Guide · Home Assistant Intermediate
Run Theatrium on Home Assistant
Theatrium works happily with Apple Home, but Home Assistant is where it can do the most: every card type, live cameras, sensors and energy, custom alerts, and devices that never supported HomeKit. Home Assistant is free, open source and runs on your own hardware — and it's the software Theatrium was built alongside. If you've been curious about it, this is a good reason to try.
TheatriumEvery card, on the TV
Do you need it? No. If your home is already in Apple Home and you're happy with what's on the dashboard, stay there — see the Apple Home guide. Home Assistant is the option for people who want more devices, more data on screen, and alerts they've written themselves. You can switch between the two in Theatrium at any time.
Install Home Assistant
Home Assistant is a free, open-source home server. It runs on hardware you own and keeps your home's data in your house rather than in someone's cloud.
The usual routes are Home Assistant Green (a small box you plug in and forget), a Raspberry Pi, or a container on a NAS or mini PC. Their own guide covers each one properly: home-assistant.io/installation.
Set aside an hour for the first install. Nothing about it is Theatrium-specific — you're setting up a normal Home Assistant, and Theatrium reads it afterwards.
Add your devices
Home Assistant finds a lot on its own; the rest is a search away in Settings › Devices & services. There are integrations for well over a thousand brands, including plenty that never shipped HomeKit support — which is often the reason people end up here in the first place.
Browse what's supported: home-assistant.io/integrations.
Give things sensible names and put them in rooms as you go. Theatrium uses your Home Assistant rooms and names exactly as they are, so tidy there means tidy on the TV.
Create an access token
Theatrium signs in with a long-lived access token — a key you generate yourself and can revoke whenever you like. Your Home Assistant password never leaves Home Assistant.
In Home Assistant, click your name at the bottom of the sidebar, open the Security tab, scroll to Long-lived access tokens and create one. Copy it — it's shown only once.
Reference: Home Assistant's authentication docs.
Point Theatrium at it
On the Apple TV, open Settings › Connections, choose Home Assistant, and enter your server address — usually http://homeassistant.local:8123 or the machine's IP address with :8123 on the end. Paste the token underneath.
Don't type the token with the remote if you can avoid it — AirDrop or email the token to yourself and use the Apple TV’s iPhone keyboard prompt instead. A free Theatrium companion app Coming soon will soon send the address and token straight to the TV.
Both devices need to be on the same network. Nothing goes through a server of ours — the Apple TV talks to your Home Assistant directly.
What it unlocks
- Every card type. Cameras, sensors, energy and EV data, media players, covers, locks, scenes and switches — the full library, driven by whatever Home Assistant knows about.
- Alerts you write yourself. Any automation can put a banner on the TV — the washing machine finishing, a door left open. See the custom alerts guide.
- Devices Apple Home can't see. If a brand has a Home Assistant integration, Theatrium can show it, with no Homebridge in the middle.
- Room data on screen. Temperature, humidity, power, whatever you've got sensing — the things that make a dashboard worth looking at.
Good to know
- It stays local. No cloud account is needed for any of this, and Theatrium has no server in the middle — see the privacy page.
- You can keep Apple Home too. Switching sources in Settings › Connections takes seconds, so trying Home Assistant costs you nothing.
- Worth supporting. Home Assistant is free and community-built, run by the non-profit Open Home Foundation. A Home Assistant Cloud subscription funds the work and adds remote access and voice — we're glad it exists, and Theatrium wouldn't be what it is without the project.
- Stuck? Their community forum is unusually good. For the Theatrium side of things, hello@theatrium.info.
This guide is general information, provided “as is” with no warranty of any kind. It describes independent third-party software that Theatrium does not control, and the steps involve installing software and changing settings on your own equipment — back up first and proceed at your own risk. Read the full disclaimer.