The Other Television
On September 3, 2026, OpenAI put a television on the internet: a wooden-console set with a channel control, a volume knob you turn with the mouse, a switch for the room lights, and a program guide that looks like the one that used to scroll past on cable. We had built the same television three weeks earlier — and then built the part nobody builds, the station log.
The two setsSame idea, three weeks apart
| KLVE — ours | GPT TV — theirs | |
|---|---|---|
| The set | Walnut-veneer cabinet, tin-foil antenna, aluminium feet, smoked curved CRT glass. A brushed channel dial numbered 1–12: the set is off until you turn it to 5. Tuning and volume knobs beside it, over a speaker grille. | A dark console with a channel control (up / down), a livestream button, a guide button, an AV panel whose switch turns the room lights on and off, and a rotary volume knob you drag clockwise — or nudge with the arrow keys, Home for minimum, End for maximum. |
| The guide | A listings magazine over a real station log: a grid drawn across the minutes each broadcast actually ran, the log sheet itself, and the record — totals and the code sheet. | A guide channel in the old cable idiom: red logo plate, blue field, a yellow highlight bar, a live preview window, the clock and the date across the top. Eleven numbered rows and a “Surprise me”. |
| What is on it | Whatever the transmitter carried. Council meetings, workshops, a field unit broadcasting from a phone. Mostly the tower is dark, and the log says so. | Films about the model that powers the television — an explainer, product demonstrations, a startup spotlight, ambient scenes rendered in Blender — running around the clock, delivered from Vimeo. |
| Behind the picture | Our own transmitter: a MediaMTX signal chain on our own box, RTMP and WHIP in, low-latency HLS out over ordinary HTTPS. No network, no middleman, no platform that can switch us off. | A curated Vimeo showcase, so the line-up can change without touching the site. Their build note says the console was a Figma design turned into a working television in React. |
| Who built it | One person directing an AI coding agent, over about six days. | Their own note, signed by the model, describes the site, its programming and the note itself as “a human-directed collaboration with GPT‑6 Astra in Codex.” |
The datesLogged the way we log everything else
A television station that argues about who was first had better be able to produce the log. Here is ours, in the format this guide uses for everything else — entry, time, and what went out. Times are Mountain, the station's own clock; the hashes are commits in this project's repository.
| No. | Date / time on | Entry | Record |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | 12 Aug 2026 · 23:04 | KLVE signs on. A self-hosted transmitter at /news — our own
signal chain, no platform between the station and the viewer. |
ad4442d4 |
| 02 | 12 Aug 2026 · 23:42 | The set gets its cabinet. The viewer is rebuilt as a 1970s television: veneer, antenna, curved glass — and the manual controls. The channel dial is the power switch. Turn it to 5 or nothing happens. | a9c5d52d |
| 03 | 12 Aug 2026 · 23:51 | Fidelity pass against the supplied style guide: finer veneer grain, a full-diameter dial lever, a sheet-frame page border. | ceb2ca73 |
| 04 | 13 Aug 2026 · 07:07 | The dial stops being set dressing and becomes a real tuner: extra channels enter the viewer's config, and the knob cycles through them. | 655ca855 |
| 05 | 14 Aug 2026 · 19:05 | Perfect World TV — the Apple TV edition of the station, native tvOS,
with the install page at /tv. |
766bdb16 |
| 06 | 18 Aug 2026 · 18:27 | The TV GUIDE is published at /tv-guide:
listings grid, log sheet, the record, and the whole book as a spreadsheet. |
release/20260818-1827-tvguide |
| — | 3 Sep 2026 | OpenAI announces GPT‑6 Astra. openai.com/gpt-tv is that
launch's microsite: the console, the channel control, the volume knob,
the room lights, and the program guide. |
See the note below |
On dating their page honestly. It carries no publication date of its own. What can be shown: it is the GPT‑6 Astra launch microsite — it says “powered by GPT‑6 Astra”, it links to that announcement, and its channel line-up is that launch's films — and GPT‑6 Astra was announced on 3 September 2026 (CNBC and Forbes that day, Al Jazeera the next). The search index we consulted reported the page as updated about six days before we read it. We could not confirm a first capture, in either direction: the Internet Archive was returning “temporarily offline” on the day we checked, and there are no captures of the URL in its index. So: on or about 3 September 2026, and we will correct this line if a firmer date turns up.
The gap, stated plainly. Our set with its manual controls predates theirs by 22 days. Our program guide predates theirs by 16 days. Neither of us invented the television; both of us were copying 1970s furniture, which is the point.
The real differenceTheir guide lists channels. Ours lists minutes.
This is the part worth caring about, and it is not the woodgrain.
Their guide is a menu. Eleven numbered rows under today's date, each one a film you can start now, with no times, no durations and no end. It is a lovely piece of work and it is not a record of anything: nothing on it can be wrong, because nothing on it is a claim about the past.
