Channel Zero

34 films — 5 h 26 min of them — running continuously as a simulated broadcast channel. Between programmes there is a couple of seconds of tracking static and a station ident, and then the next thing starts. There is no play button, no menu and no queue, because a channel does not have those. There is only what is on.

The point of it is the arriving. A playlist starts when you press start, which means it is about you. A broadcast is indifferent: it was running before you got here and it carries on after you leave, and the small pleasure of switching a television on is finding out what you have walked in on.

Everybody is on the same frame. What airs is a pure function of the UTC clock, the channel and the seed — there is no server deciding, no database and no session. Two screens on opposite sides of the world, switched on four hours apart, are showing the same second of the same film. Reloading the page does not restart anything; it rejoins.

Time is cut into rounds. A round plays every film on the channel exactly once, each followed by a 6.5-second junction — static, then the ident card naming what is next. Because a round is a permutation of a fixed set, every round is the same length, and that is what makes “what is on right now” a piece of arithmetic rather than a walk from the beginning of time.

Each round’s running order is a deterministic shuffle of (seed, channel, round number). Same inputs, same order, on every device, forever — but a different order next round, so the channel is not a five-hour tape loop. On all, the blocks are interleaved rather than shuffled flat: a cartoon, then a factory, then a scare film, rather than forty minutes of one and forty of another.

Any set of blocks can be a channel, not just the named ones: blocks=cartoons,ephemera is an ad-hoc channel that interleaves exactly those two and is scheduled like any other. What matters is that the set is the identity — the order you type it in, the case, and repeats make no difference, so everyone who asks for the same blocks is on the same frame. A set of one block, or of all four, is not a new channel at all: it is cartoons, or it is all, down to the second.

Everything hangs off a fixed instant in UTC. Time zones, daylight saving and the viewer’s locale are not inputs to the schedule, so they cannot pull two screens apart. The clock in the corner is local; the broadcast is not.

When a film will not play — a file 404s, a storage node stops sending — the display does not sit on a black rectangle for the remaining eleven minutes. It steps the schedule forward to the next programme, notes the failure for half an hour, and falls back into step with everyone else as soon as the wall clock overtakes the broken slot. If nothing at all can be fetched it says so, on a card, rather than going dark.

Booleans accept on/1/true/yes/show and off/0/false/no/none/hide. Anything unparseable is ignored rather than fatal — a mistyped parameter on a wall screen shows television, not a stack trace.