Coming Soon: A TV Channel Just for Dogs

DirectTV is launching a new channel next month, but you are not the target demographic—your dog is. DogTV is for pooches who spend much of their day alone, inside the house while their owners are at work (someone's gotta pay for those macrobiotic doggy treats). The programming will consist of 3 to 5-minute clips of "relaxing" and "stimulating" content like landscapes and dogs running, as well as "exposure" content, which aims to acclimatize dogs to things like cars, fireworks, and thunderstorms, USA Today reports.

"As we work harder and both household members usually go out to work, dogs spend a lot more time at home," says DogTV's CEO, per Forbes. "They're very lonely, they’re bored, they suffer from separation-anxiety often and people look for solutions." To accommodate dogs' color-blind vision, the colors of the clips have been adjusted (you can see an example on YouTube). The channel took four years to build, with two years of research on what dogs like to watch—which included recording dogs while they watched at home to see how they reacted, USA Today reports. DogTV launches August 1 and will cost $4.99 per month—$4.99 more than it costs to take your dog for a walk to see landscapes and other dogs in real life. (More weird news stories.)