Rabbit Ears

The problem

Streaming apps are built to keep you scrolling: endless rows, autoplay, one more episode. I wanted my kids to watch the way I did in the 90s. You switch on, something good is already playing, short public-service ads remind you to brush your teeth, and at bedtime the channel signs off.

What I built

• A 3D television and cable box built entirely from CSS gradients: a VHF channel dial with detents, a volume knob, a power button that collapses the picture to a dot, rocker switches and a red seven-segment readout. The sounds are synthesised in Web Audio, not recorded.
• Eleven channels (Gentle TV, Faith & Wisdom, Curious Minds, Creation & Nature and more) drawn from a 150-show catalogue I matched to TMDB and IMDb, each with its own ident I designed.
• A scrolling TV guide channel, a channel list, closed captions, a full-screen mode and a phone layout where the cable box becomes the remote.
• Wisdom breaks: vintage PSAs and classic commercials, levelled to the same loudness as the shows, plus my own poster-style PSAs for things I couldn't find.
• Parental controls: a profile per child with age-based defaults, channels, ratings, hidden shows, wake time, bedtime and a daily limit, all behind a parent PIN.

Engineering decisions

• A schedule with no database. Each channel's weekly grid is built deterministically from its show list, so every screen computes the same thing at the same second. Weekdays share a strip, weekends get Saturday-morning blocks, every show airs weekly, and each airing advances one episode. Tests check three weeks of every channel for gaps and episode order.
• Static is the loading state. Tuning shows static and hiss while the player loads and seeks to the live position, then re-checks the offset against the server's clock right before playing, so screens never drift apart.
• Slots fill like a broadcast block: short cartoons play back to back, and if an episode can't be served the next playable one takes its place instead of a stand-by screen.
• My home media server stays private. The app talks to it through a three-endpoint contract (episodes, stream, subtitles) via a server-side proxy with range requests, so its address and token never reach a browser.
• Captions cached forever per episode. Missing subtitles are fetched once from OpenSubtitles under a daily quota with back-off, and the vintage ads are captioned locally with Whisper.
• One design system for everything. The review page and the app share the same tokens, components and controller, so changing a knob in the design system changes it on the TV.

Results

Runs at home on our TV, laptops and phones. The kids can tell you what's on at four o'clock.