Introducing Movie Loft

I am one of those people who loved channel-surfing the cable TV guide. I would decompress with whatever happened to be on at the moment – jumping into a movie I’d seen before halfway through, or a sitcom episode of an old favorite show. When we cut the cord and got rid of cable, there wasn’t a good way to scratch that particular itch.

Switching all of my viewing habits over to streamers meant that I was faced with “The Tyranny of Choice”, which says:

“Americans today choose among more options in more parts of life than has ever been possible before. To an extent, it is only logical to think that if some choice is good, more is better. Yet recent research strongly suggests that, psychologically, this assumption is wrong. Although some choice is undoubtedly better than none, more is not always better than less.”

That was written in 2004, and we have significantly more choice available to us now in 2026 than ever before.

Basically, I have almost all of the streamers available to me. I pay for the ad-free options, because I can’t stand sitting through commercials anymore. I’ve also built up my Apple TV library to own most every movie that I love, plus seasons upon seasons of TV shows. With the streaming landscape constantly changing, I want to retain access to the movies and shows that I love, without having to maintain a physical media library.

Now the trouble that I have is picking what to watch when I just want to decompress for 20-45 minutes. I don't necessarily want to engage with a show on my To Watch list, or start a new movie that I know I'm not going to sit all the way through.

While there are services and apps that can support the cable guide experience that I miss for channel surfing, every option had at least one fatal flaw for my purposes and preferences:

• We subscribe to YouTube TV, primarily for live sports, which is effectively basic cable. And that means it comes with all the commercials. Sure, I can click into A Few Good Men to watch the last act, but I’m going to be subjected to commercials.
• Same thing for other free services like Tubi or Pluto TV. I don’t want my episode of Seinfeld to be interrupted like it was back in the 90s.
• Apps that serve up your Plex (or Jellyfin or Emby) library, like Coax, seem like they’d be perfect for my needs... if my library were in Plex (or Jellyfin or Emby), instead of Apple TV. The only way I'd be able to use something like Coax would involve me using less-than-legal means to port media from Apple TV to another solution. That’s not what I want to dabble in at this point in my life.

So when I’d read about Coax via a recent post on Lex On Tech, I had the idea that I could build something for my specific needs.

I use Claude Code quite a bit at work and at home for a variety of projects. And I’d already used Claude to read my Apple TV library for my movies, as an experiment a couple of months back. The first part of the solution was already built. That brought me to a few more questions:

1. Could I expand the use case to my TV shows in my Apple TV library, instead of just my movies?
2. Could I create an app that would mimic the old cable guide, giving me something similar to Coax, but able to work with my library, without porting to Plex or similar?
3. Could I hook that app up to the two Apple TV devices in my house?
4. Could I join a movie or show “in progress”, rather than always starting from the beginning?

The answers to all four questions were “yes”! Pretty obvious, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this whole post about it...

That led to one more question:

5. Could I share out the code and configuration instructions, so that anyone else in my particular niche would be able to run it themselves?

And, yes, obviously the answer to that fifth question was also “yes”!

That’s where Movie Loft came from – my Apple TV library, with a channel guide.

From the Movie Loft page:

You own hundreds of movies and thousands of TV episodes in the Apple TV app, and every night you scroll past all of them looking for something to watch. Movie Loft turns that library back into something you browse the way you used to browse a video store, and into something you can just turn on the way you used to turn on cable.

The name Movie Loft is inspired by the neighborhood video rental store where I worked all throughout high school, my first job. I loved working in that store -- working with customers to find the right film for their evening enjoyment, keeping the shelves in order, even selling the lottery tickets and scratch cards that otherwise seemed out of place. I gobbled up as many after-school, weekend, and summer hours working there as I could, dismayed that I wasn’t allowed to work more hours until I turned 16.

I’ve been using Movie Loft for the last several days, picking up the last 45 minutes of Rounders, or “the Catalina Wine Mixer” scenes of Step Brothers, or the middle third of The Fellowship of the Ring in time to see the nine companions form the Fellowship and then battle goblins and the Balrog in the Mines of Moria.

I’ve posted all the product details about Movie Loft here, and the code is up on GitHub for people to try out themselves. It does require a lot of configuration and prerequisites, so it won’t be for the faint of heart.

If Movie Loft is something you’re interested in trying, and you have the setup requirements, I’d love to hear about it, either here in the comments or via the GitHub repo.

Happy channel surfing!