What your Apple TV becomes when you start getting curious

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, a strange new object appeared in my life. Metal, vaguely alien, it was bolted to the outside wall of our apartment building in Southern Italy: a satellite dish. Inside, a decoder box materialised in the living room, paired with a remote that looked ordinary enough, until I learned what it could really do. I started entering numbers. Blindly. Hopefully. No guide. No logic. Just chaos, and the occasional hit of magic.

I’d sit on the floor and type in random frequencies like I was trying to unlock the universe. No guide. No logic. Just chaos and luck. Sometimes, nothing. Sometimes, a grey screen. But then—and this is what kept me addicted—sometimes it worked. Out of nowhere, an obscure Turkish weather forecast. Or a soap opera in Arabic. Or Bulgarian game shows with jarring synth music and odd camera cuts. It was, in hindsight, completely absurd. But it changed me.

I didn’t speak the languages. I didn’t even know what languages I was hearing half the time. But I felt them. And something about those channels—the vintage aesthetics, the chaotic ad transitions, the seriousness of some guy reporting on what might have appeared like commodity prices in Farsi—lodged deep in my psyche. That satellite dish didn’t just feed me TV. It fed me perspective. Curiosity. The idea that somewhere, right now, someone is living differently, thinking differently, and therefore broadcasting differently.

Eventually I ended up studying foreign languages at university, and somewhere around my graduation I launched a website about high-quality television (because of course I did). That satellite experience, that random number input addiction, rewired my brain. I’m still not sure I’ve recovered. I’m not even sure I want to. Which brings me to the magnificent Apple TV.

Apple TV, on paper, is the perfect modern successor to the satellite dish. 4K, sleek UI, capable of handling live streams, apps, AirPlay, VPN routing, media servers, all of it. It should be a portal to the entire world.

When he introduced it, Tim Cook famously said “the future of TV is apps.” And in theory, he wasn’t wrong. But in practice, it’s a future stalled by poor discoverability, market disinterest, and an App Store that feels like it stopped evolving a long time ago.

For most people it’s a glorified YouTube / Netflix launcher with rounded corners that costs £149 or north of it. A piece of exquisite engineering reduced to delivering the same five streaming apps we all pretend we’re not bored of.

That’s not just on users though. It’s primarily on Apple. They’ve built this sleek monolith of potential, but they’ve abandoned the actual work of making it discoverable.

There’s zero evidence of a strong content discovery capability, no prioritisation of navigation UX, no strategy for surfacing long-tail value. It feels like a feature-led roadmap with no user-led lens. A classic case of shipping potential without purpose, many Product Managers like me would say.

It’s also on broadcasters, but more understandably so. Most of the world’s regional broadcasters don’t even have Apple TV apps. Why would they? The economics don’t justify it. It’s yet another product to support. The user base is small. So, if you want to access these channels, you have to resort to AirPlay, IPTV hacks, obscure GitHub projects, and borderline-spiritual levels of patience.

Now if you’re willing to put in the work—and if you have a taste for television not made for the algorithm—then Apple TV becomes something else entirely. Not a platform. Not even a device.

A lens.

How I built my own world TV headquarters

Forget Netflix and chill. Here’s how I rebuilt the entire globe in my living room.

The basics (yes, still important)

Start with the basics. You need some baseline services:

• YouTube: obvious. But not just for cat videos. Many international broadcasters upload segments here, sometimes full live streams.
• Netflix: fine, whatever.
• Amazon Prime Video: chaotic UX, surprisingly deep international catalogue if you’re willing to dig. And CNN International, among its live channels.
• Discovery+: live sports I care about with TNT Sports, high-quality docs and occasionally deranged true crime.
• Spotify: for background noise or low-effort musical travel in the living room. Funny how the way I use Spotify on Apple TV is completely different from how I use it on my iPhone or laptop.

These are your comfort foods. They get you through the dry patches.

VPN

Next step: NordVPN. Or something comparable. I use NordVPN because it works, and in the rare occasions it doesn’t, their support is decent.

Without a VPN, Apple TV is a small-town newspaper. With it, it’s global front pages on demand.

Italian channels

For me, RAI and Mediaset are where it all began. RaiPlay works on Apple TV. Mediaset Infinity is a bit more hit-or-miss, but worth it for the strange alchemy of commercial TV, football, and old variety shows. RSI (the Swiss Italian-language broadcaster) is a hidden gem: beautifully produced news, elegant aesthetics, and a neutral view of Europe in my native language.

Senior Italians might remember Tele Capodistria, the cross-border oddity that broadcast from Slovenia and Croatia to serve the Italian-speaking minority, but ended up beaming into Italian living rooms throughout the ’70s and ’80s thanks to analogue signal drift. It’s still alive, still wonderfully weird, and yes, it’s on my Apple TV via the Slovenian national broadcaster’s app.

British broadcasting

BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4, U, Sky News. Between them, you get the full British media gradient: from public service gravitas to vaguely unhinged reality television to tabloid paranoia disguised as news.

Plus, their production values are still among the best in the world. Even when the content is nonsense, it’s beautiful nonsense.

My global news grid

This is where things start getting spicy.

