By Dan Moren

December 21, 2023 12:42 PM PT

Zoom on tvOS: Big screen video chatting needs some work

Ever since the announcement earlier this year of Continuity Camera for tvOS, I’ve been looking forward to giving Zoom a try on the Apple TV. The app dropped with little fanfare earlier this month, and I finally got to give it a whirl, but the result was underwhelming, to say the least.

First, some background on my particular (and perhaps unique) situation. I play a few regular Dungeons & Dragons games with my wife and several friends via Zoom. Since my wife and I are both in the same room, it’s convenient to be able to display both the video call and our map (using Roll 20) on the big screen of our living room TV, rather than peering at a small laptop display. So I use my M1 MacBook Air, extend the desktop to my Apple TV, and then run the Zoom call and Chrome in split screen on the Apple TV.¹

This approach has its downsides; for one thing, we’re looking at the TV, but since we still need to reach the trackpad and keyboard, the MacBook (and its camera) is usually on an ottoman in front of us. For another, neither the MacBook microphone nor camera are great, and it requires some awkward positioning to get everything framed up (and audible).

Offloading the call onto the Zoom app on the Apple TV while using my iPhone as the camera and mic seemed like it might simplify matters, but as so often happens with new technology, this is where things started to get sticky.

Not a joiner

The initial version of Zoom’s app on tvOS is bare-bones to say the least. Once you launch it and get your camera connected, you only have a few options: there are buttons for New Meeting and Join Meeting, and a tab that lets you view your contacts.

Here’s the thing: the way 90 percent of my Zoom calls work is by being sent a link, usually via email or Slack. Those links generally include the meeting ID and password, which are each strings of random numbers and letters.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to open those links on the Apple TV. So, instead, I have to enter the codes manually. The easiest way to do that is to use the TV Remote feature of Control Center on iOS to bring up a software keyboard, rather than laboriously entering those random characters via the Apple TV’s hardware remote. But of course, I’ve already got my phone acting as a camera and mounted atop the TV, so I have to use my iPad instead.² When I tried this, I ran into a bug where the contextual pop-up menu with the Paste command would appear off the screen.

I eventually gave up and entered the eleven-digit meeting code via the hardware remote. And then finally, after a lot of wrangling, I eventually got the password to paste in as well.

(As a note, it seems as though once you’ve joined a meeting, it does show up in your Meeting History in the Zoom app for tvOS, so that may simplify matters in the future, but for those of us who rely on Zoom links, it’s still a definite annoyance.)

Meet not-so-cute

Once I was able to join the meeting, the UI of the Zoom app is at least familiar, with little squares of video and a toolbar at the bottom. But even there, the tvOS is certainly far simpler than its counterpart on the Mac (and probably even than iOS).

Unfortunately, my problems hadn’t ended yet. The first issue I ran into was having the people on the other end of the call note that our audio was very quiet and muffled. Unfortunately—and this may be down to Apple—there was no way that I could find to boost the gain of the iPhone microphone. It may be that Continuity Microphone simply isn’t designed when people are sitting several feet away from the TV, though one would think that would be an issue on FaceTime on tvOS as well. In a subsequent test call with Jason, the audio quality was definitely lacking, and we were both able to hear our own audio coming through the other person’s speakers until we switched to AirPods. It definitely seems like Zoom’s vaunted noise cancellation doesn’t work nearly as well (if at all!) on tvOS, though it’s unclear whether that’s a limitation of the hardware or the software.

In one attempt to deal with the muffled audio, I disabled the Noise Cancellation features via the app’s Settings menu, and that seemed to help make things louder at least. I also thought that perhaps changing Apple’s Continuity Microphone settings to one of the other options it now offers might help matters, but it turned out that Zoom on tvOS either doesn’t offer those options, or there’s a bug in tvOS’s Continuity Microphone system: I couldn’t change the mic mode off Standard, even though FaceTime on tvOS does offer both Wide Spectrum and Voice Isolation modes.

Similarly, when my wife asked me to turn off Center Stage because the constant motion was bugging her, I was pleased to discover that I could use the camera controls on tvOS to reframe the shot, centering us both…only those settings would not stick when I returned to Zoom. Instead, we were both cropped out of the image, with just the tops of our heads visible. On my subsequent call with Jason, this did seem to work, and in my test the option works just fine in FaceTime on tvOS, so it may have been a transient bug.³

Bigger picture

There are some other issues that make this setup less than ideal, though they aren’t really Zoom’s fault. For one, the Belkin display mount I used, intended for external displays, doesn’t quite play nice with my TV—either that, or the TV itself isn’t totally steady, because I get a very minute (but still distracting) vibration of my camera image. Could I move the phone closer? Sure! But that would return us the issue of having the camera in one place while we’re looking another. Doable, but not as much of an improvement over my current situation.

Secondly, though having Zoom on the TV and using Chrome on my laptop is a fine workaround, I would really love it if there were still some sort of split-screen support on tvOS for running multiple apps at a time (or, at least, for AirPlaying a screen to the Apple TV while also making a video call). I realize that may be kind of a niche usage, and possibly very intensive, but a man can dream.

Overall, though, what this experience really makes me long for is a holistic Apple device that is designed for video conferencing on a big screen. Even though such a device was reportedly in testing at some point, I think there’s even less of a chance of it coming to fruition now that Continuity Camera is supported on Apple TV. Even the idea of having an external mic or camera that you could connect somehow would be nice, but again, I think unlikely—the current Apple TV models have removed the USB port found on earlier versions.

So, in terms of improvements that could be made in the here and now, I’m hopeful that a future version of the Zoom app for tvOS will take better advantage of the platform features, bringing it on par with the FaceTime app. But until then, I’m going back to my functional—if sadly janky—MacBook setup.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

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