Dear Subscriber,

This is a YouTube scheduler in an '80s costume, built by a weird Gen Xer with too much time on his hands.

That's the whole thing. Twenty-some channels run on a clock. You don't pick a program, you land on one, the same one everybody else on this channel is watching at this minute, commercials at the act breaks and all. There's a guide on channel 1 that crawls too slowly on purpose. There's a newspaper. Channel 69 is scrambled and will stay that way.

Nothing is hosted here

Every picture on this set is YouTube's own player, playing a video that lives on YouTube, uploaded by whoever uploaded it, with their ads and their view count. We don't copy, store, or serve a single frame. We keep a schedule. If a video disappears from YouTube it disappears from the schedule the next night. If you own something you see here and would rather it not be scheduled, say so and it's gone.

What we keep on your device

The breaks between programs are ours, generated from real 1980s spots, and they are part of the fun. The commercials that play before a program are YouTube's, on videos whose owners have monetised them; a YouTube Premium subscription removes those. We earn nothing for saying so, and the set works the same either way. Channel 99 says this too.

The volume. Whether you zoomed. Which wall the contrast knob put behind the set. The channel you were last on, so the set comes back to it. A counter for the pledge break. A random account number for your cable bill, and whether you marked it paid. The channel you were on when the set updated itself between programs (this tab only, thrown away the moment it is read). One mark that says you have tuned this set to a channel before, so the welcome card and the long warm-up happen on a new set only. If someone gave you a code for a channel, which listing it opened, so the channel is still open next time. That's the list, and it lives in your browser, not on any server of ours, because there is no server of ours. What we count about how the set gets used, and everyone else on the line, is in the notice to subscribers. The weather channel never asks your browser where you are: eleven towns we picked take turns, and once a rotation the cable company cuts in a local forecast for wherever your connection appears to be, the way it did in 1985. Nothing about that is kept.

Why it exists

Because somebody wondered how hard it would be to watch old music videos in a shell that looked like the console TV in his dad's basement. The answer turned out to be "about three days and then it got out of hand." Public access has its own channel now. There is a weather scan. The Community Bulletin Board is generated from word math and is not to be trusted.

Credits, such as they are

• The picture: YouTube's embedded player, exactly as YouTube publishes it.
• The weather: the National Weather Service's public forecast, courtesy of your tax dollars.
• The set: an idealized version of a real kit built by the site owner's dad, back when there were four stations and TVs weighed 4,000 pounds.
• The listings, the bulletins, and the movies on channel 69: generated, deterministic, and identical on every set.
• The news on channel 37: written for this set from the dated record of 1987, one headline at a time, each checked against its source. The Dow's closes are the record; the dollar, oil, interest rates and what things cost are the Federal Reserve's and the Bureau of Labor Statistics' public figures.
• Baseball scores on channel 37: The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at "www.retrosheet.org".
• Football and basketball scores on channel 37: FiveThirtyEight, under CC BY 4.0. Hockey scores: the league's public score feed. The No. 1s and the fall 1987 schedule: Wikipedia's lists for the year.

Yours in basketweave,
The Cable Office