This web app turns YouTube into a retro cable TV experience

YouTube is known for its endless scrolling and algorithm-driven suggestions. Now, a new web app is changing things up by bringing back something many haven’t seen in years: channel surfing.

Developer Steven Irby created Channel Surfer to turn your busy YouTube subscription feed into a cable TV-style guide. Instead of searching, scrolling, or relying on algorithms, the app makes YouTube feel more like late ’90s cable TV. That old-school approach could actually make finding new videos enjoyable again.

You flip through channels just like with a cable remote. When you pick a channel, you join whatever video is playing, even if it’s halfway done. This brings back the feeling of stumbling onto a show in progress and deciding if you want to keep watching.

At launch, the app offers about 40 curated channels. These cover news, sports, music, gaming, and tech topics like AI, machine learning, coding, space, and retro tech.

There’s also a programming guide that shows what’s coming up next on each channel. You can scroll through about 24 hours of upcoming content, similar to the electronic guides used by cable TV.

The idea for Channel Surfer comes from something many people know well: decision fatigue. Irby told TechCrunch that he built it because always picking what to watch on YouTube can get tiring. Instead, Channel Surfer lets you just tune in and see what’s playing, bringing back the easy browsing of traditional TV.

The app has a small viewer counter that shows how many people are watching at once, adding a subtle sense of shared viewing. Behind the scenes, the project is designed to be lightweight. The site runs as a static Next.js app on Cloudflare and uses PartyKit for real-time features. There’s no full backend yet, and the lineup comes from Irby’s own list of YouTube channels and music playlists.

Even with the retro interface, the videos are still standard YouTube embeds, ads included. This helps keep everything within YouTube’s platform rules.

Channel Surfer isn’t just limited to the developer’s chosen channels. If you subscribe to Irby’s newsletter, you can import your own YouTube subscriptions. The process is a bit scrappy: drag a bookmarklet to your browser, open your YouTube subscriptions page, and paste the exported data into Channel Surfer. After you import your subscriptions, your favorite creators appear as channels in the guide along with the built-in options.

Initially, the platform gives you access to about 175 YouTube channels and 25 music playlists, all arranged into TV-style categories.

Even though it’s a small side project, Channel Surfer is already drawing attention. Irby says the site had over 10,000 visits on its first day online.

Right now, Channel Surfer works best on a desktop browser, but it also runs on phones and tablets. Irby says he hopes to bring the idea to smart TV platforms like Fire TV or Google TV in the future, which would make the cable-style browsing feel even more real.