Entertainment
Live television, on the car's screen
A charging stop lasts twenty minutes, sometimes forty. iCar puts a live TV player and a few games on the car's screen, so that time looks like something other than waiting in front of a gauge.
With a subscription
Hundreds of channels, nothing to install
The player is built into iCar: no app to install, no account to create, no key to type on a touchscreen. Open the tile, pick a channel, it starts. Channels are grouped by category — news, music, sport, animation — and a favourite moves to the top of the list without leaving its alphabetical place, so you still find it where you learned to look for it.
The catalogue holds several hundred freely broadcast channels from around the world. It is not limited to your country: a British news channel, a Brazilian music channel and a French local station sit in the same list.
Every stream is checked, every night
This is the invisible part, and it is what separates a list of links from a service. One channel in six stops broadcasting from one month to the next: addresses change, broadcasters close, servers go down. So iCar takes the list again every night and drops anything that would not start on a car's screen.
The check does more than confirm that an address answers. An unencrypted stream is refused, because a browser blocks mixed content. A stream that does not allow playback from another domain is refused, however well its address answers. A stream encoded in a format the car's browser cannot decode is refused, even if it plays fine on a computer. Each of these gives a black screen with no error message whatsoever; dropping them beforehand is the only way not to discover them at the wheel.
The video does not go through our servers
The car contacts the broadcaster directly. iCar relays nothing, stores nothing, re-encodes nothing: we provide the list and the player, the stream goes from the broadcaster to your screen. That is better for quality — one fewer intermediary between the source and you — and it is what makes the feature possible without charging for bandwidth.
It is also a deliberate limit: channels that refuse playback from another domain are dropped rather than relayed. They are fewer than one stream in six, and relaying them would have made iCar a rebroadcaster.
Games for charging stops
Alongside television, the Entertainment section holds games that run in the car, with nothing to install and no account. Snake is there today, with its best score kept from one game to the next: the game you start without thinking about it while the car charges.
More will come. We are looking for games that can be picked up again after an interruption rather than reflex games that punish one — you play while parked, and a charge ends when it ends.
What to know
Entertainment is part of the subscription. The rest of iCar — favourites, weather, map, destination search, the small built-in apps — stays available without it.
Video is not cut off while the car is moving: a Tesla's screen is visible from the passenger seat, and what is done with it is the driver's call. That changes nothing about the rule: watch the road, not the screen.
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