Live TV Screensaver
The Live TV screensaver plays a real broadcast channel — Red Bull TV, DW English or Arabic, TRT World, or Al Jazeera Arabic — live in your browser. It's free, needs no account, and ESC exits.
How the Live TV screensaver works
The saver plays the broadcaster's own public HLS stream in a video element — no account, no tracking, nothing recorded.
Five real television channels, playing live: Red Bull TV, DW in English and Arabic, TRT World and Al Jazeera Arabic. Five, because that is what is legitimately available — of roughly twenty official streams tested, most send no CORS header, France 24 falls back to insecure http, and two more played but could not be traced to the broadcaster that publishes them. Muted by default, since every browser blocks audible autoplay.
Safari plays these streams natively. Other browsers use hls.js, which is served from this site rather than a third-party CDN, and is only downloaded when your browser actually needs it.
The badge in the corner reports what the player is really doing — LIVE, buffering, reconnecting or off air — rather than showing a decorative dot.
Streaming live television in a browser
The channels here are real broadcasters. DW, Deutsche Welle, is a German international broadcaster funded by the German federal government, TRT World is owned by TRT, Turkey’s state-owned public broadcaster, Al Jazeera is headquartered in Doha, Qatar, and Red Bull TV is owned by Red Bull GmbH, the Austrian energy-drink company, and carries sports, music and lifestyle programming. The stations’ own editors decide what airs, and this site has no control over or responsibility for the content.
The video arrives as HLS, HTTP Live Streaming, a format developed by Apple and released in 2009. The stream is split into a sequence of short file downloads listed in an .m3u8 playlist, which the player fetches one after another over ordinary HTTP. Because the player works from buffered segments, a live HLS picture runs somewhat behind the real broadcast, so it is live but not instant. Apple later added Low-Latency HLS to shorten that delay, though a broadcaster has to choose to use it.
Availability is not guaranteed. Broadcasters can move, rename or withdraw a stream, restrict it by region, or change what a channel carries at different times of day. If a channel goes blank, it is usually the source that has changed, not your device.
A worked example
Pick a channel in settings and it starts playing. Red Bull TV runs action sports, music and documentary; DW English and DW Arabic are Deutsche Welle's international services; TRT World is Türkiye's public international news in English; Al Jazeera Arabic is the Doha newsroom. Picture can letterbox or fill the screen, and sound is off until you turn it on — browsers block audible autoplay until you have interacted with the page.
Settings & tips
- Channel switches between Red Bull TV, DW English, DW Arabic, TRT World and Al Jazeera Arabic.
- Picture letterboxes the broadcast or crops it to fill your screen.
- Sound is off by default; browsers only allow audio after you have clicked the page, and it falls back to muted if blocked.
- In Multi-view the stream quality drops to match each cell, so a wall of channels does not saturate your connection.
- Press ESC to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real live TV?
- Yes — it is the broadcaster's own live stream, the same feed they publish on their website, playing in real time.
- Why only five channels?
- Most broadcasters' streams cannot be played from another website because they send no CORS header, and one still falls back to insecure http. Two more played but could not be traced to the broadcaster that publishes them, so they were left out. These five are free to air and verifiably the broadcasters' own.
- Is a key or account needed?
- No. Both channels are free to air and key-less.
- Why is there no sound?
- Browsers block video that starts playing with sound. Turn Sound on in settings after clicking the page and it will unmute.
- Why is the picture behind real time?
- HLS plays from small buffered segments downloaded over HTTP, which adds a delay behind the broadcast. That is typical of segmented streaming and not a fault; Apple’s Low-Latency HLS exists to reduce it.
- Will a stream use a lot of data?
- Yes, video is far heavier than most web pages and continues for as long as the saver runs. If your connection is metered, a long session can add up.
- Can a channel stop working?
- Yes. The saver depends on each broadcaster keeping its public stream online at the same address, and they sometimes change or restrict it.