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299 channels
Documentary television is the quiet giant of live TV. While news and sports scream for attention, documentary channels do something rarer, they earn your time. With 322 channels streaming globally, the genre has split into two camps: production companies that actually shoot original material and networks that recycle the same shark footage every Tuesday. The difference is night and day. National Geographic and the BBC still invest in crews who wait weeks for a single animal shot; their nature docs feel tangible, almost meditative. Then you have the true-crime factories that pump out talking-head reenactments, watchable, but forgettable. Europe does this format surprisingly well. ZDFinfo in Germany runs hour-long deep dives on Cold War espionage with zero commercial breaks. SRF Dok from Switzerland covers alpine farming and local history with a patient eye that US networks often lack. The best live documentary channels treat their subject with respect. They let footage breathe, let experts actually finish sentences, and stay quiet when the visuals do the talking. If you're scanning for something meaningful to leave on in the background, skip the channels promoting "mega-" anything. Find the ones with a single topic and a slow pace, that's where the real story lives. Nature, history, science, or crime done right: live documentary streaming rewards the patient viewer.