Sixty-eight thousand channels, finally watchable.
A live TV player built natively for Apple TV, for people whose provider hands them a lineup nobody could read.
Free while in beta. Bring your own provider.
Measured on one real subscription across two accounts. Your provider's numbers will differ.
Native, not a port.
Cross-platform players reach every screen in the house and give up the parts of tvOS that are not drawn. Those are the parts you feel.
Two engines, chosen per stream
HLS plays through AVFoundation, so you keep frame-rate matching, Dolby Vision and Atmos passthrough, and AirPlay. Raw transport streams play through FFmpeg, which AVFoundation will not touch. Nobody shipping one player can do both.
Voice search that exists
The search field is the system's own, so the microphone on the remote works. An app with a hand-rolled keyboard cannot offer dictation at all, however convincing the letters look. This one tried that route first and threw it away.
The home row, filled
Top Shelf shows what you were actually watching, with artwork sized for the carousel, what is on now, and a preview that plays when you rest on it. Not a static logo.
Siri and Shortcuts
Watch Northline on Excalibur. What's on Excalibur. Open Multi-View. Real App Intents, so they turn up in Shortcuts too.
Handoff, Spotlight, Now Playing
What you are watching is published to the system, so it can be handed to your iPhone on the way out of the room, and the TV's own transport controls work.
HomeKit
Bring the lights down when something starts. The app reads its own provisioning profile to decide whether the feature may exist at runtime, rather than touching the framework and hoping.
Four at once, and you can hear all of them.
Every other Multi-View plays one tile and mutes the rest, so when something happens in a game you are not watching, you find out by glancing over. Excalibur keeps all four audible and puts each one where its picture is.
Where the sound sits
The channel you chose is loud and dead ahead. The other three stay at eighteen percent, placed where they are on screen. Choose a different one and the whole field turns rather than one voice sliding across it.
It costs nothing extra to decode
All four tiles were always decoding audio, because the player paces video against the audio clock. Everyone else throws three of them away. This one places them instead.
Layouts worth saving
Two, three or four channels from any of your accounts, in 2x2, 1+3, 2-up or 4x2. Name a set and it comes back. Per-tile volume, so one game can run under another.
Works on a single-stream account
Which is where most players give up. The grid watches what the provider will actually deliver and retires the greediest tile rather than taking the whole thing down.
Best on AirPods
Headphones can genuinely place a sound above and to the left. A soundbar under the screen has a harder time, and the effect is honest about that.
Built for a lineup nobody could read.
A provider hands you tens of thousands of channels in its own order. Excalibur puts the six you actually watch in front of you, and makes the rest findable.
Pause and rewind live TV
A real live buffer behind the picture, with recordings you can keep and come back to.
A guide that is a guide
XMLTV listings, a day picker, groups, favorites, 4K only, and a filter for the channels that actually carry listings. Search reaches programs, not just channel names.
Free channels on day one
Thousands of legitimately free ad-supported channels across 185 countries, with guide data bound in where it exists. Useful before you have added anything of your own.
Multi-account, multi-room
Separate logins for separate rooms, each with its own lineup, and a scope switch that spans them when you want it to.
Catch-up where it exists
Replays from providers that offer them, in the same guide, in the same place you would look for them.
An adult lock that holds
A PIN in the Keychain on this Apple TV, never synced anywhere else, and adult channels stay out of search, recents and the home row.
Ask Merlin.
Is there a western on tonight? Three, and one starts in eleven minutes on a channel you have starred.
It reads the picture
Point it at what is on screen and ask what you are looking at.
Describe what you want
Something short and funny, against your own film catalog, instead of scrolling a wall of posters.
On your own key
Claude or OpenAI, answering from your own lineup. The taste profile stores genres and times of day and nothing else.
Your subscription, on every Apple screen.
Accounts, favorites and guides move between your own devices through iCloud. There is no Excalibur account to make, and no server of ours in the path. Provider credentials live in the Keychain.
Point it at your provider and see.
Add an Xtream account or an M3U playlist. Nothing else to set up.
Free while in beta. Apple TV, tvOS 26 or later.
A player only. No channels, playlists or media are included or provided, and none ever will be. You bring your own provider.
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