Channel directory
Every channel on the network, what it carries and how much of it.
- 1 — THE PREVUE CHANNEL: The scrolling grid. Every channel on this network against the next ninety minutes, in the Prevue shape — with…
- 2 — SIGN-ON: Universal Newsreels, 1929 to 1967. The news as it was delivered before anyone could pause it.
- 4 — CHALK TALK: Academic film. Someone who has thought about one thing for thirty years, explaining it to a camera.
- 5 — STUDY HALL: Classroom films. Posture, manners, fire safety, and what to do about your feelings. Shown on a projector to a…
- 6 — THE INSTITUTE: Industrial and sponsored film from the Prelinger Archives. Companies explaining themselves to employees…
- 7 — THE ALL CLEAR: Civil defense and preparedness film. Calm voices explaining an uncalm century.
- 8 — RETRO WEATHER REWIND: Local on the 8s, forever. A live WeatherSTAR-era forecast channel built from current NWS and RainViewer data.…
- 9 — AND NOW A WORD: Commercials with nothing between them. The part everybody fast-forwarded, preserved better than the shows.
- 10 — BIG BOARD: Games whose outcome was decided decades ago, called by men who did not know that yet.
- 11 — MIND YOUR MANNERS: Social guidance film. How to behave on a date, at a table, in a crisis — according to adults who were sure…
- 12 — SUNDAY DRIVE: Cars, highways and trains, filmed by people who believed the road was going somewhere good.
- 13 — THE BEIGE YEARS: Stewart Cheifet documenting personal computing from 1983 to 2002, week by week, without once guessing wrong…
- 14 — DEPT. OF: Films made by the United States government, which means films you already own. Training, procedure, and…
- 15 — HOT PLATE: Cooking, demonstrated with total confidence and a great deal of gelatin.
- 16 — LEG WARMERS: Home exercise tape. Follow along or do not; the instructor cannot see you and never could.
- 17 — CEREAL HOUR: Saturday morning as it went out: cartoons, bumpers and the adverts in between, taped off the antenna by…
- 18 — AFTER THE BELL: Let yourself in, drop the bag, switch it on. Afternoon cable cartoons off the tape, in the hours before…
- 19 — BLOCK PARTY: The afternoon action block, English dub, bumpers intact. Recorded off the air by someone who did not want to…
- 20 — TAPE HEAD: Whatever was on the tape. Rescued VHS, tracking errors and all, in the order nobody intended.
- 21 — THE DEEP END: Past midnight the cartoons stop being for children. Nobody admits to being awake for this.
- 22 — RUBBER MASK: A talking dog, four teenagers and a caretaker who would have got away with it. The whole limited-animation…
- 23 — STORY HOUR: The programmes that sent you to the library. Patient presenters, puppets, and somebody reading a picture book…
- 24 — SLIME TIME: Children racing through obstacle courses for a prize they will keep forever. There is a bucket of something…
- 25 — EIGHT O'CLOCK: Primetime as it aired. Sitcoms and dramas off the network feed with the station IDs and the eight o'clock…
- 26 — RERUN ALLEY: The shows that ran forever in syndication. Half of these were on at one in the morning on a channel you could…
- 27 — NEXT STOP: Twenty-six minutes of the uncanny, a narrator who already knows how it ends, and a turn you will see coming…
- 28 — HEAVY ROTATION: Music videos and countdowns, taped over somebody else's film. Six hours of a channel that used to play music.
- 29 — CHANNEL ZERO: Two in the morning on public access. Somebody is doing something, at length, with total conviction, and you…
- 30 — LOCAL TALENT: Community access. Local bands, talent nights and recitals. The best thing you will never see a second time.
- 31 — HAPPY ACCIDENTS: A quiet man painting a mountain in twenty-six minutes and telling you it is not a mistake, it is a happy…
- 32 — BLUE MARBLE: Longform nature film from the age of the patient camera. Jungles, oceans, tundra, and a calm voice explaining…
- 50 — T-MINUS: Rockets nobody rode. Test stands, probes, wind tunnels and the long unglamorous engineering underneath it all.
- 51 — COUNTDOWN: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab. The crewed missions themselves, in the original flat procedural voice.
- 55 — BOOT SECTOR: Computing before it won. Demos, user groups, trade shows, and software nobody can run any more.
- 56 — INSERT COIN: Games being played by people who are better at them than you, at length, without commentary.
- 100 — MATINEE: Public domain features, run straight through. Copyright lapsed, the film did not.
- 101 — NIGHT BEAT: Noir. Venetian blinds, bad decisions, and a voiceover that already knows how this ends.
- 102 — LAST LAUGH: Public domain comedy. The timing still works, which is the remarkable part.
- 103 — SUNDOWN: Westerns. The same twelve plots, the same four canyons, and it works every single time.
- 104 — HEAVY WEATHER: Drama, at the length drama used to be allowed. Nobody in these pictures has anywhere to be.
- 200 — MAN IN A SUIT: Science fiction and horror on a budget, with a monster that is clearly a person. Shown without apology.
- 201 — CREATURE FEATURE: Gothic horror, public domain. Fog, a staircase, and something the budget could just about afford to imply.
- 202 — WORLD OF TOMORROW: Science fiction features. The future, as imagined by people with a soldering iron and real conviction.
- 203 — THE MIDNIGHT HOST: A horror film is better when somebody in a wig interrupts it to make fun of it. Hosted late-night horror…
- 204 — CLIFFHANGER: Chapter serials. Ray guns, rocket sparks and a certain death at the end of every reel that turns out to be…
- 400 — THE BOUNCING BALL: Hand-drawn animation from before anyone had settled what animation was for. Everything bounces.
- 401 — MAGIC LANTERN: Silent film. A hundred years old and still faster than you expect.
- 402 — INKWELL: Fleischer and friends. Betty Boop, Popeye, and animation that has never once been polite.
- 500 — SUPLEX: Territory-era wrestling off the local affiliate. Folding chairs, blown spots, and a commentator who believes…
- 600 — SOMEBODY ELSE'S: Home movies. Strangers at their own birthday parties. The most honest footage on the dial.
- 601 — B-ROLL: Stock footage. No story, no narrator, no point. Put it on and look at something else.