About Starlite TV

Starlite TV brings back the joy of flipping channels. Eleven channels run around the clock, just like traditional television: tune in at 3:30 PM and you join whatever is already playing. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to pay.

What Starlite TV is

Starlite TV is a free website for watching classic films the way people used to watch television. Rather than a library you browse, it offers eleven channels - Adrenaline (action), Silver Screen (classic cinema), Laugh Track (comedy), Graveyard Shift (horror), Rocket Age (sci-fi), Doc Vault (documentaries), Saturday Morning (cartoons), Dusty Trails (westerns), Case Files (crime & mystery), Family Room and Space Live - each running its own 24-hour schedule with prime-time headliners every evening. Space Live (website only) carries NASA's official live streams from YouTube whenever NASA is broadcasting and archived NASA films the rest of the time; video: NASA, and NASA does not endorse Starlite TV.

The programming is drawn from more than a century of film: silent masterpieces such as Nosferatu, Metropolis and The General; early animation from Winsor McCay, Disney and the Fleischer brothers; golden-age comedies, westerns and film noir; World War II and NASA documentaries; and modern open movies from the Blender Studio. For many of the biggest titles we have written background guides covering how the film was made, who made it, why it is worth watching and why it is free to show (listed below).

How it works

• Live schedules. Each channel has a continuous programming loop. Everyone watching a channel sees the same program at the same moment.
• Classic, legal content. We only air works that are in the U.S. public domain (for example, films published before 1931, U.S. government films and films whose copyrights were never renewed) or that are released under licenses allowing commercial use. See Content & Rights.
• Free, ad-supported. Short commercial breaks and optional tips pay the bills.
• Works everywhere. Phones, tablets, computers and smart-TV web browsers. Use arrow keys or your remote's channel buttons to surf.

Silent films

Many silent-era films were shown with live music. Where a copy's soundtrack could not be verified, we mute it and play a public-domain (CC0) Chopin piano score recorded by Musopen instead.

Thanks

Videos are streamed from the Internet Archive, a non-profit library. Open movies by the Blender Foundation are used under Creative Commons Attribution licenses (credits on the Content & Rights page). Piano music: Musopen, CC0.