FreeTV started in 2024 as a simple vanilla Javascript app to play videos hosted on the Internet Archive. It has since evolved into an open-source platform for curating, publishing, browsing, and watching hand-picked television shows and movies. The project includes a web-based Viewer (front-end) for watching content and a graphical Admin Dashboard (back-end) for organizing and publishing it.
The most obvious question that I get is: "Can't I just watch these videos on the Internet Archive site?" The answer is, of course, yes! The Internet Archive has a customized version of JW Player that works great for watching videos.The problem is that the Internet Archive hosts over 17+ million video files. Their entire catalog is over 200+ Petabytes in size! Petabytes. That's 200+ million gigabytes.
The hardest part of watching video on the Internet Archive is finding it. They host everything from high-quality DVD rips shared by the the studios to homemade camcorder stuff from individuals. They have small preview clips and entire collections. They have content in all languages. You could spend hours searching and previewing clips to find high-quality content to watch.
This is where FreeTV comes in. We sift through the vast collection of content on the Internet Archive and organize it into playlists and categories. We skip the poor-quality copies, the 20 second clips, and the Russian-language versions. Most of the titles in FreeTV are complete collections which include all episodes of a show. There are also full-length movies available to watch on FreeTV. The files are also available for download directly from the Internet Archive.
FreeTV evolved from plain vanilla Javascript in version 1.0 to a Preact user interface with PHP API in version 2.0. Version 3.0 was a complete refactor of the back-end Admin Dashboard. It went from reading/writing JSON files to using a MariaDB. Version 3 also introduced a new publishing pipeline and tooling to orchestrate the various repositories of code. The front-end Viewer is currently being refactored to be smaller, lighter, and faster with a new custom video player which uses HTML5 video.
The future of FreeTV is moving it from a personal project that I host and maintain to an app that anyone can host on their own server with a customized Viewer of their own.This will allow people to curate their own collection(s) of videos from the Internet Archive and provide their audience with a customized viewer experience.
Check Out FreeTV:
- Watch online for free: https://freetv.today
- Github project: https://github.com/freetv-today
