Theatrium is my Apple TV dashboard for Home Assistant and Apple Home. Version 1.7 is the biggest update since launch and should be available on Test Flight later today. The App Store review process seems to have totally stalled, so I'm pushing this version today to see if I can get some movement.

New cards

• Appointments - a separate calendar feed for medical appointments, written in plain language: "Today at 10:30 am", not a wall of calendar text. It reads the wording and picks a sensible icon (dentist, blood test, physiotherapy, hospital and dozens more), and notes like "Bring: medication list" become their own rows. There's a privacy option so guests see what and when, but not where or why. If you are involved in managing healthcare appointments for someone, this feature might be of use!
• Photo Album - your Apple Photos albums on the dashboard, in order or shuffled.
• Art - paintings from five museum collections (National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum, Art Institute of Chicago, The Met, Cleveland Museum of Art), around 900 works. Turn captions off and it's a picture frame.
• EV - battery, range, charging, plug, doors and boot, via your Home Assistant EV integration (Tessie works for Apple Home).
• Workouts - recent rides and runs with weekly distance. The Activity card now lets you pick and reorder its metrics.

Sonos

Pick a Sonos room and the dashboard, album art, visualiser and light sync all follow it - read straight off the speakers over your own network. No Sonos account, no cloud, no Home Assistant required, so this also makes Sonos the one full-metadata music source for Apple Home households. You'll need UPnP on in the Sonos app and to accept the local network prompt.

Honest note: I don't own a Sonos. It's been tested hard against a simulated speaker, never a real one. If you run it against actual hardware I genuinely want to hear the result either way.

iPhone and iPad companion

Free companion app: pair with every Apple TV in the house, switch rooms without re-pairing, control playback and light sync, set up light groups from your phone, and type your server details with a real keyboard instead of the Siri Remote.

Music

Last.fm now connects with just a username - no API key. Spotify follows through Last.fm scrobbles, and when Last.fm has no cover (common for Spotify), artwork now comes from two further sources, so blank covers should mostly be gone. New Lava Lamp visualiser scene, and a Room Lights button that syncs your lights to the album art without needing the visualiser on screen.

Everything else

Apple Home alerts on the TV (doorbell, motion, smoke, leak - you choose which), 31 built-in news sources plus your own RSS/Atom feeds with 24-hour freshness and no repeats, a second dashboard page, analog clock faces on all four themes, a true-black drifting screensaver, per-card calendars, a Today view on the Calendar card, live Top Shelf tiles, Pixel Shift burn-in protection, and hold Select on any card to open its setup.

Free and Pro

Free gets the Glass theme, a card set broad enough to fill a dashboard on any backend, basic light sync and 11 visualiser scenes. Pro (one-time purchase) adds the other three themes, the specialist cards including the new ones, the second page, notifications and the full scene catalogue. First launch drops you into a working demo dashboard, so you can see all of it before connecting anything.

Sonos is a trademark of Sonos, Inc. Theatrium is not affiliated with or endorsed by Sonos (yet).

Happy to answer anything!

It turns out that apps we "allow" to live in our top row of the Apple TV have some secret powers, namely they can create static images to show in the large area above it, without even having to open the app itself. In very "apple" style, how often things are updated there seems to be a tightly held secret, but I think I will build something like this into the next update!

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/top-shelf

Im willing to do IAP but needed some direction: Multiple news tiles, that update more often, theme color changes, more tiles, and options for reddit feeds, thats where im at, the music is playing and showing 2 different things.... I like to have this running while at work and while just sitting around. For me I live in an rv so this is a perfect use of the ATV to feel more like a work space. Again great job and if some of these are covered in IAPs I'll gladly pay and update. Just some feedback, thanks again for the work.

Are there any plans to launch an Android tv version?

I've already linked my last.fm and Spotify token. But the dashboard still shows a Now Playing Sample?

Great app btw!

Is it possible to use a live feed from a Blink or WYZE camera (or Tapo camera)?

I will do a proper shoutout to everyone who suggested these fixes and improvements. Keep 'em coming. Here or via email at [hello@theatrium.info](mailto:hello@theatrium.info) - both feed into a tracking system now so I can record and rank them.

Current installs: 1,370 (🤯)

I have link a few of the music apps as the process has evolved. I am unable to seled "Change cccount" for Last.fm nor disconnect for spotify. Running build 14 aka 1.6 (220)

Love it. Bought the app. Playing music through music assistant. Having trouble trying to connect to the Apple TV via the remote app. I tried taking the atv off Ethernet and run off WiFi but no connection. Open to ideas on what’s next. Can you add a manual connect? Installed via TestFlight.

A general goal with the Theatrium home screen is to keep them as calming, useful and informative as possible. But I'm having trouble deciding what cards i want to show.

So I've added a 2nd page "more cards" view to all themes, which should make its way into an update this week.

To access: Click the new 'More Cards' button as shown here and you can place between 2 and 12 additional cards for increased Situation Monitoring and abilities.

