_french]

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

[xobs]

"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."

[singularity2001]

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

[hombre_fatal]

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.

[hunter2_]

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?

[al_borland]

> 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.

[hsuduebc2]

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.

[forks]

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

[caseyy]

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.

[lxgr]

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.)

[onionisafruit]

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

[magicmicah85]

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.

[ctm92]

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]

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

[temp0826]

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

[netsharc]

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).

[financetechbro]

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

[trompetenaccoun]

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

[memalign]

Heck yeah, they have ReBoot:

https://tv.garden/us/qRH5QbLVuLvQQR

[devnexus16]

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.

[geostupid]

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!

[morsch]

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

[genewitch]

So, all China and India for 16 pages?

[abhishekY495]

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.

[totetsu]

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

[joshuaturner]

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

[derac]

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

[cbozeman]

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

[INTPenis]

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.

[sexy_seedbox]

How to select Hong Kong?

[philsnow]

https://tv.garden/hk

[bookofjoe]

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

[DecentShoes]

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

[dkh]

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

[Chihuahua0633]

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

[jonathanlydall]

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

[mvdtnz]

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

[lxgr]

Works for me in Firefox!

[cbozeman]

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

[nkanaev]

Checks his own country: "No channels available."

Damn, even Afghanistan has a dozen available.

[exogeny]

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

[pete1302]

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

[yard2010]

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

[matt3210]

Very nice!

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

[alabhyajindal]

Wonderful! Works surprisingly well!

[hei-lima]

Just a great project!

[pleyr]

this is very clean..

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

[aa-jv]

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

[thomasfromcdnjs]

Love it

[przemub]

Yeah, these FTA channels are fair from representative. Get a UK VPN and try https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer instead!

[JKCalhoun]

Definitely going to be biased toward content that has a streaming URL.