Monitor Your Home Cameras and Door Locks from Your Apple TV
With tvOS 15, you can now monitor all of your HomeKit Secure Video cameras in a single grid view, just as you see on many security monitors, all live and in real-time.
Previously, although there were third-party tvOS apps that could fill the gap, Apple’s built-in control centre only let you pull up a single camera at a time, and swipe between them. Now, you can show up to six cameras at once on a single screen.
That’s not all, either. When viewing individual cameras, you can also now control any accessories that are in the same zone, so you can easily turn on your porch light or even unlock your front door without having to reach for your iPhone.
The new Secure Accessories section in the Apple TV settings allows you to decide if your Apple TV Remote should be able to unlock or open doors. So you can still lock this down if you’d prefer, or you can even open it up to allow other remote control accessories like Game Controllers to be used as well. Note that this only applies to controlling locks from your camera feeds — you still can’t use Siri on the Apple TV to unlock or open doors.
You can also get more HomeKit notifications on your Apple TV screen. This includes each of your secure accessories, so you’ll know when a door is locked/closed or unlocked/opened, as well as motion detected by your HomeKit cameras.
Lock notifications will simply show a banner to let you know what just happened, while camera notifications will show you a thumbnail preview, and name any faces that it recognizes. This basically works in the same way as the Doorbell Notifications added in tvOS 14 last year, but extended to notify you when motion is detected as well.
As with HomeKit Secure Video on your iPhone or iPad, you can also choose to be notified when any motion is detected, when only specific motion is detected (a person, animal, vehicle, or package), or only when a video clip is actually recorded (based on your recording settings).