Updates

Real commercials in the breaks.

2026-11-02

Twelve channels now fill the gap between programmes with commercial reels taped off the air, picked to match the decade of the tapes around them. A channel showing films from 1958 shows adverts from 1958.

They are whole reels rather than single spots, because that is what survives: somebody recorded an entire commercial break, or spliced an evening of them together, and those are the tapes that got digitised. 772 hours of the network's break time now carries them.

The station card still comes up at the end of every break, the way an ident always did before the programme started.

Every channel has more than one thing to say.

2026-11-02

Sixteen channels carried exactly one station card, which meant one line between every programme, all day, forever. They have four each now, and there are twenty-four network cards every channel can draw on as well.

The channel's own cards stay in front: about three breaks in five show something only that channel would say.

A re-cut channel reaches the air in about ten seconds.

2026-11-02

Changing what a channel plays used to mean publishing the whole website, which is slow enough that it did not happen often. The schedule now ships on its own.

This is invisible if everything is working. It matters when something is wrong: a channel airing a tape that has gone, or a seasonal cut still running after the season has closed, can be fixed and on the air the same minute instead of the next time there is an appetite for a full deploy.

The television apps read the same schedule directly, so they are corrected at the same moment without an update.

Every channel on the dial has a schedule.

2026-10-31

Forty-three channels were shuffled loops: they played their library in a scrambled order and whatever was on at nine o'clock on a Tuesday was an accident. They are now dayparted weekly grids or clock-locked reels, so a programme is at the same time on the same day every week.

Every channel on the network repeats at the same time of day. Six of them did before.

Start times are the ones a station would have printed — on the hour, the half, the quarter — rather than wherever the previous tape happened to finish.

The dial on a television.

2026-10-30

A Fire TV and Android TV app, verified against real hardware: the set and a laptop in the next room named the same programme at the same position on the same second.

The controls are the ones a television had. Up and down the dial, digits to punch in a channel number, and the centre button to ask what you are watching.

It does not ask the website what is on. It reads the same schedule and does the same arithmetic the browser does, which is why the two agree without either of them coordinating.

The search the channels are built from started lying.

2026-10-30

The Internet Archive endpoint used to fill the channels began ignoring the query and returning the same alphabetical slice of the whole archive for every search, with a plausible-looking total each time. A build against that would have filled all fifty-one channels with arbitrary tapes and reported nothing wrong, because every filter downstream was doing its job on the wrong input.

The build moved to an endpoint that was verified to still filter correctly, and it now refuses to run if a search comes back unfiltered. Worth writing down because nothing was broken on screen and nothing would have been, until everything was.