What do Iranians think of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli attacks? A Russian? North Koreans? You’d be lucky if a newspaper interviewed representatives of any of these countries. Tune into their TV channels, though, and they’ll provide you all of the additional perspective you could ever want.
Fortunately, there’s an extreme simple way of tuning into these foreign TV channels: Famelack, a free site that makes it extremely easy two switch countries as easy as it is to switch channels.
I stumbled on to the site by someone mentioning it in my social feeds, possibly stumbling on to the site that we wrote about just weeks ago. Whether it’s recently gone through a name change or not, however, what was once called TV.garden is now referred to as Famelack, even though the site is the same.
My colleague Dominic Bayley has referred to it as a fun distraction, a way to see what someone, say, in Angola, would watch after a long day at work. But in the recent days, I’ve found myself tuning into various TV streams around the world, just to see what they thought of our government freedoming their way into the Middle East with bombs, drones, and fighter planes.
By now, I think we all understand what’s happened to the U.S. media landscape. CBS, once the stomping grounds of legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow, has become more closely aligned with the sort of state broadcasting system Fox might like to become rather than a truly objective party. A sale to Paramount has put CNN at risk of joining them. As a sort of balance, there are left-wing news organizations like MS NOW, while the federal government’s funding cuts have gutted more neutral organizations like the Public Broadcasting Service.
Trying to develop an objective news sense, at least where politics is concerned, means sampling a bit of this and bit of that, hoping that you’ll arrive at the truth.
Famelack: free IPTV from around the world
That’s where Famelack comes in. The site is really nothing more than just a giant multicolored globe, highlighting the nations of the world. Click on one, and you’ll see a list of IPTV streams from that country. (A FAQ explains that the site is not trying to capture any streams illegally, but simply to aggregate publicly available IPTV streams from each country.) This isn’t on-demand video! You can pause a stream, but you can’t scroll back and forth.
The list is somewhat limited — you won’t be able to sneak on to ESPN, for example. But certain foreign sites stream the international versions of CNN and CNBC, which I’m often found to be much more objective and neutral in their reporting than their American counterparts.
Foundry
The sites do have ads, but only the ads that appear on the stream itself. Tune into a Swiss stream, for example, and you may see a local Geneva hotel advertising their services.
But the main appeal of Famelack is much the same as it way when I studied overseas during college: the world is obsessed with America, but don’t revere it. News programs in countries like Australia, for example, are not as afraid of calling a spade a spade as our own captive media can be. (Hi, White House press pool.)
And yes, you don’t need to know Arabic to understand what’s going on in the Middle East. Streams like Iran’s PressTV broadcast in English, with reporting from on the ground. I’m not going to contend that this reporting is objective; I have no way of knowing. But it certainly offers something that you probably won’t see anywhere else: the voices of people who are being directly affected by the conflict. Famelack allows you to click the “star” next to a stream to build a collection of favorites.
Want to watch North Korean state TV? There’s a link for that. (Pyongyang’s Internet seems to be a bit spotty, though, as the 1080i stream stuttered.)
Famelack insists that the streams are all public, so there’s no need for a VPN. Interestingly, that includes a ton of American television, which allows you to spy what viewers in San Diego might be watching on broadcast television — something to consider during Saturdays and Sundays in the fall, for example. If there’s any drawback, it’s that the streams want to stay confined to your PC, as there’s no in-app way to project to a TV. There’s no mobile app, either.
Nevertheless, Famelack is a news junkie’s dream — and a totally free service, without ads. It might have been designed as a distraction, but it’s also a surprisingly valuable news service in an increasingly fragmented world.