The IPTV player for Xbox Series X and S, compared with everything else on the console

Search the Xbox store for a way to watch your own playlist and the field is small. The three names everyone on Android TV knows, TiviMate, OTT Navigator and IPTV Smarters, are not in it. We searched the console store for each of them on 2026-10-02 and found 0 listings.

What does run on an Xbox Series X or Series S is a long-standing free UWP player, a media centre with an add-on, the console build of VLC, and a handful of single-developer apps. And ours. My TV Player was built for the console from the start rather than ported to it, and the table below is the honest version of how that compares.

We make one of the five columns, so read it knowing that. Every competitor cell comes from the product's own store listing or documentation, checked on the date above.

Side by side#

TiviMate, OTT Navigator and IPTV Smarters would be a sixth column of "no build". If you own an Android TV as well, the TiviMate alternative for PC and Xbox covers that pairing.

What a console player has to get right#

Nobody should type a portal address with a thumbstick. An Xtream login is a host, a port, a username and a password: roughly 60 characters, including a colon and 2 slashes, on an on-screen keyboard. Every other app in the table asks you to do that on the console, or to sideload a file onto it.

My TV Player does not. The console shows a code and a QR, you claim it on your phone or PC, and the console signs itself in:

Sign in on your phone

Go to    mytvplayer.app/pair
Then enter the 8-character code

         K7QP - 4M2X

Your playlists, guide sources, profiles and favourites then arrive over sync. You add a source once, in the web console or the Windows app, and every device on the account has it. Installing My TV Player on Xbox walks through the first launch.

The controller has about 5 useful buttons. Live TV, Guide, Movies, Shows, Search and Sport are built as 10-foot screens, with a hint bar on every one saying what each button does there. On a catalogue with 373 categories, a letter jump on the triggers crosses every initial in 20 presses. The controller map has the full layout.

A stream will stop eventually. Auto-repair watches each live channel and reconnects, or moves to a backup source of the same channel, when it stalls. It is a setting on the console, and it is the feature you notice least when it works.

What you get beyond live channels#

Catch-up. If your provider archives a channel, the guide offers "Watch from catch-up" on past programmes, and the console keeps your position. What catch-up and timeshift are explains what the provider has to support.

Movies and series that look like a streaming service. Posters and backdrops from TMDB, 7 sort orders, continue watching, mark a whole series watched, and a detail page with the episode list. Progress follows the profile, so a film started on the PC resumes on the console.

Subtitles that stay picked. Search subtitles from the player with your OpenSubtitles key, and the choice is remembered per series. The next episode fetches the same language on its own.

A household, not a login. Up to 10 profiles, each with its own favourites and history. Kid profiles carry a rating gate, a bedtime and a daily time limit, and when time runs out a parent approves more by scanning a QR on their phone rather than typing a PIN in front of the child. Parental controls on Xbox has the details.

Sport. Pick your teams and leagues, and the Sport page lists their fixtures with the channel in your own playlist that carries each match. A kick-off can send a notification to the console.

What the console build does not do#

Four things, so you are not surprised later.

It does not record. Recording writes to a disk the app controls, and that is the Windows app's job. It has no multiview, which needs more memory than a console app is given. Films and episodes above 1080p are refused with a message rather than played, because a 4K 10-bit file can exhaust the console's video memory budget. That one took us a console reboot to learn. HDR output and audio passthrough are desktop features too; 4K and HDR on Xbox explains why that is a platform limit rather than a setting.

And the console app is in beta. The store listing is not published yet, so check the Xbox page for its current state before you plan an evening around it.

Cost#

There is a free plan: 1 device, 1 profile, 1 playlist and a now-and-next guide. Paid plans add devices, up to 10 profiles, more playlists, the full guide and sport, billed yearly or once for life. No plan shows ads. Payment happens on the website, never on the console.

Which one to pick#

If you only want to check that a provider's playlist plays at all, VLC on the console answers that in a minute. If you already run Kodi for a local library, adding the IPTV Simple add-on keeps everything in one application. If you want a free player and do not mind typing your login on the console, MyIPTV Player has done that job since 2017.

If you want the console to behave like a television, with a guide, catch-up, a film library, profiles for the family and nothing typed on a controller, that is the gap My TV Player was built to fill.