AirFlick Lets You Stream Video to the Apple TV Without iTunes [Video]

AirFlick is a new application by Erica Sadun that lets you stream video files to your Apple TV without iTunes.

AirFlick offers the potential of real-time transcoding of otherwise unsupported file types into Apple TV-compatible data. It also allows you to open videos located on the Internet by pasting a URL and clicking the play button. I was able to watch a number of Internet Archive (archive.org) mp4 videos on a big screen TV by browsing that website, selecting URLs, and opening them with AirFlick.

AirFlick works by transforming your Mac into a web browser, the same way AirPlay works on your iPhone or other iOS device. For Mac-based files, AirFlick tells your Apple TV to connect to a local URL and serves the data that the Apple TV plays back. So long as those files are in a supported format such as mp4, m4v, mp3, etc, the Apple TV can read and display the file data.


The app is .01 alpha which means you will experience some bugs while using it; however, this is great progress towards removing AirPlay's dependency on iTunes.

Last week Erica also announced AirPlayer, a custom Bonjour AirPlay service that lets you send video from your iPhone to your Mac just like you would to the Apple TV.