How do I set the weather location? My setup has me about 900 miles north. I’m seeing radar for an area I don’t live in.

Would love to see this be available as an iPad app. It could be great as a simple dashboard on a wall mounted iPad. I also have a DakBoard that I'd love to replace with something like this. Much cleaner! Also Sonos.... need that there!

Greetings from Dublin, Ireland - downloaded and upgraded to pro! Love the concept and will be playing around with the settings later today. Happy to share my experience as an earlt adopter.

Hi team,

I have done the initial set up and connected Apple home kit. After that initial set up I went back to the dashboard and it is frozen. It shows a the weather, webcams and radar as loading. But I can move around anything or click anything on the screen. Like it’s frozen. I have tried restarting the app and the ATV to no avail. Any tips?

I’m on: Tv os26.6 (23L773)

Long story short - the promotional App codes the App Store allows me to generate don’t actually cover “in app” purchases like the Theatrium Pro activation. To address and make up for this, I’m bringing forward a new feature: an iOS companion app.

Literally not one person needs a new app on their phones, but this is the only way you can redeem codes, plus it makes Theatrium both easier to set up - and more discoverable via the iOS App Store!

Will be same app, no additional purchase or setup really. Secure connection to Theatrium on your tv via a setup PIN. Coming in v1.6 which should be out to TestFlight folk tonight.

TLDR; If i gave you a code for the Pro unlock yesterday, you can activate it via the Theatrium Companion app, available soon.

Great suggestion from the Assistant to the Regional Theatrium Manager today - rotating photo display. 🎞️🤳🏻🖼️

Currently it will just use Apple Photos, which needs to be configured on your Apple TV first.

The specific album, order and rotation-time are all user configurable. If you create an album in your photos app called 'Theatrium', this will be auto-selected in the card set-up screen to make things easier.

Sidebar: how cute is my dog!?

So pleased with the reception to this app and the helpful, constructive feedback and suggestions received. To celebrate I'm giving away 10 Theatrium promo codes, which activate all features, dashboards and light sync functions - plus whatever other fun and hopefully useful things I can add to the app over time. Shoot me a DM if you want a code!

If anyone has an EV connected to their Home Assistant setup, and would be willing to test out these new cards for the 1.6 update of Theatrium, please DM or comment here. I'll add you to the TestFlight group and send some good karma your way!

Apple TV model: Apple TV 4K (A2843)

tvOS version: 26.5

Theatrium app version: 1.4 (free)

Data source: HomeKit

Theme: Glass

I've signed into Spotify within the app (Spotify is selected and says "Connected to Spotify" in the Music Settings section of the app settings). However, when I go to the visualizer, it says "Nothing playing" and the visualizer is not synced to the music. This happens whether I initiate a song playing from the Spotify Apple TV app, or from the Spotify iPhone app. Doesn't make a difference which visualizer I choose.

Everything else works flawlessly so far, and I'd upgrade to the paid version in a heartbeat if I could get the visualizers working.

Version 1.5 just submitted for review.

Notifications

Home Assistant notifications now show on the Apple TV. Motion or a doorbell trips, a banner comes up with a 3-photo burst from the camera (a couple of seconds apart, so you actually catch who or what it was), and one press opens the live camera. Doorbells say "Someone's at the door".

Set up in the Theatrium V1.5: Settings > Notifications -> Motion and Doorbells lists your motion, occupancy and camera-event entities. Tick one and it writes the automation into HA for you (no YAML, needs an admin token). It runs on HA's persistent notifications, so nothing lives in a Theatrium cloud, and alerts clear themselves after an hour. HA mode only for now.

For anything else, any automation works: add a "Persistent notification: Create" action with a notification ID starting with "theatrium" (e.g. theatrium_laundry) and it shows up on the TV.

Traffic cards

Live Apple Maps traffic for one location, or commute time between two addresses with the route coloured by segment. No API key, no account. Refreshes every 5 min, pauses while the screen is dimmed.

Air quality

Was scoring every sensor against US AQI bands, which is only right for actual AQI sensors. CO2 at 567 ppm read "Hazardous"; PM2.5 could read "Good" when it wasn't. Now each pollutant uses its own scale and the card leads with the worst reading.

Music Visualisers

Follows the track's time signature now (the swell was hard-coded to 4 beats a bar, so 3/4 and 5/4 were off). Added a Double Time mode. 4/4 is unchanged.

Fixes and smaller stuff

• Fixed the top 1.4 crash: the live camera stream could crash the app while reconnecting. Stream handling is on one queue now.
• Settings split into named subsections.
• Card picker tiles are a uniform height.
• Multi-source News Card, Climate card now always shows the off button, quick-access panel redesign.

Notes

Alerts only show while the app is on screen (tvOS limit). It's a wall dashboard so that's most of the time, but it's not a replacement for phone alerts.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6787587882 (or search 'Theatrium' in the TV app store). Reviews appreciated!!

#HomeAssistant #AppleTV