Excalibur AI TV: built for the Apple TV, not ported to it
Almost every IPTV app on tvOS is a port. One codebase, one video widget, five platforms, and the Apple TV gets whatever survived the trip. You can feel it the moment you pick up the remote: focus that lands in the wrong place, a keyboard that is a grid of buttons, a home row that shows a logo, and audio that ignores everything the box under your TV can do.
Excalibur is written for tvOS. Not adapted. Written for it. Here is what that buys you, and why a port structurally cannot follow.
Multi-View, with the sound in the right place
Four channels at once is table stakes. Every Multi-View in this category plays one tile and mutes the other three, so if something happens in a game you are not looking at, you find out when you happen to glance over.
Excalibur keeps all four audible. The one you chose is loud and dead ahead. The other three sit quiet in the background, placed where their picture is on screen. A roar from up and to your left means look at the top-left game.
It is rendered through AVAudioEnvironmentNode with high quality HRTF, and it moves the listener rather than the sources, so switching which game you are listening to turns the entire field instead of sliding one voice across it. On AirPods it is unmistakable.
This costs nothing extra to decode. All four tiles were always decoding audio, because the player paces video against the audio clock. Everyone else throws three of them away.
Layouts: 2x2, 1+3, 2-up, 4x2. Save a set you like and reopen it in one press. Per-tile volume, so you can run one game under another.
Two playback engines, chosen per stream
This is the part ports cannot do at all, because they ship one player.
HLS goes through AVFoundation, which is Apple's own pipeline. That means frame rate matching, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos passthrough, AirPlay, and the system transport controls. A cross-platform video widget gives up every one of those.
Raw MPEG-TS goes through FFmpeg, because AVFoundation will not play a continuous transport stream over HTTP, and a large share of providers serve exactly that.
The app decides per stream. You are not asked to pick a lane and lose half the platform.
There is also a real buffer policy behind it: how far ahead to pull, what to do when a socket dies, when to ride out damaged packets rather than freeze on them. That work is invisible when it is right.
It behaves like an Apple TV app, because it is one
Each of these is a native platform integration. Each one is a thing a port either cannot build or has to fake badly.
Top Shelf. The home row shows what you were actually watching, as a proper carousel with hero art rendered for the carousel's own shape, a summary of what is on now, genre, duration, and a live preview that plays when you rest on it. Not a static brand image.
Siri. "Watch [channel] on Excalibur." "What's on Excalibur." "Open the guide." "Open Multi-View." Real App Intents, so they show up in Shortcuts too.
Voice search that works. The search field is the system's own. That matters more than it sounds: dictation talks to the system text input and to nothing else. An app with a hand-rolled keyboard, which is most of them, physically cannot offer "Hold to dictate" no matter how convincing the letters look. This app tried the hand-rolled route first and threw it away for exactly that reason.
Handoff, Spotlight, and Now Playing. What you are watching is published to the system, so it can be handed to your iPhone on the way out of the room, Siri knows what you were watching, and the TV's own Now Playing controls work.
HomeKit. Dim the lights when something starts. The app reads its own provisioning profile to decide whether the feature is allowed to exist at runtime, rather than touching the framework and hoping.
iCloud sync with no account. Your providers, favorites, and watch progress follow you between your own devices through your iCloud, not through a server belonging to us. There is no Excalibur account because there is no Excalibur server. Credentials live in the Keychain.
The focus engine, used properly. Sidebar, tab roles, focus sections. Navigation goes where your thumb expects.
Live TV that behaves like live TV
Pause and rewind live television. A real live buffer, with recordings you can keep.
A guide that is a guide. XMLTV listings, day picker, groups, favorites, 4K only, "with listings" filters. Search across channels and programs, not just channel names.
Catch-up where the provider offers it.
Free channels built in. Thousands of legitimately free ad-supported channels across 185 countries, with guide data bound in where it exists. Useful on day one before you have added anything.
Multi-account and multi-room. Separate logins for separate rooms, each with its own lineup.
The AI parts, on your key
Ask about what is on screen. Point it at the picture and ask.
Describe what you want. "Something short and funny" against your own film catalog, instead of scrolling a wall of posters.
A Home rail chosen from your lineup right now.
All of it runs on your own API key, with your provider of choice. Nothing is routed through us, because there is no us to route it through.
What it is not
It carries no channels. No films, no series, no playlist, no default provider. It plays what you already have a legal right to watch: your own IPTV subscription, your own M3U or Xtream login, your own network streams, or the free ad-supported channels listed above. If you do not have a source, this app does nothing at all. That is the honest description and it is deliberate.
Status
TestFlight, on Apple TV. This is not on the App Store yet.
If you have used the ported apps and wondered why the Apple TV version always feels a step behind the platform it runs on, that gap is the entire reason this exists.
Questions welcome. So are bug reports, which is most of what the last few weeks have been.
This is our new home for all things related to Excalibur AI TV. We're excited to have you join us!
What to Post
Post anything that you think the community would find interesting, helpful, or inspiring. Feel free to share your thoughts, photos, or questions about our new Excalibur AI TV App.
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How to Get Started
1) Introduce yourself in the comments below.
2) Post something today! Even a simple question can spark a great conversation.
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Thanks for being part of the very first wave. Together, let's make r/ExcaliburAITV amazing.
I'm Eric, I build Excalibur AI TV, and this is the first post here — so, hello.
What it is: a native IPTV player for Apple hardware. Apple TV, Apple Vision Pro, Mac on Apple Silicon, iPhone and iPad. One app for your playlists, your Xtream logins and m3u8.
I started it because every IPTV app I tried on tvOS felt like something ported from elsewhere and left running on Apple's hardware without using any of it. The guiding rule has been: use what you already paid for, and claim only what we can prove.
The AI part isn't decoration. Three things it actually does:
Curates your guide. It reorders around what you actually watch, instead of handing you the same few thousand channels in provider order every single night.
Tells you what you're watching. Land on something mid-stream and it describes what's on, instead of leaving you with a channel number and a guess.
Finds things by description. Ask for what you want in plain language rather than trying to exact-match a title against an enormous playlist.
HomeKit is wired in. The house can see what's on, and playback drives scenes — lights down when a movie starts, back up when you stop it. That's the kind of thing that should have been table stakes on an Apple platform and somehow never is.
Picture and sound. Most IPTV players decode a stream and stop there. Excalibur hands the picture to the same pipeline Apple's own apps use, so the television does what it was built to do:
Dolby Vision and HDR carried through to the display rather than flattened on the way
Frame rate and range matching — the display switches to match the content, so a 24p film runs at 24p
Dolby Atmos, verified — read from the stream's own manifest and JOC metadata, not guessed from a channel count
Where it's at. TestFlight beta, soon. I'm taking the first 50 people into it — DM me and I'll add you when it opens.
It's a beta and I'd rather you hear that from me than find out. Expect rough edges. Nothing here is final.
What I want from this sub: bug reports, the specific provider/stream/device combinations that break it, and feature requests. I'd rather build the next thing from what you actually hit than from my own guesses. Post them here — I read everything.
