Enjoy the ASCII Theater – Stream Text-Based Movies in Your Terminal
by Alex Billington
January 31, 2024
Want to watch movies online for free? Give this fun experiment a shot! Though it may not be the usual HD experience you’re used to. MSCHF recently launched a digital ASCII Theater online. ASCII is text-based visuals and images – using symbols and letters to create designs and objects, or in this case, entire frames of a movie. This radical NYC art collective has just launched a whole new website located at ascii.theater with instructions on how to stream and watch movies on your computer. Entirely free! All you need to do is open up your terminal on Mac (or cmd.exe on PC) and drop in the short line of code they provide, and it’ll play right there in front of your eyes. Voila! There’s no sound, of course, but there are subtitles. And the quality isn’t great. And you can’t control much. But hey you can watch the whole movie anyway! This is a clever web experiment and I dig the concept, even if it isn’t really practical. Right now you can watch Barbie, though they’ll switch to Hereditary soon. As a movie geek and as a computer geek – I just think this is pretty neat.
Click on any of the images above to visit the site and get the info to start watching. Thanks to Kottke for the tip. ASCII Theater is created by MSCHF (founded in 2016 by Gabriel Whaley) – visit their official site or follow them on IG @MSCHF. MSCHF (pronounced “mischief”) is an art collective based in Brooklyn, New York. They have produced a wide range of artworks, ranging from browser plugins to sneakers, products, social media and AI generated foot photographs. This is a simple concept: “ASCII Theater plays movies as text, directly in Terminal.” That’s it. They add this message as well: “A single line of code begins playing a new movie every day, like a pirate radio broadcast. The movies are rendered not as video but as colored text characters – every frame can be copied and pasted as a giant string of letters. There is a long internet tradition of hacks to stream content online, and the resulting workarounds become creatively expressive. That kid who streamed NBA games in the reflection of his sunglasses on Twitch is a hero. ASCII Theater is now live, streaming a new movie every day until we get shut down.” Get in on this h4x0rz fun while you can.