BufferedTV

Watch the video network nobody owns — on your telly.

An unofficial PeerTube client for Apple TV. Free, open source, and built with ❤️ by Ric Harvey, supported by SquareCows.

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What is this?

PeerTube is video hosting that nobody owns. Instead of one company running one enormous site, thousands of independent servers — instances — host their own videos and talk to each other. No algorithm deciding what you see. No adverts. No company.

This app brings all of it to your Apple TV.

Find things worth watching

Most PeerTube apps can only search the server you signed in to. That means a channel you know exists often simply will not appear.

This one searches the whole network by default, and plays what it finds wherever it happens to live. Look for a channel, get the channel — not a shrug.

There is plenty to browse, too: trending, just added, live right now, top rated, and whatever is local to your own instance.

Sign in — or don't

Sign in to any instance and your subscriptions, playlists, Watch Later, history and continue-watching come with you. Two-factor sign-in works.

Prefer not to? Browse anonymously. The app remembers which you chose and stops asking.

Watch it properly

Videos play full screen at the best quality the instance actually published — not whatever your connection settles for in the first few seconds. Change quality mid-video whenever you like.

Subtitles, audio tracks and playback speed are a swipe away. Swipe down again for the rest, as labelled tabs beside Info: Save the video to Watch Later or one of your playlists, subscribe from Channel, like or dislike it and read or add Comments (dictate them with the remote rather than typing on a TV), or Report it. Where you got to syncs back to your instance, so you can pick it up on your phone later.

When a video ends you land back where you were, rather than being dragged into the next thing. Unless you'd rather it kept going — that's a setting.

Subtitles in your language

PeerTube is a network without borders, which is lovely right up to the point where the video you want is captioned in a language you don't read.

Point BufferedTV at a LibreTranslate server — free software you can run on a spare machine at home — and it will translate a video's subtitles into your language while you watch, and offer them in the subtitle menu alongside the originals.

It's off until you switch it on, there's no default server, and the subtitle text goes only to the server you named. Run it yourself and nothing leaves the house.

Made the way you want it

Full screen playback, best-available quality, autoplay, resume and progress sync are all yours to change. Sensitive content is hidden until you ask for it, not the other way round.

It knows where it lives

BufferedTV uses the Apple TV properly rather than just running on it.

On the home screen. Put BufferedTV in the top row and the shelf fills with what's actually trending on your instance — and what you were part-way through. Choosing one drops you straight into it.

From anywhere. What's playing shows up in Control Centre and on the Siri Remote's TV button, so you can pause or skip without going back to the app. Picture in Picture keeps a video going in the corner while you look for the next one.

By voice. "Play what's trending on BufferedTV." "Open my subscriptions in BufferedTV." They're Shortcuts actions too, so you can build them into automations.

For everyone in the house. On an Apple TV with more than one user, your instance, account, history and blocked list are yours alone — tvOS keeps each person's separate.

Settings on every device. Your settings, blocks and the instance you use follow you between Apple TV, iPhone and iPad through iCloud, signed in or not. Sign-ins and parental controls stay on each device.

Your feed, your rules

Had enough of someone? Block the account — or the whole server it lives on — and they vanish from everywhere in the app at once. No account needed, and blocks are easy to undo in Settings.

Something worse than annoying? Report it — a video or a comment — straight from the video or the player, and your instance's moderators pass it on to the instance it came from. Blocking someone hides their comments too.

Sensitive content is hidden until you ask for it, never the other way round. Set a parental PIN and it stays that way: showing sensitive videos needs the PIN, or choose Ask for the PIN to see them listed, blurred, and enter the PIN before one plays. The PIN covers every profile on the Apple TV, so switching user doesn't get round it.

Made for everyone

BufferedTV works with VoiceOver. Every card, button and switch says what it is and what state it's in, so a card reads out a video's title, channel, length and age, how much of it you've watched, and whether its thumbnail is hidden. Anything that turns up on screen by itself is read out too: an error, a "Comment posted", a translation finishing.

It follows your Apple TV's accessibility settings. With Reduce Motion the launch animation, sliding banners and the bouncy focus lift give way to simple fades. Reduce Transparency swaps the glass for solid panels, and Increase Contrast firms up the focus outline and the faintest text. The interface is dark throughout, text meets the WCAG contrast guidelines, and nothing relies on colour alone: a blurred thumbnail is labelled Sensitive, and settings that undo things carry a warning sign.

A video's page shows a CC badge when it has subtitles. If you've asked your Apple TV to always show subtitles, in Settings › Accessibility › Subtitles and Captioning, they come on by themselves, in your language where the video has it.

Nothing is watching you

No analytics. No tracking. No adverts. No third-party code of any kind. The app has no server of its own behind it, and it reports nothing to the developer.

Your password goes to the instance you chose and nowhere else, and the sign-in token stays in your Apple TV's keychain.

Read the full privacy policy →

Getting it

The app is not on the App Store yet — see the honest assessment of what stands in the way.

In the meantime you can build it yourself. It needs Xcode 27 and the tvOS 27 SDK: Building BufferedTV →

Contributing

Bugs, ideas and patches are all welcome at code.squarecows.com/ric/peertube-tvos.

If you are poking around the code, BUILD.md and the engineering notes explain the parts that are not obvious — and why a few of them are stranger than they look.

Thank you

To Framasoft and everyone who has built PeerTube, and to every person running an instance out of their own pocket. This app is only a window; you made the thing worth looking at.

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MIT licensed · Built with ❤️ by Ric Harvey · Supported by SquareCows

PeerTube is a trademark of Framasoft. This app is unofficial and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by the PeerTube project.