I’m a sucker for nostalgia, so when I stumbled across a Reddit post about Splunkr, a streaming service that clearly aims to recreate the vibe of old-school cable TV, I couldn’t help but check it out. An entirely free app that streams content I watched as a kid is right up my alley.
It’s kind of like Coax, an Apple TV app I covered a few months ago that turns your Plex library into a personal live TV service, or similar apps like QuasiTV (which I also covered) or EratzTV, only it’s already curated, features just 34 channels, and consists entirely of content from the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library of content known for hosting content no other platform would.
When you click a channel, the player links directly to its source on the Internet Archive, which are mostly VCR-recorded VHS tapes uploaded directly to the nonprofit digital library. Someone had to press record on a VCR all those years ago, record a now-ancient TV show or movie, and then upload it to The Internet Archive for it to be part of Spelunkr’s library.
Because it sources its retro content this way, a Spelunkr channel or content on that channel sometimes goes down when the Internet Archive removes a file, but the dead programming usually isn’t around for long. Splunkr uses Claude to check each tape file in its library every week, so when one goes down, another quickly takes its place.
Users can also report dead programming on the streaming platform’s Discord. Spelunker’s creator says rights holders can request that their content be removed from Spelunker, but as a legal smokescreen, the app also emphasizes that it doesn’t control the content the Internet Archive hosts.
What’s actually hosted by Spelunkr is the cool-looking digital cable retro guide that looks like it was pulled right out of the late 1990s, along with the “short breaks” between TV shows, which usually consist of a few…