Ours is a station log — the document a broadcaster keeps because somebody may one day ask what it actually put on the air. Every line carries an entry number for the station day, the time on, the time off, the duration to the minute, a program-type code, an origination code, where the picture came from, where the unit was standing, who paid for it, and who was operating. The word in the sponsor column is usually SUSTAINING — the trade's own term for a program nobody paid for, which is the honest label for nearly everything we broadcast.
A program guide tells you what you may watch. A station log tells you what already went out. Only one of them can be checked, and only one of them can be wrong.
That is why the log is downloadable as a spreadsheet, why a corrected line keeps what it used to say, and why the first four lines of our public log are visibly slate tests rather than broadcasts. A record you can quietly tidy is not a record. The tidying, when it happens, will be a correction with its own timestamp.
The load traceWhat each television does to your browser
Both sets were opened in the same browser, in the same session, minutes apart on 10 September 2026, with nothing clicked but the guide button. These are the requests each page made and the state each page left behind. We read request URLs, cookies and local storage; we did not open anybody's payloads.
| Measured | KLVE — ours | GPT TV — theirs |
|---|---|---|
| Requests | 28 on the set, 24 on the guide | 190 |
| Hosts contacted | One. everythingisperfect.org, and nothing else. | Eight. openai.com, cdn.openai.com, chatgpt.com, ab.chatgpt.com, images.ctfassets.net, player.vimeo.com, cloudflareinsights.com, static.cloudflareinsights.com. |
| Cookies set | pw_in — one, ours, and it only marks that you came in through the front door. | Seven: a device id (oai-did), country, locale, a Datadog session id — and three consent cookies (analytics_consent, marketing_consent, personalized_marketing_consent) which all already read agreed, with no banner shown or clicked. |
| Left in local storage | Three keys, all interface state: which modules you visited, and whether the now-playing dock is tucked away. | Five: four belonging to a feature-flag service (a stable id, a session id and its cached evaluations) plus a recorded GPU performance profile. |
| Telemetry | One first-party beacon of ours. It stores no IP addresses. | A first-party-proxied Datadog stream — 14 beacons while we sat on the page, and still counting — plus a speed-insights script and a Cloudflare beacon. |
| Third-party video | None while the set is off. Power it on and one Vimeo frame loads: the station's own donation spot, once per power cycle. | Vimeo carries the programming. |
Fair reading of that table: theirs is a marketing site for the world's most watched software launch and ours is a town television station, and those jobs have genuinely different budgets. The consent line is still the one worth keeping. On ours there is nothing to consent to, which is a design decision and not a compliment we are paying ourselves — it is why the table has one host in it.
The uncomfortable partBoth televisions were built by someone talking to a model
Theirs says so, in a note on the set: a Figma design became a working television in React; an image model refined the console artwork; scripts built 3D scenes and rendered the ambient films in Blender; the finished films were curated in Vimeo so the line-up could change without the site. The note reports that about 98% of its input tokens came from cache — an engineer's brag, in a museum placard.
Ours was built the same way. D supplied a television style guide as a picture; the cabinet, the dial, the knobs and the grille were built against it in a single night, and the guide six days later against the format of a real station log. The commits above name the agent as co-author, because it was one.
So the difference is not the tooling and it was never going to be. Both of us pointed the same kind of machine at the same piece of nostalgic furniture. One of us pointed it at a launch, and the television plays films about the model that built it. The other pointed it at a town, and the television plays a council meeting — and then writes down that it did.
Where this standsHonest
- The set is live at /news, dial and knobs and all, since 12 August 2026
- The guide is live at /tv-guide since 18 August 2026, tag release/20260818-1827-tvguide
- Perfect World TV, the living-room edition, since 14 August 2026 — the Apple TV app
- Every line of the log is written at sign-off from the station's own broadcast records, and corrections keep the old values
- Their launch date is inferred, not stated — the page carries no date and the Internet Archive was offline when we checked
- Our tower is dark between broadcasts. The log is short because the station is small, and it would be dishonest to pad it
- The first four lines of the public log are zero-duration slate tests, not broadcasts. There is no delete here by design; the correction is the station's to make, on the record
- Our Apple TV app is unsigned and cannot be installed from a link — tvOS has no sideloading, and the page says so
SourcesRead them yourself
- OpenAI, GPT‑TV — the television itself, read 10 September 2026: controls, program guide, and the “How it was built” note quoted above.
- OpenAI, GPT‑6 Astra: A new generation of intelligence — the announcement the television was built for.
- CNBC, OpenAI announces rollout of GPT‑6 Astra, 3 September 2026.
- Forbes, OpenAI launches GPT‑6 Astra after a curious false start, 3 September 2026.
- Al Jazeera, OpenAI unveils GPT‑6 Astra amid rising scrutiny and safety concerns, 4 September 2026.
- Ours: this project's commit record — ad4442d4, a9c5d52d, ceb2ca73, 655ca855, 766bdb16, 026e3fce — and the release tag release/20260818-1827-tvguide.
Quotation on this page is primary-source only and kept short; everything else is described in our own words. No artwork, mark or layout of theirs is reproduced here.