Wave goodbye to your afternoon! Tumblr just launched its own GIF TV channel

It’s Friday afternoon, which means that if you haven’t yet searched the internet for a GIF to communicate exactly how you feel, you likely will do within the next hour or two. Fortunately for you, Tumblr has just launched Tumblr TV – an endless stream of GIFs which automatically play out, to make that process easier and more entertaining for everybody. It’s essentially Tumblr’s equivalent of Giphy TV, but with a search service which allows you to narrow down to exactly which image of Mariah Carey gently wiping away a tear you’re after, and it’s a treat for all of us internet-age aliens who can only express emotions through GIFs.

“The GIF is really an old standard that dates back to the 80s,” Tumblr project engineer Bill Eager told Wired in an article on its site today. “It was a conceptually challenging exercise to present GIFs in a fresh way… GIFs can be large files and render slowly. We have a sophisticated search product already, so it was easy to get the Tumblr TV content right once we nailed down the experience.”