Cable TV for two kids.
No algorithm.

Channels instead of a feed.

Two open-source projects and a control room.

1. The libraryJellyfin holds every show and film, the kid accounts and the apps on the TVs.
2. The channelsTunarr turns the library into live channels with a real guide that Jellyfin can tune.
3. The control roomOur own small app decides what plays where: half-hour blocks, an “up next” card before each new show, breaks filled with old commercials.
4. The yesNew shows land in a shared folder, and a parent approves them on a phone, behind a PIN.

Free, legal, and checked title by title.

Most “free” video online is free to stream, not free to keep. So the box only gets things that are actually free to copy: films from 1930 or earlier, later films whose copyright was never renewed (with a source for each title), US government films, items the Prelinger Archives itself marks public domain, Creative Commons work from the people who made it, and free stock footage. Nothing pulled from YouTube.

Three research sweeps by a team of AI agents, 18 lanes in all, went through archives like the Internet Archive, NASA, NOAA, the National Park Service, the National Archives, the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons. Every item came back with its real file size, the evidence for its rights, and a kid check. The kid check flags the things old film is full of: racist caricatures, wartime propaganda, smoking played for laughs.

The result was a shelf of 1,863 items. I picked what I wanted on a checklist page. The box downloaded the picks overnight straight from the archives, checked every file’s size, and put them on the right channels by itself.

• An uploader saying “public domain” is not evidence. It has to come from a real source for that title.
• No old TV broadcasts taped by fans. Those were broadcast, not given away.
• Every size comes from the real file, so the space budget is honest.
• Short clips are stitched into themed reels of up to 25 minutes, so a 20-second clip never gets its own “up next” card.
• If the family doesn’t like it on the TV, it comes off, and nothing gets deleted: it moves to a rejected folder. So far that’s two shorts with a hiss or a buzz, two Dutch films, four recipe videos in Chinese, a cooking reel with a segment in German, and a 1926 German film that turned up in the breaks.

It should feel like real TV.

Is the TV OK? Ask the phone.

Until now, every problem started the same way: I saw something wrong on the TV and asked Claude to go look. That’s no good when my wife is the one holding the remote. So the control room got a Checkup tab that answers three questions: is the whole box OK, is this one channel OK, and is this one show OK.

The checks give the same answer every time for the same box. The box check looks at the apps, the video chip, the disk, the schedules, the guide, every file the next few hours need, and recent errors, in about two seconds. A channel check can tune the channel in for real and time how long the picture takes. A show check can have the box play a few seconds of it and listen for silence. A sweep of all 690 titles takes about a minute and a half.

Where a fix is safe, it’s a button: restart a stuck channel, refresh the guide, rebuild a channel, take a show off the TV. Restarting the apps, the VPN or the whole box goes through a small helper with a fixed list of jobs, so the page never gets more power than it needs. Every 30 minutes the box checks itself, and the only thing it fixes on its own is an empty guide.

The phone app

On my phone, and nobody else’s.

The control room installs on my phone like a regular app. It only answers over my own private network, at home or away, behind the parent PIN.

What broke, and what fixed it.

• The box wouldn’t boot from the stick. The refurbished PC shipped with USB booting turned off. One setting.
• Setting the parent PIN erased a key. Setup saved Jellyfin’s access key, then the running app saved its own older copy over it, so no channels could build. The installer now restarts the app after setup.
• The video chip sat idle. Tunarr was told to use it, looked for its driver in a folder that doesn’t exist, and quietly fell back to the processor: about 290% of it for one channel. After the fix, under 20%.
• The VPN knocked the box off my remote network. Its routing rules jumped ahead of the remote-access rules. Two rules put them back in order, and setup now checks for them.
• The guide said “No program data available.” I saw it on the TV. Jellyfin had saved an empty copy of the guide during setup and kept reusing it. The control room now clears that copy before every refresh.
• Four downloads got the wrong file. The research had given a few different videos the same ID. The size check caught all four before anything bad landed, and IDs are unique now.
• Twenty-one reels stopped partway through. They mix old standard-definition clips with HD ones, and the two label their colors differently. When the label changed in the middle of a reel, the video chip’s converter gave up. Now every clip gets the same label when a reel is made, and the 21 old reels were fixed in place.
• Silent shows on channels with sound. A sound check on every title found the quiet ones. 122 moved to Screensaver, and 7 silent commercials came out of the breaks.
• A batch of fixes never saved. The script that moved those silent shows ended before the control room wrote its changes to disk, so the shows quietly came back. A second AI agent caught it while writing the operations guide. Now every change is saved on purpose and read back.
• The tuner can’t read our PBS station. Our local PBS station switched to the newer broadcast standard, ATSC 3.0, in 2023. The tuner I bought only reads the older one, and the research that picked it missed the switch. So the first scan found zero channels, even though the antenna was catching the station: plugging it in took the signal reading on the station’s channel from about 30% to about 75%. There’s no such thing as a digital antenna, so the rabbit ears stay. The tuner goes back for a model that reads both standards.

This part fills in as it ships.

1. November 9Two clips from Family TV.

   A real Saturday Morning handoff from the card and chime to the opening of a film, plus a demo of the guide and the Wiggle Room station ID.

2. November 1The antenna, the wrong tuner and a phone app.

   The antenna and the tuner arrived. Rabbit ears on top of a curtain rod upstairs, arms all the way out, and the scan found nothing. Moving it, unplugging things, even holding it outside the window: still nothing. Our PBS station had switched broadcast standards, and the tuner can’t read the new one, so it goes back. The same day, the Checkup went on my phone as an app.

3. October 31A checkup for the whole box.

   My wife and I needed a way to check on the TV without me asking Claude every time. Claude and a team of AI agents built the Checkup: a check for the box, one for any channel and one for any show, plus safe fix buttons. Building it turned up the silent shows and the reels that stopped partway.

4. October 31Breaks, a quiet channel and a first look.

   The new commercials and station breaks went on the air, along with the Screensaver channel and redrawn “up next” cards. Then I showed my 9-year-old how to pick a show, and we pulled the first ones that didn’t belong. A plan for live PBS over an antenna, too.

5. October 30Install day.

   Ubuntu on the box, two typed lines, and eight channels on the air by the afternoon. The VPN went on, two more research sweeps ran (the second one just for commercials and breaks), and the box downloaded about a thousand picks overnight.

6. October 28The first shelf, and our own guide.

   Five research lanes built a 362-item shelf of public domain film. The cable-style guide got built the same day.

7. October 25The box arrives.

   A refurbished HP mini PC, $257.

8. October 21The software, before the hardware.

   The control room, the installer and a test setup on my laptop, all built before the box was even ordered.

9. October 20The real plan.

   A questions form: what’s allowed, what’s not, which TVs, what “done” looks like. Our answers changed the plan, starting with a library far smaller than the first guess.

10. August 14The idea.

    A note about a kids’ cable network. Codex sketched an architecture, and in October it sized up the hardware.

Checks are not kids.

The original record was assembled from the project plan, the install logs, the research sweeps and the box’s own build logs through November 1, 2026. The November 9 entry adds the two public video clips shown here. The dated build log separates those additions from the earlier install and test results. Built by Mark Salisbury with AI collaborators: Codex sketched the first plan and sized up the hardware. Claude planned the build, wrote the control room, the installer and the Checkup, ran the install, and ran the research sweeps with a team of Claude agents. Claude also picked the first tuner, the one that’s going back.

Public record revised November 10, 2026. Application and device checks retain the dates, builds and conditions described in this record.