Measured, not marketed

The setup we
actually run.

Every number on this page was measured on real hardware in the living room where Rivue is built. Real results, not theoretical maximums.

First launch

Three steps and
you're watching.

1️⃣

Sign in

Create your free Rivue account with email or Apple ID, done in seconds. On a TV, sign in with a short code from your phone instead of typing a password with the remote.

2️⃣

Add your source

Add a playlist or sign in to your own TV provider. Rivue loads your channels, movies and series. Even very large playlists with tens of thousands of channels stay fast.

3️⃣

Every screen follows

Sign in on your other devices and your playlists, history, profiles and settings are already there. Nothing to set up twice.

The short version

One Mac behind the TV.
Everything else follows.

🖥️

The heart: a Mac

An Apple Silicon Mac behind the TV, running Rivue in TV Mode. A base M4 Mac mini is perfect. It's your player, your DVR, and your home media server, all at once.

📺

The couch: Apple TV

The Apple TV app drives the same library with the Siri Remote, and streams recordings and downloads straight from your Mac.

📱

On the go: iPhone, iPad & MacBook

Downloads for the plane on your phone, your iPad, and even your MacBook, which almost no streaming service allows. Remote streaming from your own server covers everywhere else, and watch state syncs back: pause on the couch, resume at the gate.

Per-device recommendations

What to buy, and what
you can skip.

Mac

Any Apple Silicon Mac

Rivue runs its video engine, DVR and library server natively. Rivue plays the playlists you add. Even with very large ones loaded (tens of thousands of channels and a huge movie catalog), it settles around half a gigabyte of RAM, because the catalog lives on disk, not in memory. 8 GB Macs are genuinely fine; take 16 GB if you run big Multi-View layouts while recording.

Latency

30–45 ms in TV Mode

Button-press to on-screen response, measured with in-app instrumentation, not an estimate. Any game controller (Xbox, PlayStation, MFi) or Bluetooth remote that presents as a keyboard drives everything.

Multi-View

Up to 8 streams

Each tile is its own real decode. On a base M4, expect 4–6 HD streams comfortably and 8 SD, measured on the same M4-class hardware we watch on daily.

iPhone · iPad

iPhone 12 or newer

Any M-series iPad. Catalogs live on disk on iOS too, so even very large multi-playlist setups stay comfortable. Movies download at roughly 1–3 GB each, so a 128 GB device holds a healthy offline library.

Apple TV

Apple TV 4K

The Apple TV app works today, designed for the TV screen and the Siri Remote, with the full guide, Multi-View, recordings and your server library.

Android · Fire TV

Native there too

Android phones, Android TV, Google TV and Fire TV run the native Rivue app today. Same account, same library, made to look and feel like Rivue on the Mac.

Vision Pro

Runs day one

Rivue runs on Apple Vision Pro as an iPad app, with playback and windowing verified on the device itself.

Network guidance

Stability beats speed.

🔌

Wire the living room

Use wired Ethernet or 5 GHz Wi-Fi for the Mac. A 4K live stream commonly uses 8–20 Mbit/s, and Multi-View multiplies that for every stream on screen, so eight at once can use up to ~100 Mbit/s.

🛟

Short outages don't interrupt you

Rivue keeps a live buffer, so when a stream stalls for a moment, playback continues. We tested that through 45-second interruptions with no error and no rebuffering. A stable connection matters more than a fast one.

🌍

Remote streaming

Streaming from your home server while away? Plan for 20 Mbit/s of upload speed for one full-quality stream. On weaker connections, Rivue measures the link and lowers the stream quality automatically, so it keeps playing instead of buffering.

DVR storage sizing

Plan for ~2 GB per hour.

💾

Real numbers

From a real recording library: 66 recordings took 84 GB, about 1.3 GB per recording on average, with HD sports using 1.5–2.5 GB per hour.

🧮

A simple guide

At ~2 GB per hour of HD recording, a 1 TB drive holds roughly 500 hours. Rivue records to any folder you choose. An external SSD works well.

🔁

Every recording, everywhere

Recordings remember where you stopped and stream to every device from your Mac. We tested that on the whole device family.