Introduction
What Airwave is, why it exists, and how these docs are organized.
You know the feeling — you turn on the TV, something's already playing, and you drop into a movie halfway through instead of staring at a catalog deciding what to watch. Airwave brings that back, built from media you already own.
Airwave is a self-hostable service that turns your Plex library into custom, always-on live-TV channels — a real channel guide, DVR, and bumpers — streamed straight from your own Plex to native apps on LG webOS, Apple TV, iPad, Android TV, Fire TV, and Roku, plus any browser. It's free and self-hosted: you run the server, and there's no subscription.
Make a 90s-sitcom channel, a Saturday-morning-cartoons channel, a kids' channel, or one that quietly marathons a favorite show — from practically any mix of genre, year, network, cast, rating, collection, or playlist. Airwave turns that into a continuous schedule and presents it through a proper 10-foot guide.
What makes it different
- You join what's airing. Tune in and you land on whatever's on now, at the point it would actually be — not the start of a file. Everyone watching a channel sees the same thing at the same moment.
- Live, but with a DVR. Scrub back through programs that already aired, restart what's on, or jump to an earlier episode. The only thing you can't do is seek ahead of live.
- The channels belong to your server, not a device. The server owns the lineup, schedules, packages, users, and playback state; every app is just a client tuning into the same network. Open Airwave anywhere and you see the same channels and the same thing currently airing.
The result is discovery — you stumble onto something buried in your library and end up watching it, instead of endlessly scrolling thumbnails. For the fuller story of why Airwave exists, see About Airwave.
Start here
Quick Start
Zero to watching — connect a source, build a channel, add viewers, and tune in.
Channels
Build a channel from a filter — ordering, grouping/rotation strategies, and its schedule.
Self-hosting
Deploy the server with Docker, configure it, and keep it updated.
How these docs are organized
- Getting Started — what Airwave is, the platforms it runs on, the architecture, and how to self-host it.
- Using Airwave — the day-to-day from the admin panel: sources, channels, packages, users & access, bumpers, and settings.
- How it works — the internals: background jobs, durable workflows, and the device capability diagnostic.