Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto.
Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more.
Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University.
When I first started my career in journalism and blogging, I worked for a mainstream news publication where the TV was always on in the background, running a 24-hour news channel. While it helped the editorial team stay on top of the daily news grind, I appreciated the constant stream of information because it kept me connected to the world outside the tech industry bubble where I spend most of my time.
With that in mind, I recently decided to create a similar setup in my home office so I can better keep tabs on the news (I hear it's a dumpster fire out there). Sure, I could go to a national or local TV station's website and watch a livestream, but often I'm forced to create an account and sign in, or jump through hoops like downloading a dedicated app.
That's when I stumbled across Famelack (formerly TV Garden) in a Reddit post.
Famelack is a mostly legal, entirely free live TV directory
These channels are already available for free somewhere online
While the website's overall vibe reminds me of a pirated UFC or live sports streaming site (not that I'd ever watch something like that, of course), it's actually mostly legit to my understanding. The open-source project aggregates publicly available live TV streams from around the world. It pulls content from legitimate publicly available broadcasters, various YouTube livestreams, and IPTV directories. Many of these channels already stream online for free on different platforms, but Famelack puts them in one central place with a simple, easy-to-understand UI.
What's great is that when a stream goes offline or has an issue, Famelack pulls it down quickly. To be clear, the platform doesn't host or own any of the video content it links to. Instead, it's a directory that points you to streams already available elsewhere. This makes it vastly different from similar pirated stream-focused platforms.
Many of these are freely available OTA broadcasts or online streams you can find elsewhere, although some channels are typically associated with paid TV services, and it's not always clear whether the streams are authorized. Still, it's definitely not the same as someone ripping every episode of The Sopranos from HBO Max and streaming them on a platform called 42069b3ststreams, or something like that.
Have you ever wanted to watch the local news in Belize? Well, you can now
Welcome to worldwide live TV
Thankfully, Famelack doesn't bombard you with random torrent-site-level pop-ups. If you're seeing constant ads, you've accidentally landed on a website imitating Famelack's library (the TV Garden GitHub repository was archived back in January 2026). It's refreshing that, in this money-hungry world, Famelack is completely free of ads, as far as I can tell.
Since I'm Canadian, I typically want to watch CBC Toronto's broadcast, so I click on Canada on the spinning globe that's Famelack's interactive menu. Then I use the left-side menu to select the stream at the end of the list.
Famelack's quality isn't always the best, so if you're looking for a 4K stream, it's likely not the live TV platform for you. It might say the stream is 1080p, but the bitrate is often so low that on a large screen, everything looks potato-like (most streams let you set quality manually, thankfully). There's also a left-hand navigation menu with channel categories like Top News, Entertainment, Sports, and more, making it easy to find a specific live event if you're not sure which channel it's on.
The platform also supports picture-in-picture mode in Firefox and other browsers, letting me pop the stream out and drop it somewhere else on my two-monitor work setup. This makes low-resolution streams even less of an issue since the window size is so small. While I often see complaints that streams go down, the channels I watch have been pretty reliable, including various CBC regions, CP24, CTV, CNN, and occasionally Fox News, if I'm looking for a bit of comedic relief. Over the past few days of using Famelack, the only issue I've encountered is CNN going down a few times for a couple of minutes.
There's even a kind of fun randomizer mode that pulls up a random stream, though most of the time I can't even figure out what I'm watching. One time, a random, very odd Russian TV station appeared; another time, an entire channel dedicated to Wipeout showed up. I also sometimes take a break from work to load up a random stream from a random country, like Afghanistan's national news station.
Look, I'm not saying Famelack is a spectacular platform. It's passable at best, but for how I watch live TV — in a small window tucked into the corner of my monitor, usually on mute — it gets the job done.