Also, people knew what was on TV before they turned it on.

People bought TV Guide magazine, which was pages and pages of listings, or looked at the TV page in the newspaper.

You also generally had the airtimes for your favorite shows memorized (I bet a lot of people who were alive in the '90s could still tell you when, e.g., Seinfeld, ER, The Simpsons, and The X-Files were on and on what channel number).

Yeah, I grew up on a rural OTA antenna with one clear channel and two dodgy ones.

The live experience was better for zoning out. That’s about it. You had no choice.

Today I can spend 20 minutes just browsing and never settle on anything. I’m never able to just zone out.

Well, I was born in black and white. As a lad in the UK in the '70s, we had three channels on the goggle box - BBC1 and 2 and ITV, which was regional. If you lived in the right place you could get two ITV regions equally badly. You tuned the TV with a rotary knob.

Viewing figures for some programmes were staggering due to the obvious reason - little choice. For example I seem to recall that some episodes of say Neighbours (Australian soap), had more viewers in the UK than the entire population of Australia! The marriage of Charlene (Kylie M) and that blonde bloke (Jason D) was one.

These sorts of things are fun projects, and I appreciate the effort that goes into them. But running my own media server with 4K mkv files I can browse and play on an OLED TV is light years ahead of what I had in the 90s, and I love it.

Certainly as an adult I was never really a channel surfer I had a lot of programs I wanted to watch and if I cared enough I would set the VCR once those were available.

Isn't this just Pluto TV? Like, https://pluto.tv/us/live-tv/633354b63df9700007f6a1b7 is the sitcom channel, https://pluto.tv/us/live-tv/66ba495ffe11e5000881f049/details is the channel of just Cheers and Frasier, etc. Just playing non-stop through one episode after another on a schedule as quasi-"live" TV.

Netflix wants you to watch their own shows, not TV from the 90s that they have to pay licensing fees for.

On the radio side, XM radio has a lot of channels like this. A 70s channel, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 10s, etc.

A lot of black-market IPTV services (the kind with "30 000" channels") will have dedicated channels. A Simpsons channel, etc. where you just get whatever episode it's currently playing.

youtubeTV in my area has a Portlandia channel, non-stop on a loop. Always thought it was strange that was the only marathon channel.

It is nice not to have to pick an episode.

Plenty of other services do this. Plex has a whole cable-style directory of “live” shows

I think they had this feature at some point. It randomly selected something to watch, with a skip to next button.

WatchSeinfeld dot net, works on my TV browser.

Sometimes TikTok live streams are like that. Not always, but at certain times of day, there's a huge variety. For me, I interact with it like an old television. Just flipping channels. Not knowing what I'll get and not seeking out specific live streams. At 3 AM my time, I stumble across weirdness and it feels like my childhood watching random stuff on cable.

Take a look at archive.org’s video section.

Yep you’re right. The author does not need any conversion, only the correct adapter to drive a TV from the era.

> And "Stargate SG-1" was on cable.

Not in 'Rest of World'. It was on Channel 4 in the UK, over-the-air.

Yup, and it was only on in the 90s for a few years. More of a 2000s show than 90s IMO.

I had zero when I moved into my current house in the mid 90s until I was able to get cable maybe a couple years later. (And now I have zero live channels again since I cut the cord.)

Probably looking for https://www.retrojunk.com/ then, or https://www.clipland.com/

I showed an old Dr Pepper commercial (one of the singing/dancing crowd ones), to a kid and she loved it compared to those of today.

https://youtu.be/TEy_1dvBFYE