When I'm traveling for work, one of my favorite things to do is to watch cable TV in my hotel room. Whether it's an ancient episode of Law & Order, Storage Wars, or an ironic few minutes of Fox News, there's something freeing about not being able to truly decide what's on a channel at any given time.

This often leads me to find 90s or early 2000s films I haven't seen in years or had forgotten existed, like Men in Black or Mars Attacks. In other situations, I end up watching a random cooking show or an episode of South Park from 1997 that I vaguely remember watching when I was way too young (the Mecha-Streisand reference now makes sense to me).

Sure, I can change the channel and find something else if I'm not 100% into what I'm watching, but that level of choice doesn't compare to the countless on-demand streaming apps and self-hosted options I typically have at home. There have been times when my partner and I have been scrolling through apps like Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+ looking for something to watch. We find a few worthwhile movies or TV shows, but keep scrolling, hoping to uncover something better — it's analysis paralysis at its finest.

Given I don't have cable at home and have never subscribed to it my entire adult life, I started wondering if there's a simple way to recreate the retro cable experience, but with my own curated, self-hosted Plex library? That's when I came across a cleverly named app called Coax for the Apple TV, iPhone, Mac, and Vision Pro.

So what does Coax actually do?

It turns your Plex library into a fake live TV platform

The first time I tried Coax, it felt like magic. All you need to do is download the app for the Apple TV, iPhone, or Mac, connect it to your Plex server, and a library of live television is instantly generated, complete with a retro menu and nostalgic left corner video preview.

You can also select specific folders to source content from. For example, if you want an entire channel focused on your Sailor Moon content library, pick that option within Coax's setup menu. Maybe you'd rather have a set of channels focused on your movie library because you miss the days of Saturday afternoon made-for-TV movies? You can do that too, as long as your movies are in a separate folder from all your other media.

You can also add/remove channel categories, switch between a retro and a modern theme (they both look retro to me), set rating levels, create a single channel for all your content, and more. It's pretty wild that Coax is both a set-it-and-forget-it-style client and offers significant customization if you want to tweak the experience in a specific way.

So far, I've set up a 24/7 channel dedicated entirely to the controversial Canadian dub of Sailor Moon from DiC Entertainment, and another channel on a friend's Plex server that I have access to, focused on 90s action movies. I also have one that's just my friend's entire movie library, too, and I'm thinking about creating a Ms. Rachel channel for my son at some point. I don't turn Coax on all the time, but when I'm looking for background noise while doing something else, or when my partner and I can't decide what to watch, it's a great tool for cutting down on the never-ending menu scrolling.

The experience isn't perfect

Like a lot of Apple TV apps, you'll need to pay for Coax (and it's pricey)

The most notable drawback of Coax is that it isn't free and carries a pretty steep price tag. The app offers a free one-week subscription, followed by either $3/month, $30/year, or $60/lifetime options. It's undeniably expensive, especially when there are free options on other platforms that offer similar features, and if you're paying for it on top of a Plex Pass subscription. However, given how streamlined the Coax is, I'd argue the cost is worth it.

It's worth noting that Out to Lunch Productions (digglesB), the developer behind the project, says they plan to support Coax long after its release, including better filling content gaps, adding a swift native wrapper, and more themes and visual customization. You can find the full development roadmap here.