Video Screenshots - Apple TV Release [June 2023]

What's New? Zwift Game
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Hi everyone!

I’m Evan and I’m a Senior Engineering Manager at Zwift. Starting this week, we’re starting to gradually roll out the Video Screenshots feature for Apple TV.

With Video Screenshots enabled, whenever you have a notable moment in Zwift, we’ll automatically capture short, 15-second video recordings – that means you’ll never miss setting a new PR, finishing an event or challenge, completing a workout, or taking a jersey.

You can also manually capture any previous 15 seconds of action. There are two ways to do this (and note if you’ve used Video Screenshots on other Apple platforms: on Apple TV, videos are not saved to your device locally in the same way as other Apple platforms; more on this later).

If you use the Zwift Companion app, you can press the Video Screenshot button and your videos will sync to your mobile device and be stored there so you can share them on social media. (It’s up to you to delete videos from your smartphone’s storage.)

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Within the game, you can select the Video Screenshot button in the Action Bar using your Apple TV remote or Zwift Play controller.

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At the end of your session, if you’ve integrated your Zwift account with Strava, you can select one video to upload to Strava at the end of your activity. Unlike other platforms like macOS and iOS, your videos will not be saved locally in your Apple TV storage, nor will it be saved to your Apple Photos app.

Apple TV-specific FAQ’s

Q: Which Apple TV models support Video Screenshots?
A: Video Screenshots will begin rolling out this week to Zwifters using Apple TV 4K (2nd Generation) and Apple TV 4K (3rd Generation), which includes models A2843, A2737, A2169 (see the Apple Support site to identify your Apple TV model). The rollout will happen in phases over the next several days.

Q: What about older Apple TV models?
A: We’re gathering additional performance data on these devices and will look for opportunities to roll this feature out to more devices over time. Older devices may not have enough processing power to record a video in the background at the same time as you’re riding / running.

Q: How do I turn off Video Screenshots?
You can enable or disable Video Screenshots in Zwift Settings. When disabled, you will no longer see the filmstrip icon in your blue Action Bar, Video Screenshots will no longer be automatically captured after Notable Moments, and no video recordings will be saved to your device.

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Q: Where can I learn more about Video Screenshots?
For more detailed information about Video Screenshots in general, including a full list of feature FAQs, see this previous forum update or the Screenshots and Video Capture article on the Zwift Support Site.

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Starting today, approximately 20% of Apple TV 4K (3rd Gen) and Apple TV 4K (2nd Gen) will have Video Screenshots enabled. We’re monitoring performance metrics and will continue increasing the rollout over the next few days. Please note though that these percentages are subject to change.

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Cool, thanks for the update!

I understand the typical Apple user likes shiny new features/UI but why the Zwift preference of two Apple OSs only? Versus still no Windows desktop or Android mobile, both whose users predominantly use those OSs because they have additional control of their devices and demand more functionality (eg: more UX than UI). And if your focus is more inward than user focused, wouldn’t Zwift want to support OSs that hold solid global majority of market share for both device types?

Unless Zwift long term strategy is to come across as the nice, easy to use product targeted at basic computer users, instead of the everyone else who should look somewhere else?

Can you help share general feature rollout roadmap timeline to help reassure a good percentage of your user base that it’s worth continuing our Zwift subscriptions when the off-season returns in a few months? Otherwise you’ll leave many of us assuming Apple is the Zwift preference moving forward and the rest of us should start weighing or options.

Thank you!

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Great questions! We’ve covered this in other threads, but I’m happy to explain here in more detail.

For Video Screenshots, our platform rollout plans are based off of a lot of factors, especially performance and platform-specific capabilities (which may make implementing a feature more or less complex or risky). It was essential to us that Video Screenshots had minimal performance impact on the game, so we had to build unique implementations on every operating system (because every OS has different capabilities), and some operating systems had meaningful benefits that move them higher in our list.

For example, one of the big factors in rolling out to Apple devices first was because 1) Apple provides very performant APIs in its operating system for capturing image data that we use to create video screenshots, and those APIs are consistent across all of their OS versions - so although we still have to do some platform-by-platform work within Apple platforms, for the most part, we could build Video Screenshots for macOS and leverage almost all of that work for iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS; 2) Apple products have very limited hardware permutations (for better or for worse), which means we have a much simpler matrix of hardware to test and measure. For example, we currently have Video Screenshots rolled out for all macOS devices with M1 (and newer) chips, and all iOS devices with A12 (and newer) chips; because of how tightly Apple controls its hardware ecosystem, we can make huge assumptions about all of those devices that share the same chip having similar performance (which they do!).

