Interactive “Black Mirror” movie cannot be viewed on Apple TV

If you’ve joined any social media platform in the past few hours, you’ve certainly encountered passionate reactions to the series’s new special episode Black Mirror. The interactive film, entitled "Bandersnatch", brings an entirely new experience that Globo had invented in the 1990s in which the narrative is controlled by those watching it; depending on your choices, the fate of the characters is completely changed and several endings are possible.

The problem? If you try to settle on the couch to watch the new episode (or control it) through your Apple TV, face a wall: it cannot be reproduced through Ma's black box.

To be more precise, Apple TV was not out of the news: "Bandersnatch" it also cannot be seen on Chromecast devices, the Netflix app for Windows, or on browsers that (still) use Silverlight technology. Some platform apps for older Smart TVs will also not be able to play the episode.

Why, exactly? Well, it can be said that the content is very different from that normally shown by Netflix and it is closer to a game than to a movie instead of a continuous video with a playback bar that you can fast forward or rewind at your leisure , "Bandersnatch" it has no playback controls (you can, at the most, fast forward or rewind ten seconds) and, due to its various possibilities of continuation, it has multiple “videos” that need to be loaded in the background for a reasonable experience.

Platform applications that have not been updated to perform the buffer of multiple content at the same time, therefore, the episode cannot competently display the case of Apple TV and Chromecast. Could Netflix have run to update its apps and include as many users in the game? I could, but who am I to question the company's decisions, anyway?

In the end, if you want to watch "Bandersnatch" to be able to participate in the conversations over the next month, you will have to settle for doing so on your Mac, iPhone or iPad. What is not the end of the world.


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via MacRumors