Pet project YTCH turns YouTube content into a vintage TV experience

We’ve always called YouTubers’ accounts channels, but what if YouTube‘s viewing experience actually mimicked what it was like to turn your TV on in the 80s? Before DirecTV, before TiVo–just a handful of channels and whatever was on them.

That’s what new website YTCH is doing.

First spotted by Dexerto, the site is a pet project from single developer Hadi Safa, and offers 17 channels that load up YouTube content at random. Viewers go to https://ytch.xyz and pick the niche they want to watch: Channel 1, for example, is Science and Technology, Channel 3 is Food, Channel 9 is Autos and Vehicles, and Channel 13 is Gaming. Those channels play through a predetermined set of videos on a schedule, just like a traditional TV network. Viewers can’t scroll through videos (or anything else; the videos are full-screen and there’s no comment sections) or pause them.

YTCH doesn’t link directly to videos, but does include each video’s watch ID in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, so a viewer just has to copy that ID and paste it in after youtube.com/watch?v= to find it on YouTube.

The one thing that is

different from the TV of old is that YTCH doesn’t have commercials. That means none of YouTube’s regular ads run alongside this content, so we are concerned creators aren’t being compensated for the views YTCH generates.

Safa posted about this project on Y Combinator’s forums, and the lack of ads was a major discussion point among respondents, with some theorizing YouTube’s overabundance of ads and constant cracking down on ad-blockers is a way for it to funnel people into Premium subscriptions.

We have mixed feelings. Yes, an overabundance of ads is annoying and part of what’s driving people away from traditional TV and over to digital content in the first place, but also YouTube pays out millions upon millions of dollars in ad revenue to creators who earn their livings from content.

While creators’ earnings is a concern, YTCH is still an interesting project, straddling the line between the format of TV networks and the content of YouTube. YouTube’s shaped itself up to be a competitor for mainstream TV for years now, and is constantly hyping up how much TV watch time it generates. Maybe the enthusiasm for YTCH is a sign that digital natives’ nostalgia plays a part in that living room viewership.