There's a channel at the bottom of the dial that most people scroll right past — channel zero, the one the numbers skip. It's been running the whole time; you just tuned in. A real station, broadcasting 24/7 from a machine in a house: scheduled shows, neighbourhood ads, a nightly flagship, sign-off at midnight. You didn't subscribe. You arrived.
While observing spacetime from a comfortable distance, our correspondent picked up a distress signal originating from Earth.
Naturally, they opened a wormhole and came to check on us. They study us. They don't fully understand us. But they are trying. Wearing a very convincing human skin and armed with a french baguette that is absolutely, definitely a microphone, they walk among the locals and ask the questions no one else will.
Filed nightly from a ship that is bigger on the inside, parked somewhere overhead.
Channel Z0 airs commercials from the neighbourhood: your shop, your band, your garage sale, your inexplicable hobby. Make something worth interrupting a movie for.
Every spot is screened before air and loudness-normalized — your ad will be exactly as loud as everything else, a courtesy the 20th century never gave anyone. Station reserves the right to decline anything, with love.
| LENGTH | 15 / 30 / 60 seconds, exactly |
| FILE | MP4 · H.264 video + AAC audio |
| PICTURE | Landscape 16:9 — 1080p, 720p or 480p. We downscale to the channel's 854×480 on air. |
| RIGHTS | You own everything in it — music too |
| TONE | Neighbourly. A kid might be watching. |
Half of this channel is made here: Ground Zero, Lab Hour, the Neighbourhood Desk, the sign-on and the sign-off, the idents and the intervals between programmes. The other half was fetched from the Internet Archive, and every second of it carried a public-domain licence mark before it was downloaded.
The intake tool never asks for anything else — the search itself is filtered to public-domain-marked items, so material without a mark is never even a candidate. For every file that lands, the station records the licence URL it matched and the archive.org identifier it came from, and names the file after that identifier. Anything you see on air can be traced back to the item it came from and the mark it was aired under.
A licence mark is the uploader's claim, not a legal opinion. It is the best signal the archive offers and it is the one this station acts on. If you hold rights in something we are airing, use the desk — the programme comes off the schedule while we check, not after.
If what is on air right now shouldn't be, tell the desk.
A viewer has no way to name what they are looking at, so the page does it: this goes with your message, stamped at the moment you click.
Opens your own mail app, filled in. Nothing leaves this page on its own, and the station keeps no record of you.
| OURS | Ground Zero, Lab Hour, the Desk, idents, intervals, test cards — made at the station |
| SHORTS | Prelinger Theatre, and the vintage PSAs between programmes — the Prelinger collection |
| CARTOONS | The Cartoon Block and Cartoon Carnival — archive.org animationandcartoons |
| FEATURES | Noir, sci-fi, documentary, serials, classics, cult — archive.org feature_films |
| SLOW TV | Scenic, travelogue and railway film, 1900–1985 — standing in until our own long takes exist |
| COMMERCIALS | Sent in by neighbours, who confirm they own everything in them (SEC.04) |
| THE MARK | Every fetched item matched licenseurl:(*publicdomain*), recorded per file with its archive.org id |
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