Getting started with Wowza Flowplayer tvOS SDK

This article is an introduction to the core features of the Wowza Flowplayer tvOS SDK and lists all the requirements for adding the SDK into a tvOS project. It assumes that you have basic understanding of tvOS development and that you are familiar with Xcode and Swift.

The Wowza Flowplayer SDK for tvOS is a fully fledged media manager that handles every aspect of media playback, ads, and state. The Wowza Flowplayer tvOS SDK uses AVPlayer at its core and, therefore, takes advantage of all its powerful features.

The SDK supports adaptive streaming technologies such as HLS as well as the most popular single container formats such as MP4, MP3, AVI, and several more.

Features

Some of the most important features of the Wowza Flowplayer tvOS SDK include:

• HLS, MP4, MP3, AVI formats.
• Callbacks for monitoring a wide range of player events .
• IMA3 based VAST and VMAP ads .
• Loading & handling of media assets (subtitles and audio)
• Player playback handling (stop, play, seek, etc)

Prerequisites

To be able to compile and run your application using the Wowza Flowplayer tvOS SDK, the following requirements need to be met.

Minimum tvOS version

The Wowza Flowplayer tvOS SDK is available to devices running tvOS version 12.0+.

Dependencies

The Wowza Flowplayer tvOS SDK is based on the following dependencies:

• Google Interactive Media Ads (IMA) : 4.4.2

Add the SDK to your project

Once you have met all the prerequisites, you are ready to add the Wowza Flowplayer tvOS SDK to your project and start developing. You can add the SDK using CocoaPods or a manual setup.

CocoaPods setup

1. Add Flowplayer together with its dependencies to your Podfile :
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   pod 'Flowplayer-tvOS', '~> 1.0.3'

2. Execute pod install to finalize.

Manual setup

1. Download the binary framework of Wowza Flowplayer tvOS SDK from here .
2. As mentioned earlier, the Wowza Flowplayer tvOS SDK depends on Google IMA which you need to download as well.
3. Next, you need to link and embed the frameworks (Flowplayer, FlowplayerCore, and Google IMA) into your target.

Your target's Build Phases should look similar to this:

Update Info.plist

In your target's Info.plist file, add a new string with the key FlowplayerAccessToken and set the value to your Wowza Flowplayer access token to enable the player to play content.