Like others have said, ErsatzTV is no longer developed, but Tunarr picks up where it left off, including a settings import from ErsatzTV to make migrations easier.

This may be a dumb question but isn't OTA TV still basically exactly what you describe?

ErsatzTV is great for this, but it just entered maintenance mode and I don't think any forks are currently continuing the work. Still, it'll probably continue to work without issues for a long time.

I was just about to set up ErsatzTV for this exact thing, but the maintainer announced recently that he’s not updating it anymore and nobody is taking over. It’s probably fine for now, but I’m hesitant to start running it. He’s encouraging forks, but none are really the clear successor yet as far as I know. I don’t know if there’s anything else comparable.

Tunarr

Switch and Click had a video about that recently: https://youtu.be/M9qJI2u_be0

There's also pluto tv, xumo, etc that have live channels that basically run content throughout the day.

I just recently found out about FieldStation42. It takes quite a bit of configuring, but I really like the idea.

As others have said, ersatztv would be the way to go, but apparently is no longer being developed. I’m still using it, but there was a conversation a few days ago that might have some leads on good replacements: https://lemmy.ml/post/44804563

Ive tried ersatz and a couple of other things it was cool

if you're needing this channel on multiple devices at once (synced-ish) then ersatz is the way to go.. but it uses some hardware/horsepower and it bugged me seeing the metrics spin up on that server for me to wanna have some background noise

instead, i found out kodi can do smart playlists!

I have jellyfin/emby feeding several kodi installs, and made various playlists based around various rules (can be genre, folder, tags, or TV show titles etc), with one of the rules being playcount for episodes/movies being under a certain number.

added a script for starting each playlist to buttons in home assistant, and bam, poor mans channels.

when an episode gets finished, the playcount goes up, keeping us from seeing the same episodes.

i know we're getting crazy here but i even created a variable, so when the house knows i put it in "TV mode" like that, it maps my channel up and down buttons to the skip foward, skip previous buttons, making it feel more like channel surfing. which is a little much, but puts a smile on my face.

in the home assistant script, you could add a "skip 3 minutes" when "changing channels" so it feels like real TV, no need to see the first few minutes of speed! Where is Sandra Bullock!?

Jellyfin has an iptv addon you can install

Try just using digital TV. I get like 20 channels on mine with just a coax cable hooked to a VCR!