Channel Surfer
Watch YouTube like it’s cable TV
Details
- External ID
- 47336100
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Channel Surfer
- Website domain
- channelsurfer.tv
- Launched
- March 11, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 604
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.998769987699877
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I know, it's a very first-world problem. But in my house, we have a hard time deciding what to watch. Too many options!So I made this to recreate Cable TV for YouTube. I made it so it runs in the browser. Quickly import your subscriptions in the browser via a bookmarklet. No accounts, no sign-ins. Just quickly import your data locally.
Enrichment
- Theme
- media discovery and streaming tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- youtube interface like cable tv
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a straightforward frontend application that parses YouTube channel exports via a bookmarklet and controls a YouTube iframe embed player.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ytch.tv, freetvz.com, tv.garden, The Trees Network
Concerns raised: Google might not like scraping their product / legal issues, Shorts still appear despite recommendations being off, Missing VCR functionality
Feature requests: Community channels / live chat features, Android TV app / sideloadable version on GitHub, Channels curated by specific creators to filter quality content, Cast to TV with sponsors blocked
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 151 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #1 of 152 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 82 days after the earliest competitor.
- MyTube · ph · 2026-09-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Channel Timeline Viewer · ph · 2026-09-23 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Turn your favorite YouTube channels into a streaming experience · hn · 2026-04-13 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- YouTube Transcript Tool · ph · 2026-03-26 · 202 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- netflix-tube · github · 2026-09-09 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Loopcast · ph · 2026-09-22 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- URL2Vid · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Framecast — Turn Any Website Into Video · ph · 2026-09-23 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.