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TV Garden

tv.garden

789 pointsvkdelta126 comments

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've not looked at it in a few months but fairly sure its not pirated, its just online streams of FTA channels. All the UK ones for example are are just the UK's free to air broadcasters and someones figured out the urls to the feeds they use on their websites and apps.

Lots of the US and CA ones look to be the same sort of situation. You'll find most wont work without a VPN as they are geo blocked.

Free to air in UK does not mean free to the whole world. For example BBC/Channel 4/Channel 5 are geofenced to UK only.

Yup thats why I mentioned that, and the vpn.

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.

I had something similar a few years ago. I ended up having to write a little script to pull out just the channels I wanted as nothing could handle the 18 thousand stream options it provided (total insanity that its bundled up into 1 file like that in the first place but seems to be the norm for dodgy IPTV providers).

Nowadays theres better tools for the job. StreamMaster* for example can handle thousands of IPTV sources and let you organise them nicely into something that can be read by Plex, Jellyfin, etc.

*Sadly recently abandoned but still available on github.

Thanks for the rabbit hole, and making me realize I need one.

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.

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.

"Station Unavailable

Users in the United Kingdom are restricted from tuning in to stations outside of the UK for an indefinite period due to copyright and neighboring rights related matters that require clarification.

Stations situated in the UK continue to be available.

For more information please read the statement in the 'Settings' section."

tv.garden might witness similar issues :/

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

maybe we need a podcast.garden now

Most [public] podcasts are registered in Apple's podcast registry, which is what most podcast apps with a global search/discovery feature queries, and why these apps can all turn up the same podcasts. There are also things like https://podbay.fm that put give it a more general web frontend.

I suppose that the not public podcasts could be aggregated somewhere, but I'm less of a fan of that, and there's also some technical reasons why this would be more difficult than it was to aggregate these IPTV HLS streams.

Being able to view them by country or whatever is interesting, though I think perhaps less so for podcasts than something like live news, but not a bad idea

You may find the Podcast Index [1] project interesting, it tries to create an open index of all podcasts, and currently has 4.5M podcasts. It has a downloadable sqlite database and an API.

[1] https://podcastindex.org/

Haha, the most recently uploaded/indexed "episodes" of a "podcast" on this site are individual songs from what looks like a podcast feed of a radio show. Just kind of funny

Very cool project

They seem to use this monetization "system"/philosophy: https://value4value.info

..which is yet again something I find both interesting and kind of funny (that they have "standardized" the philosophy of "pay what you want")

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.

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.

I made some mix tapes a couple years ago for my wife (Filipino) with some of her favorite Filipino artists. I searched for radio bumpers and commercials from the stations we used to hear on the radio and in taxis to put in-between every couple songs as if it were a radio station it was so much fun and made her feel like home, reminded me of my years spent there too!

> 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.

Nope, a couple of Pride Bar commercials one for Safe Guard and a couple of laundry detergent ones.

I agree the skin lightening soap was weird for me too. Its kind of interesting how people yearn for what they don't have (pale light skin women in the west tanning, tan darker skinned women in the east lightening...)

Skin lightening products are famous here for social status. It’s so fake.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

I think a number of these are also public rebroadcasts piggybacking off a less-public source.

Definitely a lot of these are also [re]broadcasts from vendors, probably for a specific platform or distribution target, that people found the URLs for and that the original source isn't super aware of the details of

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?

I came across erotic films in a Swiss channel, so yes. The catch is that they probably were streaming it at 3 a.m. in the night but i watched it at 7 p.m across the ocean

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.

Most of these are being "offered" in a way not intended or desired by the broadcaster

So let's link it to a site that can ddos sites, and probably has employees of media companies in it!

I'm all for sharing, but I was hoping this bit of awesome joy would not be linked here.

I wonder if OP heard about it from the NA podcast or from someone who does listen to it. It was mentioned last week Thursday to the tune of a million people, so, I guess "yes".

