Show HN: TV Explorer. Adding advanced UI to free online TV

This is great! I like it a lot better than tv.garden

Two issues i had:

1. Closed captions didnt work on firefox (windows) - the menu did appear where im suppposed to be able to select a cc option but i cant actually click on any of them

2. Closed captions did work on chrome (windows) but i could only just barely click the menu icon; putting the mouse over most of the menu buttons caused them to disappear, so i had to click the very lowest part of the button

but otherwise terrific, especially if this is updating from github live as you say; lots of channels were dead on tv.garden (maybe its different now - i dont actually watch tv that often unless an event is going on like moon landing or something)

This is awesome! We need more projects like this!

I'm sitting here watching music videos from Mongolia, having a legitimately cool digital experience. It just _feels_ different, like I'm a kid in the 90's scanning cable channels, finding whatever's interesting. Roulette-like, but with results filtered by what different cultures find generally acceptable. Very early-internet vibes on this, but with modern quality and presentation.

I love it. I have no reason to love it. But I do. And that's the best part.

I built this app for myself after being disappointed with the options for viewing IPTV online. Thousands of global channels broadcast their streams but there's no great way to find, filter, save, and share them.

Since it was launched during the war, comparing news broadcasts from different countries and perspectives became the number one use case. But not far behind was language learning, something I used TV for as a kid when I was an exchange student to Spain.

Several technical challenges had to be overcome to make this work:

- How to get channel data and keep it updated?

- How to handle geoblocking or off-air channels?

- How would users save channels and share them with friends or across devices?

- Could you operate your living room TV with your phone as a remote?

I'm pleased to say that TV Explorer addresses all of these issues, and lots of other ones like different devices sizes and orientations, browsers, and user preferences. To connect a user across all the apps developed with my platform, called Watson, TVE uses common authentication and user login for all Watson apps -- itself a challenge to develop and implement.

Here's how those things were handled:

- Channels are loaded live from a public repo on git, maintained by an established community.

- A graceful scanning interface detects dead or blocked channels and keeps their status for users.

- Deep linking (with screenshots on mobile!) encourage viral sharing.

- Yes, you can! I call it the $1,000 remote. TVE acts like a search and channel changer for your living room set.

I'd love to hear what you think... and what challenges you've had deploying your side projects!