Getting started with Flowplayer tvOS SDK

This section gives you an introduction to the core features of the Flowplayer tvOS SDK and lists all the requirements for adding the SDK to into a tvOS project.

This guide assumes that you have basic understanding of tvOS development and that you are familiar with Xcode and Swift.

Introduction

FlowplayerSDK for tvOS is a fully fledged media manager that handles every aspect of media playback, ads and state.

The 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 Flowplayer tvOS SDK include but are not limited to:

• 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
• Analytics for Flowplayer platform videos (Flowplayer-hosted and registered remote assets)

Prerequisites

In order to be able to compile and run your application using the Flowplayer tvOS SDK, the following few requirements need to be met.

Minimum tvOS version

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

Dependencies

The Flowplayer tvOS SDK depends 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 Flowplayer tvOS SDK to your project and start developing.

You can add the SDK in one of the following 2 ways:

CocoaPods setup

Add Flowplayer together with its dependencies to your Podfile:

pod 'Flowplayer-tvOS', '~> 1.0.3'

Execute pod install and you're ready to go.

Manual setup

1. Download the binary framework of Flowplayer tvOS SDK from here.
2. As mentioned earlier, the 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 Flowplayer access token, in order to enable the player to play content.

Flowplayer tokens can be created and revoked from the Flowplayer Dashboard