The news channel you actually want on in the background.
XNBC - X News & Buzz Channel - turns the timelines, lists, hashtags and feeds you trust into a live, presenter-led broadcast. No algorithmic doom-scroll. No day-old cable headlines. Just your news, read out loud, 24/7.
A personal productivity tool that grew into a product.
XNBC started because I couldn't keep up with the firehose of news on X. The people I follow break stories hours before CNBC, CNN or EuroNews read them off a teleprompter - but scrolling timelines all day is exhausting and notifications are noise. I needed a way to consume that information in the background, the way a TV in the corner of a room just works.
So I built one. XNBC takes the sources you trust - X lists, accounts, hashtags, RSS, Aligned News - and renders them as a proper channel: presenter-led, with lower-thirds, breaking-news tickers, and segment transitions. Put it on a second monitor, your living-room TV, or a lobby screen and let it run.
Bring your own OpenAI, xAI and X keys. Pick your anchors. Pick your models. The channel is yours.
The project is open source on GitHub and ready to use right here on this website. I built it for myself - now I'm making it available to anyone who wants their own news channel running 24/7.
Robert Koller
Creator of XNBC
I couldn't read every tweet. So I built a TV channel.
I'm a triple-qualified lawyer (Frankfurt, Madrid, London) turned AI infrastructure builder. I became one of the youngest partners at a Silver Circle law firm, arranged bond issuances for FC Schalke 04 and many titans of industry, hold a CAIA charter, and won my own case at the European Court of Justice - the Koller case - which set precedent across all EU member states.
I tell you this not to impress you, but because it matters for what came next.
After years in capital markets, I noticed something: the gap between what AI promises and what regulated industries - and serious news consumers - actually need is enormous. LLMs hallucinate. Compliance doesn't forgive hallucinations. Neither do you, when you're trying to follow a story that moves in minutes. So I started building systems that work in the real world, under real pressure.
That led to fDesk - a CSSF-regulated Treasury-as-a-Service platform that has processed over €500M across 45+ bond issuances. We helped the London Borough of Sutton issue a £100M municipal bond in three weeks instead of six months. We built the world's first fully digital commercial paper programme for Haniel, one of Germany's oldest industrial groups.
Running fDesk taught me what breaks when you rely on AI in production - and what's possible when you build the right constraints around it. Out of that came SynapseLayer: the deterministic orchestration brain we now use to route models, manage credentials, and stitch outputs together with guarantees, not vibes.
XNBC started as a personal productivity hack. I follow hundreds of people on X - analysts, traders, journalists, founders - and the signal is incredible, but I couldn't keep up. Scrolling timelines all day is a part-time job. I needed the information to come to me, not the other way around. I wanted it on in the background, like a real TV channel, while I worked.
It worked so well I decided to open source it on GitHub and make it available here for anyone who wants the same thing: their own news channel, running 24/7, on their own terms.
Your keys. Your sources. Your anchors. Your channel.
The ventures
XNBC is one of several things I'm building. They share a stack and a philosophy: your keys, your data, your rules.
XNBC
The personal AI news channel. The product you're looking at. Open source and ready to run on this website.
fDesk
CSSF-regulated Treasury-as-a-Service. €500M+ processed, 45+ issuances, in production. Bond issuance for mid-market companies that can't afford the traditional investment-bank route.
SynapseLayer.ai
Deterministic AI infrastructure for regulated industries. Extracts business rules from documents and converts them into executable logic graphs. 99.98% accuracy across 100,000+ validations.
How we think about your channel
Your keys, your channel
Bring your own OpenAI, xAI, and X keys. They're stored server-side, masked after save, and never echoed back to the browser.
Models you choose
Swap presenters and reasoning models per segment. SynapseLayer handles the routing - you stay in control of cost and tone.
Always-on, never recycled
Segments are generated fresh from the current state of your sources. No reruns. No stale loops.
getbates.ai - your company in a box
If XNBC is the news channel in the corner of your room, Bates is the team running your business behind it: an open-source AI executive assistant that runs on a mini PC on your desk. Same philosophy - your keys, your hardware, your rules.
Want it on in the background?
Hook up your sources, drop in your keys, and hit start. Your channel goes live in minutes.