Channel Zero

A channel that was already running when you walked in. Hours of verified public-domain film — cartoons, industrial reels, educational shorts, ephemera — scheduled as a pure function of the clock. Everyone watching is at the same frame at the same moment, and restarting the container does not restart the broadcast: it kept going without you, which is what a channel does.

Live demo →Setup Put it on a screen

Channel Zero program panel: a black-and-white 1940s industrial film playing with CRT scanlines, a channel indicator, and an on-screen program lower third. — ProgrammeCRT treatment, lower third, channel indicator.

Channel Zero test-card ident: a phosphor-green Channel Zero bullseye graphic shown between programs with the next film's title. — IdentBetween programmes, with what is next.

Where the films come from

Every item is individually verified public domain and streamed straight from the archive to your browser. Nothing is rehosted and no video passes through the display’s own server.

Where it runs

Self-hosted, read-only container, no database and no volumes. The schedule is derived from the clock, so there is no state to keep and nothing to back up.

What it wants

A screen in the corner of a room, muted. It is the closest thing here to television, and it is designed to be ignored for hours at a time.

Setup

Put Channel Zero on a screen.

A browser is genuinely enough — Plash and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.

Any screen

nothing to install

Open the display in whatever browser the screen already has.
Go full screen: F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.
Or give it a browser of its own, which is what a dedicated panel wants: chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.
Turn off display sleep in the machine’s power settings and walk away.

Mac desktop

via Plash

Install Plash from the Mac App Store — it renders any web page as your desktop wallpaper.
Menu bar icon → Open URL… and paste the display’s address.
Leave Browsing Mode off so clicks pass through to your desktop as normal.
Plash reloads on wake, so it recovers on its own after sleep.

sindresorhus.com/plash →

Wall tablet

via Fully Kiosk

On any Android tablet, install Fully Kiosk Browser.
Settings → Web Content → Start URL: the display’s address.
Under Device Management, keep the screen on and set a dim schedule so it isn’t glaring at 3am.
Turn on Start on Boot so a power blip brings the display back by itself.

fully-kiosk.com →

Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.

Configuration

URL parameters.

Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at zero.livingkiosk.com/setup.

Parameter	Default	Meaning
`channel`	all	`cartoons`, `industrial`, `educational`, or `ephemera`. `all` interleaves the blocks.
`blocks`	—	An ad-hoc channel: a comma-separated set of blocks, e.g. `blocks=cartoons,ephemera`. Wins over `channel`.
`crt`	full	`off` → `low` → `full`: how much picture-tube treatment.
`bug`	on	The station mark in the top corner.
`sound`	off	Starts muted regardless — browsers refuse audio without a gesture.
`info`	on	The corner status line: what’s on, time left, what’s next.
`seed`	ch0	An alternate schedule universe — same films, different running order.
`dim`	0	Black scrim over everything, `0` to `0.8` (fleet-wide convention).

Channel Zero is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command — the repositories go public at launch.