Apple TV does a lot of things better than Google TV, but if there’s one thing I’ve always been a little jealous of, it’s the screensavers. Instead of static images, Apple TV plays 4K video clips as a screensaver, and they just look way cooler. I wasn’t about to buy an entirely new box just for that, though. So, I used a free app called Aerial Views to bring those same screensavers to my TCL Google TV.
Google TV’s screensaver game is weak
Your TV deserves better
Google TV has screensavers, but they’re nothing special. Sure, there’s a decent library covering everything from mountains and cities to art, but they all look pretty boring after a while. You can connect Google Photos to see your own photos, but that’s not something everyone likes to do. I certainly don’t.
Apple TV screensavers are a different story because they’re not static images. Apple TV shows aerial drone 4K videos, and they’re genuinely eye-catching. You’d see top-down shots of cities, scenic views of national parks, and remote regions like the Grand Canyon. It honestly doesn’t matter what’s actually on the screen. Every single one of those clips feels like it’s worth watching.
Screensavers aren’t something everyone cares about, of course. Still, the ones you get on the Apple TV actually make you want to keep your TV on even while you’re not watching anything.
Bring Apple TV-like screensavers to your Google TV
Give your Google TV a glow-up
Aerial Views is a free, open-source app that brings Apple TV’s video screensavers to any Google TV. It includes 4K clips from Apple, Amazon, Jetson Creative and Robin Fourcade. You can pick your preferred sources and even specify what type of content they show — nature, beach, city, sea, outer space, or countryside. These stream over the internet, so they use up to 4GB of data every hour.
You can even load videos from an Immich server, Nextcloud Memories server, NAS, or your PC. If you want something that works offline, the app can also load screensavers from local storage or a USB drive. You can grab the video packs for that from Aerial Views’ GitHub page.
Video screensavers are only half the story. The real deal is all the extras the app offers. Head to its settings menu and you’ll see options to add overlays. You get eight overlay slots, two per corner, and you can fill them with weather, a clock, the date, a countdown, or a custom message.
Heck, you can even control the size and spacing of each of these overlays. If it’s a weather overlay, you can control the unit. For a clock overlay, you can pick the time format. And if you’ve added a music overlay, you can specify whether it shows the artist name or just the song. It even lets you alternate the overlay positions if you’ve got an OLED TV and are worried about burn-in.
My favorite thing about Aerial Views is that it lets you control the video playback. You can use the D-pad on your remote to skip to the next or previous video, adjust the playback speed, change the brightness, pause a video, or hide overlays. It even lets you play a specific video that you like on loop without going into settings.
You’ll also find options to set up a sleep timer, adjust the scaling, change the transition between videos, and a lot more. There’s obviously no need to mess with every single option here, but it’s there if you want. Finally, you can also preview the screensaver from the app itself.
Setting it up takes some effort
The big catch
Aerial Views is completely free and customizable, but getting it working on your TV takes a bit of effort. This is actually a Google TV problem. Starting with Android 12, Google TVs no longer let you pick a third-party screensaver app from the regular settings menu, so simply installing the Aerial Views app won’t do.
First, you’ll need to unlock the Developer Options menu and enable USB debugging. Then, go to the network settings menu and find the IP address of your TV. From here, you need to use a phone or a computer to run a few ADB commands. I personally used my Windows PC for this part since I already had SKD Platform Tools set up there. Finally, you need to run these commands to set Aerial Views as the default screensaver option.
adb connect ip_address
adb shell
settings put secure screensaver_components com.neilturner.aerialviews/.ui.screensaver.DreamActivity
settings put system screen_off_timeout 600000
All of this does take some work, of course. But if you want those video screensavers, Aerial Views is worth the effort. Their GitHub page has all the instructions laid out in detail, which makes the setup smooth.