THE PAST IS ALWAYS ON.
A television network with no television station. Fifty-one channels of archive film, cartoons, newsreels and late-night nonsense — all of it already running, whether or not anybody is watching.
There is nothing to queue and nothing to choose. You turn it on and join whatever is in progress, at the frame it has already reached.
No account. Nothing to install. Nothing to cancel.
Fifty-one channels, running to one clock.
A sample of the dial. The real one is one click away.
HOW IT WORKS
There is no video server, no transcode step and no stream.
A channel is not a playlist being played to you. It is a piece of arithmetic. Every channel is a fixed-length cycle of tapes laid over a start time, so the question what is on right now has an answer that can simply be worked out:
cycleIndex = floor((now − epoch) / cycleLength)
offsetInCycle = (now − epoch) − cycleIndex × cycleLength
Your browser runs those two lines, points a <video>
tag straight at a file on the Internet Archive, and seeks to the
offset. The Archive honours range requests, so the browser drops into
the middle of a film it has never touched before.
Two people watching a channel agree because they both ran the same sum — not because anything coordinated them.
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NOTHING IS STREAMED FROM HERE
Every frame is served by the Internet Archive. This site is a static folder: some markup, and a list of what is on.
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NOTHING IS PERSONALISED
No recommendations, no profile being built, no algorithm deciding what you get. The dial is the same dial for everybody.
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NOTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU
The schedule runs forward and backward forever. Tune in on a Tuesday three years out and the arithmetic already knows what is on.
WHAT YOU CANNOT DO
The restrictions are the product. They are not an early version of something else.
- You cannot fast-forward.The frame has not been broadcast yet.
- You cannot search.A network is a set of things already happening, not a library.
- You cannot pick an episode.You can pick a channel. That is the choice on offer.
- You can go back fifteen seconds.And that is the entire extent of your control.
THE DIAL
Every channel on the network, in dial order.
Reading the lineup…
Channels are re-cut from time to time, and a tape that is taken down comes off the air at the next rebuild.
ON AN ACTUAL TELEVISION
Fire TV and Android TV. One app, because Fire OS is Android.
It turns on already playing, and the only controls are the ones a television had: a dial you turn, a number you punch in, and a button that tells you what you are watching.
It does not ask the website what is on. It fetches the same lineup the browser does and runs the same arithmetic — so the set in the living room and the laptop in the next room are on the same frame of the same film.
- UP / DOWN
- channel up and down the dial
- 0 – 9
- punch in a channel number
- CENTRE
- show the channel bar
- BACK
- hide the bar, then leave
WHERE IT COMES FROM
Every frame is served by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library that has kept this material online for longer than most of the sites that link to it.
Twenty of the channels are built entirely from public domain film — old enough that copyright has lapsed, or made by the US government, which cannot hold one.
ARCHIVE.ORGTHE PAST IS ALWAYS ON.
TUNE IN