Apple TV Update Integrates Several Major Apps
The TV app now integrates Amazon Freevee, AMC+, DAZN, Philo, and a bunch more apps into the user experience.
Apple TV is by far the most consumer-friendly TV platform — most intuitive, most elegant, most integrated — in large part because the main interface navigates you into and out of the major streamers like Hulu and Prime Video and keeps up with what you’re watching.
The killer feature of the TV interface and of the TV app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac is a content row called “Up Next” that organizes the TV and movie titles you’re watching. Many newer and more niche streaming apps for Apple TV, though, have not worked with the “Up Next” row.
The tvOS 16.1 update added functionality for a bunch of new streaming apps: Amazon Freevee, AMC+, ALLBLK, DAZN, Funimation, Philo, and international services including Globoplay, Eros Now, Flix Latino, Pantaya, and Univision.
(Notable no-shows: Netflix, Xfinity and Criterion Collection. Netflix has long opted out of the TV app because it doesn’t want to be aggregated, but I’m hoping to see Xfinity and Criterion Collection connect to the TV app in future updates.)
How to Connect the New Apps to Apple TV
Here’s how to integrate the new apps from the TV app screen:
Scroll several rows down until you see “Streaming Apps: Watch all your shows from one Place,” which is a row of large tiles for apps that are already integrated — probably Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, etc.
Scroll through those app tiles and click on the one that say “Connect More Streaming Apps.”
That takes you to a screen that shows all of the apps available to connect to the TV app that you haven’t already installed or connected. Mine shows 80+ available apps; you may see more.
If you select an app that’s already on your device, you’ll see a “Connect” option like the one for AMC+ that I used as the main art for this newsletter. If you select an app that’s not already on your device, you’ll see an “Install” option.
Once you install the app and connect an app to TV, it will immediately start integrating with “Up Next” and other aggregation features.
What Streamer Is that On? It Doesn’t Matter.
The main TV interface on Apple TV — actually an app that’s Apple confusingly calls “TV” — is a Home Screen from your living room that syncs with the TV app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
If you hear about a new show or new movie on almost any streamer that you want to remember for later, you can search for and add the title from the TV app on any devices.
Once you add, say, Abbott Elementary or Disenchanted, the new title will be added as the left-most tile in the “Up Next” row. And here’s where “Up Next” starts to get particularly intuitive about how how viewers watch TV:
When you finish an episode of a show, the next one appears in “Up Next” with the streamer logo on the show art and the season and episode number below the show title.
If it’s a weekly show and the next episode is not yet available, the show will simply disappear from “Up Next” and reappear whenever the next episode is on streaming.
The disappear/reappear feature is a godsend for shows that are between seasons. When Season 2 of The Sex Lives of College Girls premiered a few weeks ago on HBO Max, bloop there it was at the front of my “Up Next” row.
If you add a movie title to your “Up Next” row that’s only available on VOD, the TV app will automatically move it to the front of “Up Next” when the movie becomes available on streaming and will add the streamer logo to the show art.
The genius of the TV app in general and the “Up Next” row in particular is that you can select a title without having to open the app — Prime Video or Disney+ or whatever — where it lives.
If you subscribe to AMC+ as an Apple TV add-on channel and select the next episode of The Walking Dead from “Up Next,” the episode will play directly within the TV app just like it’s an Apple TV+ original.
If you subscribe to AMC+ on the AMC+ app and select the next episode of The Walking Dead, Apple TV will launch the app for you and take you directly to the episode. (On some apps, including Hulu and HBO Max, you have to click your profile on the app before the episode plays.)
Once you’re in a streamer app, you’re in the app. To get back to the TV interface, you can click the TV button on the Siri Remote. That’s technically a workaround, but it gives you the best of the streamer app (if you want to stay there for the next episode or something else) and the TV app (if you don’t).
The integration of streamers like AMC+ and Philo to the TV app makes the ecosystem that much better by bringing more titles to the “Up Next” row but also by making new titles easier to find across all (or at least most) of the subscription apps and free apps you already use.
Content rows like “Sports,” “New Shows and Movies,” “Popular Shows,” “Movies Spotlight,” etc., will immediately begin incorporating titles from new apps that you connect to the TV interface.
Apple TV has long been my preferred TV platform for corralling the majority of the streamers I watch, and now it’s several new streamers better.
(UPDATE: I initially reported that the new app integrations are in the tvOS 16.2 beta, and one reader was able to find the integrations in still-fairly-new tvOS 16.1. It’s not clear whether the integrations are server-side and just now pushing out or whether Apple and the streamers just have not yet publicized them.)