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Welcome to the myChan.tv Beta! This post is to introduce new users to the Beta version of myChan.tv and to explain to you the basics of how to use the site.

What is it, what’s it for?

As a YouTube watcher, and a creator myself, I love to watch YouTube subscriptions, and use them to support other creators and keep up with my friends and favorite channels. The challenge is that YouTube subscriptions often become unwieldy after you subscribe to more than a few hundred channels, and it can be difficult to sift through the feed to find the content you want to find. myChan.tv aims to make it easy to organize your subscriptions to make it easy to find the content you want to watch, and to allow you to curate automated, always-fresh bundles of channels you can watch to easily keep up.

If you like to watch content that you subscribe to, myChan.tv is the best way to watch YouTube.

How to log in!

How do I get started?

For beta, you can log straight in with your YouTube channel. The first time you log in, myChan.tv will download all your awesome subscription channel content and load it into a subscriptions dashboard where you can easily see all your subscriptions and start to organize them.

To start organizing, click on “Add Bundle” and make the Bundles of channels you want to use to organize your favorite content. These can be anything you like, but you might like to make bundles for content based on channel theme, channels you particularly want to keep up with, or even just with a single channel. Create all the bundles you like, and start curating your bundles with the channels you want to assign to them. You can easily add and remove channels from the Subscriptions dashboard, and in the left hand menu where you can review how your bundles are looking.

Okay, and how do I watch my awesome curated bundles?

Easy, just click on the play icon beside the bundle you want to watch, and you will go to the player. In the player, it will show your selected player with a playlist of the most recent 10 videos from each channel in that bundle, organized chronologically that is newest to oldest by default. you can click on “bundles” above the video playlist to change “bundle” any time, the same way you would flipping channels on a TV. Videos play in the standard YouTube channel. If you want to know what is coming, watch it in normal mode with the playlist visible. If you want it to look like your own curated cable TV channel, just click on the standard YouTube full screen icon in the player and sit back.

Don’t forget the cool stuff!

So betas are meant to be simple and basic. But I couldn’t resist throwing in some cool features you can try. First, check out “lights on/off” mode in the top right menu. You can get a cool night mode for watching. In the subscriptions dashboard, you can filter your subscriptions using the “filter” button, where you can display channels with channel names or descriptions that contain certain keywords, like “comedy” or “Japan” for example. This makes it easier to find the channels you want to add to certain bundles. Furthermore, if you want to update your subscriptions data to reflect channels you subbed to since signing up for myChan, you can click the refresh icon to recapture your subscriptions data any time and make your newest subs available.

Finally, in the player, if you want to catch up on subs chronologically, you can reverse the playlist order and go into “binge-watch mode”. And if you want to update the playlist you are watching to capture videos uploaded up to the minute, you can manually refresh your bundle playlist anytime.

Fill Your Boots!

There’s a lot of cool stuff here. I want beta users to get stuck in, help me find the bugs to fix before full launch, and to get excited about this thing, to spread the word and help YouTube fans break free of the algorithm and find the best way to watch YouTube. Get stuck in and tell me what you love, what you’d like to see, and what needs fixing!

Hiko