Experience the joy of channel surfing across the decades in this fun website

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Originally published at: Experience the joy of channel surfing across the decades in this fun website | Boing Boing

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It was interesting until a Google ad banner showed up on the screen - with a fuzzy visual filter they apply to all the videos. … takes you out of the illusion. Also the higher fidelity of stereo sound and all that static between channel changes… weak.
Immersion in the illusion? Not even close.

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Watching The Partridge Family in the 1970s TV was fun.

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Watching The Partridge Family on TV in the 1970s was fun.

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That is outstanding. Flipping through the 80s, I immediately landed on a news story about acid rain. chefs kiss

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And if you’re fed up with the TV, and want to turn on the radio, we’ve got you covered as well. For the entire world.

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the 70s drama channel is pretty heavy on the Wonder Woman.

The only thing that rings false is the brief time between channels coming in. The one thing TV did far better in the analog age is that when you changed channels, you were there right away, no waiting 4 seconds for the channel to figure out what it is.

edit: also the mixing of Brit tv shows and American takes away from the effect. I never saw The Tomorrow People but there appears to be a lot of it uploaded to youtube.

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Those effects both have the same explanation. It’s streaming clips from YouTube. The delay is it loading the next clip. The content is biased by whatever happens to be on YouTube that is easily procedurally determinable to be from the correct year, and has the embeddable flag on. So someone must have uploaded a bunch of Wonder Woman and tagged it with the year in the title or other metadata.

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I checked the 2000s tv and it uses the same effect, the ‘static white noise’ effect which didn’t happen by then between channels…they should have switched to some form of ‘cable scramble’ or something else.

They do, of course, clear up the reception in the 2000s which is a nice touch. I’m glad they didn’t burden the 70s tv with realistic reception (or limited it to a really good weather day at least)

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Or maybe the solid blue that became the “no signal” in the digital era. :grin: I wonder if anyone under 40 knows what static is or why it exists.

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If they really wanted realistic 70s tv, about 3/4 of the channels would remain just static, and you’d have to keep going up to find the very few active channels

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That technology upgrade completely inverted the meaning of the first line of Neuromancer
“The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel”

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