On Thanksgiving, the Mystery Science Theater 3000 team continued a tradition that was started all the way back in the ’90s when they were on Comedy Central, that being the Turkey Day Marathon in which they showed bad movie after bad movie after bad movie, all Thanksgiving day, and linked them together with specially-created skits.

They are no longer on the air of course, in fact their last episode aired back in 1999, however the tradition lives on through YouTube! They have their own channel, and used it to air a full run of episodes, all on line, over Thanksgiving. Good times.

MST3K shreds This Island Earth

The whole time it was on, however, they kept popping up a little note saying that even when the marathon was done, it would be re-run all weekend long on something called pluto.tv. I had never heard of it, but I do love the show, so I thought I’d just keep it going, but I was impressed with what pluto.tv offered.

It turns out the site is set up to look like a cable guide you’d find on TV, with various channels in various categories such as “news,” “lifestyle,” “tech,” and “sports,” and programs you can watch in each one. They’re all YouTube feeds, it has even impacted my YouTube recommendations, but they do manage to make it look like a cable guide. It has parental controls, you can set up an account and favorite channels or set up customized lists, it will tell you new programs that are being shown, and it even has full HD channels. They have desktop apps for Windows and Mac, and a mobile app for iOS and Android.

Pluto.tv Interface

It’s not a substitute for cable if you watch a lot of TV, but if you’re a casual watcher it’s surprisingly effective. I have been using it off and on ever since Thanksgiving and can usually find something worth watching. Never mind that MST3K is on ALL THE TIME on channel 400, they have channels like “Sharks 24/7” along with cats 24/7 and dogs 24/7, “Slow TV,” which when I put it on was footage of nothing but the view out the front of a train traveling through the countryside, there’s an HD Nature channel, a headline news channel as seen in the image above, a channel that streams gameplay, tech reviews, “Nerd TV,” “Anime,” “The Yoga Channel,” “The Fail Channel,” “The DIY Channel,” and the “Guns & Explosions Channel” along with music channels and channels for kids to name just a very small few.

Slow TV

It has some DVR functionality so you can record upcoming shows but I wasn’t able to test that functionality as I don’t have an account, yet, and of course you can FF and RW. If you know other pluto.tv watchers, you can chat with them through the website as well.

As time goes on, there are more and more options for cable-cord cutters such as myself, and although it isn’t as extensive as a cable package, considering my TV watching habits it’s close enough. And really, the one thing Internet video has been missing is channel surfing, but no more!