These are my must-have live news channels. They are free, in English, and don’t require VPNs:

• France 24: French perspective, slick production, great international focus.
• DW (Deutsche Welle): German worldview, slightly cold but refreshingly calm.
• Euronews: a bit dull, but wide coverage. Very “Brussels corridor” energy.
• Al Jazeera English: still one of the best in-depth global outlets.
• NHK World-Japan: Japanese perspective, often overlooked. Gorgeous segments.
• CGTN (China Global Television Network): state TV, obviously, but fascinating for how it tells stories.
• CNA (Channel News Asia): Singapore’s clean, efficient spin on regional affairs.
• Taiwan+: A rising star. Crisp, candid, and visually sharp.
• A News (Turkey): State-aligned, but intense. A good proxy for Turkish political mood.
• Africanews: from the Euronews ecosystem, but Africa-centric.

This isn’t just for “balance.” It’s to understand that every channel is a story with an angle. And by watching them side by side, you stop trusting any single lens, and start noticing the blind spots between them.

Region-specific English channels

Yes, I keep the American majors, including CBS News, NBC News, CNBC, ABC News, Bloomberg, et cetera.

Because you know what they say, when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches cold. And if I’m watching a story on France 24 about the Fed, I want to see how they spin it on that side of the pond, or how they turn it into a three-minute segment between weather and sports.

Outside of the US, CTV News (Canada), SABC+ (South Africa) are some examples of channels I’d tune in occasionally if there’s anything related to those regions that I’m curious about.

Non-English channels

Just like 25 years ago with satellite tv, I still get to spend a few minutes here and there watching channels in languages I don’t understand. Zero comprehension. No subtitles. Just vibes. And that’s entirely the point.

TV, at its best, isn’t necessarily about extracting meaning. It’s about absorbing intent. What do people wear on air? How fast do they talk? Is the set made of woodgrain and fluorescent panels or pure sterile minimalism? You can’t Google this kind of cultural nuance, you have to feel it live.

I’ll happily stream a German show where the weather map looks like it was designed by Lufthansa and the host wears a horribly knotted tie with nuclear confidence. Dutch debates with neon graphics and three moderators all speaking at once? Absolutely. Swedish real estate reality TV with drone shots of snow-covered suburbs and zero emotional conflict? Inject it directly into my soul.

These aren’t shows. They’re signals. They tell you what a country wants to believe about itself. What it dreams about at 8pm on a Tuesday. What its anxieties look like when repackaged as entertainment. Sometimes it’s austerity disguised as calm. Other times it’s chaos disguised as glamour.

Is it useful? Barely.
Is it delightful? Deeply.
Is it television? Completely.

Sometimes I don’t even try to follow the plot. I let it run like a cultural fireplace: warm, strange, and weirdly comforting. There’s a kind of intimacy in not understanding, like you’re witnessing something not made for you, and that makes it all the more honest.

Other content apps (aggregators, niche, etc.)

• Tubi and Freevee: both ad-supported, both stuffed with forgotten B-sides and surprisingly watchable oddities. Great for cultural archaeology.
• Pluto TV and Rakuten TV: the channel-flipping simulacrum you didn’t know you missed, with hundreds of genre-specific streams, often chaotic, occasionally brilliant.
• Arte: Franco-German cultural gold, like if the BBC had studied philosophy in Paris and never stopped. Half the time I don’t even know what I’m watching, but it always feels important, weirdly serene, or both.
• Red Bull TV: snowboarding documentaries filmed like arthouse films, long-form drone racing coverage, extreme athletes interviewed. A collection of sports channels that seems sponsored by GoPro.
• OneFootball: for live matches from leagues you didn’t know were televised, from Iceland and Finland to the Austrian second division. A small but glorious window into the world’s less-hyped football scenes.

The joy of conflicting realities

What I love about this setup—and I mean really love—is that it breaks the illusion that news is “the truth.”

Watch CGTN and Taiwan+ back-to-back. Or DW, i24 and Al Jazeera on Gaza. Or Bloomberg and NHK on inflation. You start to notice how stories are told. What’s included, what’s omitted. It’s not cynical, it’s clarifying.

And that perspective, ironically, is almost impossible to gain when you’re getting your content from the usual sources. They’re too sanitised, too for you. This is for everyone and no one, which is why it’s perfect.

The most tragic part? Apple could own this space. They have the hardware. The design chops. The platform. They don’t have a product narrative. No connective tissue. Just a polished box waiting for a soul. Their own Apple TV+ platform—while glossy and expensive—is a walled garden with remarkably little soul.

What we need is the opposite: a jungle. Messy. Raw. Unpredictable. Full of channels you didn’t know existed until they changed how you saw the world.

Your Apple TV will not help you become curious. It will not show you the Estonian weather forecast. It will not suggest you watch a Mongolian newsreel or a Chilean architecture program. It will never think to show you the Turkish parliamentary debates. That’s your job. You’re not just the user anymore—you’re your own editorial ops team. You build the stack. You define success.

Once you start curating your own global feed, once you start treating your Apple TV not as a product, but as a platform you can hack into meaning, it changes. It becomes a kind of radar. A late-night telescope. A very expensive way to waste time productively. And maybe, just maybe, a way to feel slightly less clueless about the world.

So yes, most people are wasting their Apple TVs, but you don’t have to.