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How to write your own video content feed
How to write your own video content feed
Robert Blessing avatar
Written by Robert Blessing
Updated over a year ago

Use this guide, if you host your videos on your own server or a CDN:

In order to connect your videos with our Apple TV app, we need some metadata about your videos such as:

  • Video title

  • Video thumbnail URL

  • Video file / streaming URL

You need to write a basic JSON video content feed code so that we get all the metadata we need. With this feed code, we can populate an Apple TV app that contains your videos.

To write your own feed code, we recommend copying our example code and editing it with your video metadata:

Sample JSON Feed Code:

{
"providerName": "ACME Corp",
"lastUpdated": "2023-11-29T08:23:03.257303908Z",
"language": "en",
"shortFormVideos": [{
"id": "jin4sce",
"title": "Video title 1",
"content": {
"dateAdded": "2023-10-28T17:00:00Z",
"videos": [{
"url": "https://your-cdn.com/video1.m3u8",
"quality": "HD",
"videoType": "HLS"
}],
"duration": 339
},
"thumbnail": "https://your-cdn.com/video1_thumbnail.jpg",
"shortDescription": "description of video 1"
}, {
"id": "ubm6wzj",
"title": "Video title 2",
"content": {
"dateAdded": "2023-10-28T17:00:00Z",
"videos": [{
"url": "https://your-cdn.com/video2.m3u8",
"quality": "HD",
"videoType": "HLS"
}],
"duration": 260
},
"thumbnail": "https://your-cdn.com/video2_thumbnail.jpg",
"shortDescription": "description video 2"
}],
"playlists": [{
"name": "My latest videos",
"itemIds": ["jin4sce", "ubm6wzj"]
}, {
"name": "Most popular videos",
"itemIds": ["jin4sce", "ubm6wzj", "iquzbsa"]
}]
}

This JSON feed code example above has just two video items in it.

videoType must be HLS as Apple requires this for Apple TV. This means the streaming URLs of your videos must be in .m3u8 format.

Thumbnail images must be in .jpg file format.

We strongly recommend to organize your videos in playlists. Each playlist is then a new row in your TV app.

To do so, you need to expand your feed code with a playlist object:

"playlists": [{
"name": "My latest videos",
"itemIds": ["jin4sce", "ubm6wzj"]
}, {
"name": "Most popular videos",
"itemIds": ["jin4sce", "ubm6wzj", "iquzbsa"]
}]

Video Thumbnail Image Sizes

For video thumbnails, we require a 16x9 aspect ratio. We recommend using

1280 x 720 pixels (HD) or 1920 x 1080 pixels (FHD) thumbnails.

Thumbnail images must be in .jpg file format.

What Video Types do we support?

We recommend to only use the video Type "tvSpecials"

Field

Type

Description

tvSpecials

tvSpecial Object

TV Special

movies

Movie Object

movies

shortFormVideos

Short Form Video Object

videos less than 15 minutes long

liveFeeds

Live Feed Object

live streams

What Categories/Playlists do we support?

Field

Type

Description

categories

Category Object

playlists

Playlist Object

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