Turn any playlist into a 24/7 TV channel

When HackerTV launched on Hacker News, it collected 187 points and, more tellingly, 39 comments. The upvotes said people liked watching curated technical talks on a loop. The comments said something more useful: people were arguing about which videos belonged in the channel. That argument is the real signal. It means curation is not a solved problem handed down by one author — it is something every community wants to do for itself.

Existing tools do not serve that need. A plain YouTube playlist has no channel identity, no loop ritual, and no way to embed a shared viewing surface into a Discord server or a course page. Self-hosted media servers like Plex or Jellyfin solve the playback problem but demand a machine, storage, and patience that most community organizers do not have. Discord's built-in YouTube activity is locked inside Discord and disappears when the call ends. None of these give a small group the feeling of owning a channel that is simply always on.

The timing is right because the format has already been validated by a single Show HN post, while the tooling to reproduce it has become trivial. Public playlists are readable through a free API, browsers can play them without a backend, and a static page can be deployed in minutes. What is missing is not technology but a generator: a way for the Rust study group, the design collective, or the podcast community to spin up their own channel without writing a line of code. Channelize is that generator, and HackerTV is our first demo rather than our competitor.