But most of all, one main thing to note here is that we opted to roll this feature out on a platform-by-platform basis as soon as any one platform was ready, rather than hold it back until all were ready. Sure, that means that some platforms will get it sooner than others, which I know can be frustrating, but it also means we get feedback on the feature sooner and can improve it along the way, rather than withholding it from everyone until every platform is supported. And thanks to a lot of the improvements we’ve made along the way with the Apple implementation, Windows users will get all of those benefits right away when the feature launches on that platform.

At a macro level, we really don’t think about features on a platform-by-platform basis nor do we intend to build features as platform-specific by default. Video Screenshots, like most of our features, is ultimately intended to be available on as many devices as possible. Video Screenshots itself is just a little unique in that it legitimately requires a significant amount of platform-specific implementation to build, and we have to very seriously consider the performance capabilities of devices within a platform.

The Windows version of Video Screenshots is nearing completion and we are in the final stages of testing; we’re hoping to share more on this soon. We have not yet started building the feature for Android, but we’re currently evaluating the technical capabilities of the platform and will determine next steps based on what we learn. For what it’s worth, I’m also primarily a Windows and Android user in my personal use.

I hope this information is helpful!

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Update: Video Screenshots are now available for 50% of Apple TV 4K (3rd Gen) and Apple TV 4K (2nd Gen) devices.

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Update: Video Screenshots are now available for 100% of Apple TV 4K (3rd Gen) and Apple TV 4K (2nd Gen) devices. Have a great weekend!

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If all goes well with the feature that sounds like a great way to finish the week for an engineering manager :grinning:

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Splendid! I think Apple TV folks will really love this feature. Watch for lots of Zwifty highlights to start popping up on Strava!

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I have Apple TV 4k 1st generation… will the video snapshot would work? And when?

I still can’t get the feathers…
Thank you in advanced

Regards
Fatma

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Hi Fatma, we’re still doing some performance testing on Apple TV 4K (1st Generation) and don’t yet have an answer on if or when the feature will be extended to these devices. I’ll post back here when we have more on this.

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Also running ATV 4K Gen 1 and very keen for this feature. Considering it has the same processor as some iPad Pros that are already supported, I hope that can happen soon (admittedly on the older end!)

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Any ideas on whether notable videos/photos taken on Apple TV will be saved locally (and not just on Zwift) in the future. Currently you can only save/share 1 video when there might be multiple notable moments taken automatically you’d like to keep … (as it’ll be near impossible to hit the video button on ZC mid sprint! )

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Huh, I thought they were supposed to be saved in the Photos app

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Hi Evan,

I have ATV 4k; I’m on the latest version of the game and everything seems to be updated yet I don’t have the video screenshot available. It just doesn’t show up on the menu. Any help on fixing this?

Thanks.

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If it’s the 1st gen ATV 4K (which originally came with a black remote) then video screenshots aren’t supported on that model, only on the later 4K models.

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Yep, just checked and it is a 4k 1st Gen

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Hi Evan,

Just wondering if you plan getting the feature on 1st gen 4K? I hope so as it still runs Zwift smoothly and would be lovely to use the feature.

Best regards,

E.J. 105

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This is fab. I keep checking that it’s landed here and look forward to it arriving.

Ride on.

Dave

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Notable moments do not work with 1st gen 4k at this time too. Video capture will be on older Apple TV 4k’s right? I am still hoping🙏 Great way to see Zwift across Social Media Platforms also👍

More power & Ride on!

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Hello! This was a tricky one. We originally planned to save video screenshots locally on Apple TV (to solve exactly the problem you described), but ran into challenges due to the limitations of the Photos app on Apple TV. Namely, the Apple TV version of the Photos app doesn’t let you delete media on the device (which was super surprising to discover) – the only way to delete media was to enable iCloud sharing and then use a different device with the normal Photos app (like an iPhone or Mac) to delete the media. We did some initial testing of this version and got feedback from customers that it wasn’t a good experience, so for now we have the limitation where only one video is saved to Strava.

If the Apple TV Photos app gets updated in the future to allow better media management, even being simply able to delete media files, we can definitely look at this again.