I’m trying to figure out how to stream YouTube videos directly in my Apple TV app. In regular iOS apps, I could just use UIWebView to load the YouTube embed code and it worked perfectly fine. But now I’m working on a tvOS project and I discovered that UIWebView isn’t available on this platform. This is causing me problems because I can’t use the same approach I used before. Are there any alternative methods or APIs that work specifically for tvOS? I need to be able to play YouTube content seamlessly within my app interface. Any suggestions or code examples would be really helpful since I’m stuck on this issue.
honestly the youtube player situation on tvos is kinda messy. i ended up just using AVPlayer with youtube-dl to grab the stream urls but had to handle the extraction server side since youtube blocks most client-side attempts now. works pretty well once you get it setup tho
for sure! you can also use the youtube-ios-player-helper library. it can simplify streaming and give you good control over playback. just make sure to check the permissions tho. good luck!
I went through this same struggle about six months ago and what eventually worked was implementing a hybrid approach. Instead of trying to force web-based YouTube embedding, I switched to using the YouTube Data API v3 to fetch video information and thumbnails, then handled the actual playback through a custom AVPlayer setup. The tricky part was dealing with YouTube’s streaming URL extraction, which required implementing a backend service to avoid client-side restrictions. One thing that really helped was caching the extracted URLs temporarily since they expire relatively quickly. The end result actually felt more native to the Apple TV experience than any web view solution would have provided. Performance was noticeably better too, especially when users were browsing through multiple videos quickly.
I ran into this exact same issue when I migrated my iOS app to tvOS last year. The main problem is that tvOS has very limited web view support compared to iOS. What ended up working for me was using AVPlayerViewController with direct video URLs instead of trying to embed YouTube players. You’ll need to extract the actual video stream URLs from YouTube using their API or third-party parsing libraries. Another approach that worked well was implementing the YouTube Data API to get video metadata and then using AVPlayer to handle playback. The user experience is actually better this way since it integrates more naturally with the Apple TV interface and remote controls. Just be aware that YouTube’s terms of service can be tricky when it comes to extracting direct video URLs, so make sure you’re compliant with their guidelines.
WKWebView is available on tvOS and should replace UIWebView for most cases, though it has some limitations compared to iOS. However, for YouTube specifically, I found that approach unreliable due to focus management issues with the remote. What actually solved this for me was integrating the official YouTube TV framework if your app qualifies, or alternatively using a custom implementation with AVKit. The key insight is that tvOS users expect native video playback behavior rather than web-based players. You might also want to consider deep linking to the native YouTube app for certain use cases, which provides a smoother user experience. The AVPlayerViewController route mentioned by others is solid, but be prepared for additional complexity in handling YouTube’s various formats and quality levels.