TV Garden

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reception & experience

  • Many find the site “magical”: fast, simple, and reminiscent of channel-surfing via big satellite dishes in the 80s/90s.
  • People enjoy “dropping in” on everyday TV worldwide (news, ads, soap operas, kids’ shows), often in languages they don’t speak, as a window into other cultures.
  • Several mention its value for language practice and for comparing international news coverage.

Legal, licensing, and longevity concerns

  • Strong worry that it’s “too cool to be legal” and may be short‑lived.
  • Discussion references UK court rulings that restricted Radio Garden/TuneIn for copyright reasons and predicts similar risk for TV Garden.
  • Distinction is drawn between:
    • Sites that rebroadcast signals (clearly illegal without rights).
    • TV Garden, which links to streams provided by broadcasters themselves; geoblocking suggests intent when they care.
  • Some argue that unrestricted channels are effectively public; others say “public” is fuzzy and courts may disagree.

Nature of the streams & content issues

  • Many channels are public HLS/OTT streams or YouTube/FAST channels; some may be “unintended” public endpoints or vendor rebroadcasts.
  • Users note missing or geofenced major networks; others see fee-based or NSFW content that likely wasn’t meant to be globally discoverable.
  • Porn/erotic content exists on some late‑night feeds, raising concerns for children; project notes say NSFW is meant to be removed.

Technical and economic points

  • Site is praised for snappiness; YouTube‑backed feeds are notably more robust than many direct streams.
  • Questions raised about bandwidth cost; consensus is broadcasters either don’t notice or don’t care at this scale, and many streams are already public for domestic use.
  • Brief side discussion on multicast vs unicast and CDNs explains why internet TV is mostly unicast despite IP multicast capabilities.

Requested features & quirks

  • Desired features: login/favorites (workaround via browser bookmarks), popularity-based sorting, better labeling/filtering of YouTube/FAST channels.
  • Some UI bugs and missing countries/contested borders are noted.