this is very clean..
hi from Pleyr, https://pleyr.net/
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
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
So the cable pirated TV to IPTV reflector streams are being re-pirated or maybe just Liberated?
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.
There’s also Radio Garden https://radio.garden/
HN brought me there over 5 years ago and I've been using it regularly ever since.
maybe we need a podcast.garden now
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.
> 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.
Skin lightening products are famous here for social status. It’s so fake.
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.
Same here. Clicked Brazil, SBT and they're showing Chaves (El Chavo del Ocho) reruns, just like they were 30 years 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.
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.
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?
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.
If they contain some entropy, i.e. if there's path/parameter based bearer token authentication, sure.
https://iptv.example.com/720p.m3u8? I doubt you'll convince many courts of that being nonpublic.
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.
Where are the pornographic channels? You know, so I can avoid them?
My children were interested in playing with it, but this was my fear. Is there actually pornography streaming on it?
The GitHub notes they were required to remove any nsfw content, or unlabeled content.
For me the site is incredibly snappy. Amazing. As in i clicked Australia, clicked ABC TV and it all loaded in milliseconds.
It's missing a few major channels, Seven and Nine afaics. Maybe they don't offer free iptv.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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Very nice!
nit: country label appears under the mouse. Edge Browser, Mac
Go to Germany, select "KIKA" and you can see the depressed bread.
For me Germany and Estland are confused de/ee !?
I have so many questions. Why is the bread depressed? Why is it in space? Why is the soundtrack so cool?
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.
One of those things that's so cool it's hard to believe it's legal
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.)
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.
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.
I've tried watching some Italian TV channels, and some content was not available for streaming. It's a common practice here. It also applies to satellite-transmitted channels, they usually don't have the license to show some movies on that version (you can only see them on the terrestrial signal).
NFL season will likely stamp out the CBS and FOX streams in the US.
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.
This is very different though: The streams are provided by the broadcasters themselves, not by somebody that receives their signal and then rebroadcasts it.
If they didn't want their content watched abroad, they would add geoblocking or authentication. Some of the ones listed on TFA actually do that for parts of their program.
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.
Wait, what? Receiving foreign web radio streams in the UK is prohibited?!
How is that even enforced?
A UK High Court ruled in 2019 that websites like TuneIn are distributing illegal music[0]. It went to appeals but the previous ruling was upheld. There hasn't been much clarification beyond that nor very clear enforcement. But the precedent this ruling set makes companies fear repercussions if they accidentally link to a stream that has content not licensed for the UK. To interpret this ruling broadly would be to break the internet[1]:
> The claimants say that a finding for the defendant will fatally undermine copyright. The defendant says that a finding for the claimants will break the internet.
As usual, this happened due to rather rabid approach to copyright by big American labels. They may be legally in the right, though their actions, as always, have meaningful negative externalities. How far they reach in this case is unclear, but TuneIn and Radio Garden both have blocked non-UK streams for UK listeners.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TuneIn#Legal_issues
[1] https://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2019/11/did-uk-judge-ju...
It is rather awkward that the US right-holders chose to sue TuneIn in the UK, rather than US radio broadcasters that stream online without appropriate licenses. However, TuneIn was profiting from the premium subscriptions relating to content they knew didn't pass muster legally, and their service foundational was based on such content. There are certainly many things to be said about it. But unfortunately the debate is already settled by the appeals court in the UK.
Overall, the UK TuneIn service was valuable to the public. And it is an example of such value being destroyed by copyright laws. This is yet another topic that many people have said much on.
Crazy that I can change channels on this faster than on youtube tv
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.
This is awesome. If the site owner is reading this, favorites would be cool.
As someone mentioned, each channel has it's own unique URL. Create a Bookmarks / Favorites folder in your browser of choice and just add.
How to select Hong Kong?
There are some conspicuous erasures of countries on the data used to make this map.
I was really hoping to catch up on Real Housewives of Vatican City
and Survivor Palau. I noticed New Zealand was missing and Island, Cyprus had no Türkiye on it, Gaza was part of Israel, etcetc
It's cool, but are you not worried about a huge lawsuit from rebroadcasting copyrighted content without a licence?
TIL There’s a Mr. Beast channel in the US
Is there? Or is that just his Youtube channel on a loop?
Thanks to this website I learned that ABC 25 Waco TV (KXXV) has some incredibly good interlude music.
Wonderful! Works surprisingly well!
Just a great project!
We've got -- nothing better to do! Than watch TV! And have a couple of brews!
Love it
Cool project. Unfortunately I get infinite spinners on all non-Youtube videos in Firefox. Works in Chrome.
Works for me in Firefox!
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Yeah, these FTA channels are fair from representative. Get a UK VPN and try https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer instead!
Definitely going to be biased toward content that has a streaming URL.