About TIMESURF.TV

Last updated: June 2026

What it is

TIMESURF.TV is a one-person project that tries to recreate the feeling of channel-surfing through a television from a specific year. Pick any year from 1960 to 2020, choose what kinds of clips you want to see (TV, movies, commercials, music videos, sports, or news), and the site shuffles through real clips of the era as if you were flipping channels on a CRT.

The goal isn't a search engine or an archive. The goal is the strange, unplanned pleasure of catching the middle of a show you'd forgotten existed, or a commercial that defined a year you'd half-remembered. The interface is deliberately spare: a TV, a year slider, and a few buttons. No infinite feed. No recommendation algorithm trying to maximize watch time. No account, no login, no profile.

How it works

Every clip on the site is an embed of a video that already exists publicly on YouTube. The site doesn't host or re-upload any video. When you switch channels, the player loads a different YouTube embed from a curated list for the year you're surfing.

Under the hood there is a single YouTube IFrame player on screen. When you flip the channel, the app leans on the CRT mask, static, and transition timing to hide the fact that a fresh YouTube embed is loading, rather than keeping multiple hidden players alive in memory.

The CRT effects are all rendered in the browser. The scanlines and glow live in CSS. The static between channels is drawn on a canvas using random pixel noise generated each frame. The channel-change snap, the power-on thunk, the soft hum behind the picture, and the VHS tracking blip are all synthesized in real time with the Web Audio API. No MP3 files. No external sound library.

If a clip turns out to be unembeddable (the channel that owns it blocked embedding, or the video was pulled), the player notices and skips to the next one. Bad video IDs are remembered for the rest of the session so you don't bounce into the same dead clip twice.

How clips get picked

The clip list for each year is hand-assembled. The point of the site is to feel like you stumbled into a live broadcast from the era, not into a 2020s YouTube list video about the era. To keep that feeling intact, several kinds of clips are filtered out before they ever reach the player.

• No compilations, montages, or supercuts. Single clips only.
• No reaction videos, reviews, or commentary tracks over old footage.
• No "Top 10," "Greatest," "Best of the 90s" style countdowns. Those are retrospectives, not broadcasts.
• No lyric videos. If the era used a real music video, that's the one that plays.
• No hashtag titles (anything with #TBT, #nba, and so on). Hashtags didn't exist on TV.
• No vertical phone footage. The aspect ratio is wrong for a CRT.
• Clip content has to match the year it's filed under. A song from 1992 doesn't go in the 1991 list, even if it's close.

Categories are kept deliberately small: movies (which also covers TV shows), commercials, games, news, sports, and music. Filters in the settings panel let you turn any of those off so you can surf an all-commercial channel, an all-music-video channel, or any other slice.

Where the clips come from

Clips are sourced from public YouTube videos uploaded by broadcasters, archivists, fan-archive channels, news organizations, music labels, and independent uploaders. The site links to those videos through the standard YouTube embed. Copyright stays with the original rights holders. If you are a rights holder and would like a clip removed, contact the address at the bottom of this page and it will be pulled.

Who runs it

TIMESURF.TV is built and maintained by a single independent developer. It's a side project, not a company. There is no team. There is no funding round. Feedback, bug reports, broken clips, suggested additions, and takedown requests can all go to hello@timesurf.tv.

FAQ

Why is there no algorithm picking what plays next?

Because the site is trying to feel like a TV, not a feed. A real TV doesn't know what you want. That's the point. The shuffle is weighted slightly by what you've saved before, but there's no profile and no behavioral model. Flipping the channel is supposed to be a small surprise, not a calculated recommendation.

Why did a clip skip past before I could see it?

Almost always because the channel that owns the video blocked it from being embedded elsewhere. The player catches the error and moves on to the next channel automatically. Common offenders are official league channels (NFL, FIFA) and Vevo. The site avoids adding clips from those sources, but YouTube changes embed permissions over time and some clips slip through.

How do I suggest a clip?

Email the YouTube link and the year it belongs in to hello@timesurf.tv. If it passes the filter rules above and the embed works, it gets added.

Why these specific years?

Coverage runs from 1960 to 2020. 1960 is roughly when broadcast television had enough surviving archival footage on YouTube to fill a channel with real clips instead of stills. The range stops at 2020 to keep the focus on the era of cable, broadcast, and pre-TikTok streaming. The endpoints will move outward as more archive footage gets uploaded and curated.

Does it work on my phone?

Yes. The site is built mobile-first. On a phone you can swipe up or down to change channels and swipe left or right to change category. Saved clips, settings, and rankings all live in your browser's local storage. There is no account.

Why isn't there sound at first?

Browsers block autoplaying audio until you tap the screen. The opening tap-to-start prompt is the moment the audio context unlocks. After that the channel sounds, hum, and clip audio all work normally.

Privacy and terms

Short version: the site doesn't run its own database of user information. Your settings, saved clips, and rankings live in your own browser's local storage. The longer explanations live on the Privacy and Terms pages.