A Look At the New TV App in macOS Catalina

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's take a look at the new TV app that will be coming in macOS Catalina.

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So a very exciting new part of macOS in Catalina is going to be the TV app. Now people are talking about this as one of the things that's splitting off from iTunes. iTunes is going to become Music, TV, Podcasts, and also the Books app too for audiobooks. But the TV app is where you're going to be able to do your movie rentals, your movie purchases, and TV shows as well. But it's actually a lot more than that and it's more important than just a piece being broken off from iTunes because it incorporates a lot of features that weren't available on the Mac before. They were part of Apple TV and also available on iOS devices. But weren't really available to Mac users and now they will be in Catalina.

So I'm using the beta here of Catalina, obviously, and I'm going to run the TV app. It's going to come up and it's going to kind of look similar to other apps like the old iTunes and the Books app in particular. You've got some items here at the top and you have a big scrolling area for content here in the middle. Now the first section here, Watch Now, highlights what makes this different than the old iTunes because in addition to listing movies and TV shows and things here you're also going to find stuff like the ability to subscribe to various channels. Here's CBS All Access, HBO, Showtime, STARZ, etc. You can click on one of these and you can do the free trial or do a subscription. Everything syncs across using your Apple ID. So one subscription here to HBO through Apple will get you the HBO channel on all of your Apple devices. 

This still isn't quite as good as Apple TV because Apple TV includes Apple TV apps. A lot of channels have apps rather than a direct way to subscribe to them. So being able to access those apps on Apple TV sometimes will get you new features and definitely more content. But at least we have the ability here, on our Macs, to be able to subscribe to these channels.

Now if we move over to the Movies tab here you're going to get a way to rent and purchase movies. Just like you could before in iTunes and can on Apple TV and such . Then you've got TV shows as well so you can do individual episodes. You can do seasons of TV shows here. There's a special kid section which is more of the same movie and TV content but specifically for kids.

Then you have your Library section and this is what a lot of people have asked me about. This is where you'll access things like your own videos. But first you'll have the movies that you purchased here. So you can see the few movies that I've purchased. TV shows as well. Individual episodes and seasons. This is just like in iTunes before. You have something called Home Videos. A few versions of iTunes ago they kind of switched things out and had movies that were your own files classified as home videos. Maybe trying to emphasize that's what you should be using it for. Not for ripping things from DVD's. But that is indeed where movies that you ripped from DVD's that you owned that you want to watch on an airplane ride or something like that, that's where they will appear. I've added a couple of movies that I own on DVD and also an episode of MacMost. I did that by simply dragging and dropping from the file into the TV app.

I have options here. You can see I have full playlist options here and I've actually created a playlist where I can store MacMost episodes. So you can create video playlists. You can get Info and it looks just like iTunes where you have details or descriptions or things like that. So it works very much as a piece of iTunes here with the functionality that we would expect.

Also in Preferences you've got options. So, for instance, under Files you can choose to keep the media folder organized or whether or not to copy the media into the Library. The same thing you could do with iTunes before. So if you wanted to store your videos on an external drive you can uncheck this. The video will remain there in the external drive yet it will still be in your Library, that is you know stored at this media location which is in the Movies folder slash TV slash Media. That's where it's going to be.

You also have the ability, when you play a video, to play it and go with picture in picture. You can see I get this window and I can resize the window and have that appear on top of everything else. I can Exit or go back to the regular mode. Of course I can go to Full screen mode for the app which is probably how you want to watch your TV shows most of the time anyway.

You do have the ability to view by list rather than having those huge thumbnails there. You can have sorting options, view options, what columns are there. So a lot of the stuff that we were used to in iTunes.

So if you have a lot of video content already in iTunes, say you have some purchased movies, maybe some stuff you've added manually, that stuff should transfer over to the TV app when you upgrade to Catalina. We'll have to see how well that works but that's the plan. That's how it should work.

Another thing I know people are going to ask me about is how do you sync to an iOS device. If you want to sync manually using a cable. That, of course, is done in the Finder now. In the Finder if you have your device connected, I have an iPad connected here, then you can see I get all of the different screens I used to see in iTunes. They are now in the Finder including the ability to sync movies and TV shows to my iPad. 

Now another really big aspect of this whole TV app is that it means that the new content Apple is planning on coming out with as part of Apple TV Plus which has just been announced but isn't here yet, that's going to be on the Mac too. I think that's really big news because I would have expected initially that Apple TV Plus would launch just on Apple TV's and probably on iOS as well. But not on the Mac. It would have been one of those things where you just couldn't access Apple's own content on the Mac because there was no way to do that. Apple's done similar things like that before. But the existence of this TV app means that that's not the plan at all. That Apple TV Plus will launch across everything. You'll be able to watch it on you Apple TV, your iPad, your iPhone, and your Mac.

The best part of that is for those of us that own multiple devices, is we won't be restricted to watching it in one place. We can start watching a TV show on Apple TV but if it's convenient for us to watch the next episode on our Mac then we can do it.