I built this app for myself after being disappointed with the options for viewing IPTV online. Thousands of global channels broadcast their streams but there's no great way to find, filter, save, and share them.

Since it was launched during the war, comparing news broadcasts from different countries and perspectives became the number one use case. But not far behind was language learning, something I used TV for as a kid when I was an exchange student to Spain.

Several technical challenges had to be overcome to make this work:

- How to get channel data and keep it updated?

- How to handle geoblocking or off-air channels?

- How would users save channels and share them with friends or across devices?

- Could you operate your living room TV with your phone as a remote?

I'm pleased to say that TV Explorer addresses all of these issues, and lots of other ones like different devices sizes and orientations, browsers, and user preferences. To connect a user across all the apps developed with my platform, called Watson, TVE uses common authentication and user login for all Watson apps -- itself a challenge to develop and implement.

Here's how those things were handled:

- Channels are loaded live from a public repo on git, maintained by an established community.

- A graceful scanning interface detects dead or blocked channels and keeps their status for users.

- Deep linking (with screenshots on mobile!) encourage viral sharing.

- Yes, you can! I call it the $1,000 remote. TVE acts like a search and channel changer for your living room set.

I'd love to hear what you think... and what challenges you've had deploying your side projects!