Most people run an Emby Apple TV app for their personal library and a separate IPTV app for live channels — two remotes, two mental models, two guides. OneTV Connect collapses them into one. Connect your Emby server with an API key and your Emby Live TV channels line up next to your M3U and Xtream channels, sharing the same EPG grid and the same multi-engine player. Here is the full walkthrough, gotchas included.
Why run Emby and IPTV together?
IPTV gives you live channels and a VOD catalog; Emby gives you the movies and shows you have ripped, curated and tagged over the years. Keeping them in separate apps means constantly switching, re-learning two navigation styles, and juggling two watch histories. With OneTV Connect they live in one home. Your Emby Recently Added and Continue Watching rails sit right next to your live channels, and — crucially — if your Emby server has a tuner, its Emby Live TV channels merge straight into the same Live tab. This is what makes Emby IPTV feel like a single product rather than two apps bolted together.
Generating an Emby API key
The cleanest way to sign in is with an API key — no password to type on the Apple TV remote. Open the Emby web UI on any device, go to Settings → Advanced → API Keys, click the + button, give the key a recognizable name such as "OneTV Apple TV", and copy it. That's the whole ceremony. The key is scoped to your server and can be revoked from the same screen at any time, so it's safe to hand one out per device — an Apple TV in the kids' room, a second one at a vacation home, and so on. You do not need an Emby Premiere subscription: OneTV Connect uses the public Emby Server API, which works on every tier.
Connecting Emby in OneTV Connect
On the Apple TV, connecting takes about two minutes:
- Open OneTV Connect and go to Settings → Integrations → Emby.
- Enter your server URL (for example
http://192.168.1.20:8096on your LAN, or your remote address). - Paste the API key you copied earlier. Prefer the old-fashioned way? The standard username and password flow is also supported — credentials are stored in the iOS Keychain, scoped to that device.
- OneTV connects, verifies the server and starts indexing your libraries in the background. You can keep browsing while it works.
Once the first sync finishes, Movies, TV Shows and — if present — Live TV are all detected automatically.
Live TV alongside your IPTV EPG
This is the headline feature. If your Emby server is wired to a tuner — an HDHomeRun, a USB DVB stick, a Tvheadend or NextPVR backend — it exposes a list of TV channels with a program guide. OneTV Connect pulls that channel list and its EPG and renders it inside the same Live tab as your IPTV sources. That means your Emby Live TV Apple TV channels sit shoulder to shoulder with your M3U and Xtream channels: one unified guide, one favorites list, one player. No separate "Emby TV" section to hunt through, no second EPG to scroll. Zap between a broadcast channel from your antenna and an IPTV stream without ever noticing which source it came from.
Multi-server and favorites
You can add several Emby servers — your own, a family member's, a friend's. Each server is treated as its own source, keeping its own watch state, but their libraries aggregate into the same Recently Added, Continue Watching and Search rails, and their Live TV channels merge into the same guide. Favorites are bi-directional: heart a title in the Emby web interface and it shows up in your OneTV favorites; mark something watched in OneTV and Emby receives the timeline report through its standard Sessions API. Continue Watching therefore stays in sync whichever app you last opened.
Trakt scrobbling
When an Emby movie or episode plays in OneTV Connect, the app resolves its TMDB ID and sends a scrobble to Trakt — exactly the same logic used for Plex and Jellyfin. The payoff is a single Trakt history that spans every source: IPTV VOD, downloads, and all your media servers together. Turn Trakt on once and stop worrying about which app you watched something in.
Tips for the best experience
- Run Emby on your LAN when you can. Local connections give the snappiest browsing and let the multi-engine player direct-play high-bitrate files without transcoding.
- Use an API key per device. It avoids typing passwords on the remote and lets you revoke access for one Apple TV without touching the others.
- Let the player choose itself. KSPlayer handles 4K HEVC natively, MPV covers the awkward codecs, VLC catches the rest — OneTV picks automatically per file.
- Combine sources. Emby Live TV plus your IPTV channels plus Sport Centre gives you one place for everything that's on right now.
That's the whole setup. For the deeper feature list, see the Emby integration page, and if you also run other servers, the Jellyfin and Plex integrations work the same way. OneTV Connect is a free download, and if anything goes sideways the support page has the full troubleshooting checklist.