Streamline plays your own M3U or Xtream playlist, with its XMLTV guide, on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Vision Pro.
Shown with a demo lineup: channels, programs and artwork are fictional. Video: Big Buck Bunny © Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0.
Streamline is an IPTV player for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Vision Pro. It plays the playlists and program guides you already have. It is one SwiftUI codebase, with each platform built around its own input: touch, keyboard, the Siri Remote, or eyes and hands. It is in development and due in 2026, as a single purchase.
An IPTV playlist is just a list of channels. The guide data that makes it watchable usually arrives as a large, compressed XML file that most players handle poorly. And on Apple TV especially, a player has to get focus, remote input and channel changes exactly right, or it feels broken however good it looks. Streamline treats the guide and the channel change as the core of the product, not as features.
The player swaps items rather than rebuilding the video layer. A small pool of warm players pre-buffers the channels you are likely to switch to next, in the direction you have been switching, and the stream format that worked last time is remembered per channel so the fallback sequence isn’t repeated. A signpost measures every change from tap to first frame.
A gzipped XMLTV file is decompressed to disk and read with a streaming parser, which first checks the opening bytes to catch an HTML error page posing as a guide. Programmes are sorted per channel, so “what’s on now” is a binary search, and a compressed disk cache lets the app open without a network.
The player’s on-screen controls run on a five-state machine that replaced four separate flags and their sixteen combinations; only one element can hold focus at a time, so the focus engine never has to choose. The guide grid never recycles the focused cell, and when it rebuilds it keeps you at the same time of day, not the same scroll offset.
Channels live in SQLite with a full-text index for search, and lists load in pages. The Apple TV work was tested against a synthetic catalog of about 80,000 channels.
| Aspect | iPhone and iPad | Apple TV | Mac | Vision Pro |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Input | Touch and swipe | Siri Remote and the focus engine | Keyboard, pointer and menu commands | Eyes and hands |
| Navigation | Tab bar | Top tab bar | Split view | Split view |
| Guide | A list on iPhone, a grid on iPad | Grid | Grid | Grid |
| Player | Full screen | Full screen | In the window | Inline |
| Lists | Swipe actions and context menus | Context menus, driven by focus | Context menus | Context menus |
Streamline is in development and due in 2026, as a single purchase with no subscription.