What this is

Five channels of British television from the 1990s and early 2000s, on air around the clock. You don't choose what plays: you tune in and catch whatever is on, at the same moment as everyone else watching that channel, the way television used to work. There's no account, nothing to pay and nothing to sign up for.

Channels 1 to 5 are numbered like the old terrestrial channels. Channel 3 and Channel 4 have ad breaks, made from adverts recorded at the time; the others link programmes with their own continuity, and Channel 5 is the children's channel, on in the day and closed at night.

Whose programmes these are

Not ours. Every programme, film and advert plays straight from the Internet Archive, the non-profit library that has kept this material when nothing else did. Rewind TV stores no video of its own: your browser plays the Archive's own copy. Under every programme there's an archive.org link to its page there, so you can see who recorded and uploaded it.

That means watching here uses the Archive's bandwidth, exactly as watching on their site would, and they run on donations. If you enjoy something here, please give them something back.

Rewind TV isn't affiliated with the Internet Archive, and they haven't endorsed it. The credit belongs to them, and to everyone who once pressed record on a VCR and, years later, took the trouble to upload the tape.

Programme summaries come from Wikipedia and TVmaze, credited where they appear.

If a programme shouldn't be here

Recordings are sometimes taken down from the Archive, and each update of the catalogue checks every link. Anything that won't play shows the test card for its slot and is tried again a couple of minutes later. If you uploaded a recording or hold the rights to one, the Archive explains how to ask for it to be removed; once it's gone from there, it drops off Rewind TV's schedule at the next update.

Each channel

The biggest shows on each channel

Finding the programmes

• Popular shows first. The programme list starts from Wikipedia's British television series of the 1960s to 2000s, keeping those on air between 1990 and 2005 (1984 for children's), ranked by how much their articles are still read today. Each show's infobox says which channel it was on.
• Uploads named after them. The Archive is searched for each show by name. An upload has to start with the show's name, be in English and British, and not be a clip, trailer, reunion, dub or another country's version.
• Whole runs. A show that started in the era keeps every series, later ones too. One that started earlier but was still on in the 1990s is shown from its very first series up to 2005.
• Off-air tapes. Recordings of an evening's television, adverts and continuity and all, are sorted by the channel they were taped from, using the uploader's description and timestamps to list what's on them.
• Films. English-language films from 1960 to 2005, each channel with its own kind: dramas on 1, comedies and family films on 2, action and adventure on 3, thrillers and horror on 4, animation and family films on 5.

Running order

• Every show loops on its own. Episodes go out in order, series one first. When a show reaches the end of its run it starts again from the beginning while longer runs carry on, so nothing is cut short.
• Fair shares. Each show gets airtime in proportion to the size of its run, but no more than of a channel, so a show with hundreds of episodes can't take over. No show goes out more than times a day, or again within hours, while anything else suits.
• The loop. Each channel's schedule is long enough for its biggest run to be seen through once (up to days), then repeats. Everyone watching works out the same moment from the clock, so it's live without a server.
• A film roughly every hours: one or two a day.
• The news, every now and then. Every day or two, in the early evening, a bulletin from a random day of the era: the Six O'Clock News, News at Ten, Newsround and the rest, not in any order. A look back at what was news one day in 1997.

Time of day

Programmes go out at the times they suit, judged from their Wikipedia summary (or a tape's title):

Times are UK winter time; in summer everything runs an hour earlier on the clock.

Keeping it suitable

• Watershed. Films with nudity wait until 21:00 (strong content until 23:00), and so do horror films.
• Children's channel. Channel 5 shows no film with nudity, and nothing that's also a drama, crime, horror, thriller, war or romance film.
• Era-matched breaks. Ad breaks are picked from adverts recorded closest in year (and ITV region) to the programme they sit in. Films on 3 and 4 are split into parts with breaks, with "End of part one" captions, as they were shown; the BBC ran them straight through.