Oh the irony of wanting such a site to exist but to keep it a bit of a secret.

There are a zillion streams on this site, so unclear if enough additional traffic will be going to any particular one of them to be noticed by the sources. Certainly some number of media company employees will be aware of it due to it hitting HN, but I have my doubts that there are many media employees who read HN who didn't already know these things existed and/or would do anything about it

the odd thing, i suppose, is i probably won't use the site as i don't watch broadcast TV at all; but just for research, testing / using / tuning speech to text (translate and transcribe,) and comparing coverage of news stories it is invaluable. It would be awful if it had to shut down because it was linked on a VC forum where people often defend IP.

> I wonder if OP heard about it from the NA podcast

What podcast do you mean?

here's the cite:

https://noagenda.clipgenie.com/content/34613737-6134-3364-66...

Thanks for the link.

On a related note, that's a pretty neat site for podcasts.

I vaguely remember that John C. Dvorak had a podcast, but I honestly had forgotten about him since the TechTV/ZDTV days. Though I may not always agree with him, I've always appreciated his point of view and personality.

In the world of tech journalism, he's one of the best.

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.

"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".

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

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.

1 month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43205563

"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."

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

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.

> however you can't do multicast over the internet

Some parts of the internet do actually support multicast. The BBC did IPTV via multicast to subscribers in the UK for a while.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast

> 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.

They aren't making money from this, but they are likely operating at a scale where they either don't notice if 1000 nerds on the internet are piggybacking their feeds, or don't care all that much.

It is not likely useful to them in negotiating ad rates, at least not with how advertising is usually bought/sold, because the broadcaster has almost no information (if any) about anyone watching these streams, including if it's even a person. It's possible they could fold it into a more general ad package that places a lot of weight on total view/viewers numbers, but that is a lot less common these days, and when it is done, the rates tend to be much lower

Yea I meant it is an argument they can use but not a good metric at all. I agree that mostly they just do not care. This tool only means that they'll get more international views from curious people but in the end it means nothing.

It doesn't even really mean that, the ones that care are already geofiltered. Most of these feeds only work in their country of origin.

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

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...

Wow, truly bizarre.

And TuneIn and Radio Garden don't even host any streams, to my knowledge; they're mere directories!

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.

> Overall, the UK TuneIn service was valuable to the public.

I agree about stream directory services in general, but I'm a bit on the fence about TuneIn in particular.

It started out very useful, especially as the de facto backbone for Google Home devices – I believe they back or at least used to back "Hey Google, play <station name>".

But lately they started playing "pre-roll ads", and I think lately even playing ads over the live content, and I'm not entirely sure if they even share the revenue of those, or of premium subscriptions that avoid ads, with the underlying radio stations.

They did not.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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).

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

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

It's both. It's a FAST channel being used by I think Pluto.TV and Roku to give them another "live 24/7" "channel" for their catalogs, but underneath is just looping playlist of YouTube content.

That's actually what a huge number of the channels on this site are, and I do wish they were labeled and filterable that way.

Heck yeah, they have ReBoot:

https://tv.garden/us/qRH5QbLVuLvQQR

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.

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!

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

So, all China and India for 16 pages?

I was thinking within a country. But sure, that would make more sense than only alphabetical sorting for the global listings as well. Hadn't even noticed those.

If you wanted -- and you had the data, which you probably don't -- you could make the sorting criteria the share of viewers (ie. percentage as opposed to absolute numbers), that way countries with unusually large audiences wouldn't always appear at the top. Though that comes with its own issues.

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.

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

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.

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.

How to select Hong Kong?

https://tv.garden/hk

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works for me in Firefox!

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

Checks his own country: "No channels available."

Damn, even Afghanistan has a dozen available.

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

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

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

Very nice!

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

Wonderful! Works surprisingly well!

Just a great project!

this is very clean..

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

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

Love it

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