Use case · Dashboards

Grafana on Apple TV (Without a Raspberry Pi)

Most guides for putting Grafana on a TV ask you to buy a Raspberry Pi, install the grafana-kiosk plugin, configure auto-login, and wire it to a display. PMVW skips that. Capture your Grafana dashboard from Chrome on a Mac or Windows machine you already have, and cast it to your Apple TV over your local network — with up to four dashboards on screen at once.

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Why most Grafana-on-TV guides start with a Raspberry Pi

Grafana doesn't have a native TV app. Apple TV doesn't ship a general-purpose web browser. So the standard recipe — repeated across every blog post and the official grafana-kiosk project — is to build a small dedicated computer:

Buy a Raspberry Pi 4 (or similar single-board computer) and a microSD card.
Install Raspberry Pi OS, Chromium, and the grafana-kiosk plugin.
Configure auto-login, full-screen Chromium, and a watchdog to restart it on crashes.
Wire the Pi to your TV over HDMI, run an Ethernet cable to it, and find a power outlet.
Maintain the Pi forever — OS updates, Chromium updates, Grafana plugin compatibility.

It works. It's also a weekend of setup, $50 to $100 in extra hardware, and a permanent piece of infrastructure to look after — for what is essentially "show this web page on a TV." If you have a TV with HDMI inputs, this is fine. If you have an Apple TV (because that's what you watch everything else on), you've now added a parallel device that does one thing.

The PMVW approach: capture the tab, send it to Apple TV

PMVW reuses the Mac or Windows machine you already have. It runs as a tiny background app on your computer, captures any Chrome tab — including a logged-in Grafana dashboard — and streams it to the PMVW receiver app on your Apple TV over your local network. There's no extra Linux box, no kiosk plugin, no display-cabling project.

The Pi setup

Raspberry Pi + grafana-kiosk

$50–$100 in hardware
OS, Chromium, kiosk plugin to maintain
One dashboard per Pi
Permanent extra device on the wall

With PMVW

Chrome tab → Apple TV over LAN

Uses the Apple TV you already own
Standard Chrome auth — SSO, VPN, all work
Up to 4 dashboards at once on one screen
No new device to maintain

Watch four dashboards at once

The grafana-kiosk pattern shows one dashboard at a time. If you want a NOC-style wall display with several panels visible together, you either rotate dashboards on a timer or build multiple Pi rigs. PMVW renders up to four independent Chrome captures in a 2×2 grid on a single Apple TV — so you can pin a Grafana service-health board, a Home Assistant overview, a Cloudflare traffic view, and a Datadog APM screen side by side.

The same setup works for any web-based dashboard or admin panel: Home Assistant, Node-RED, Uptime Kuma, Portainer, Proxmox, Nextcloud, Plex / Jellyfin, Synology DSM, Frigate NVR, or your own internal tools. If it loads in Chrome, PMVW can put it on your Apple TV — no Pi, no kiosk plugin, no per-tool integration.

Each tile is its own browser session, so they stay logged in independently and refresh in real time. Latency is typically under 50 ms on a wired LAN, with H.265 hardware encoding keeping the source machine's CPU low.

Tiles aren't limited to web dashboards either. Each slot can be any source PMVW supports — another Chrome tab, a live sports stream, an IPTV channel, an RTSP security camera, a YouTube feed, or HDMI captured from a USB capture card (Elgato, AVerMedia, and similar). Audio is per-tile, so on a quiet on-call shift you can pin three Grafana panels and watch the match on the fourth.

How to set it up

Install the PMVW sender app on your Mac or PC. Download from the home page. The sender runs in the background and captures Chrome tabs.
Install the PMVW receiver app on your Apple TV. Free download from the tvOS App Store. Requires tvOS 17 or newer.
Open tile.pmvw.app in Chrome. Enter the pairing code shown on your Apple TV. The two devices link over your LAN.
Add your Grafana URL as a source. Paste the dashboard URL, log in, and pick the tile slot. Repeat for up to four dashboards.

What you need

Apple TV (tvOS 17+) — any current Apple TV HD or 4K model.
A Mac or Windows PC — already running, on the same local network as the Apple TV.
Google Chrome — used to capture the dashboard tab.
A Grafana instance you can log into from Chrome — Grafana Cloud, on-prem, or behind a VPN. PMVW uses your existing browser session, so any auth method works.
Wired Ethernet recommended — Wi-Fi works on a clean 5 GHz network, but Ethernet is more consistent for a wall display you leave on for hours.

Who uses it this way

Home-lab operators showing Proxmox, Home Assistant, and self-hosted service health on the living-room TV.
Small ops teams putting a NOC-style wall in the corner of the office without a $5,000 AV install.
Server-room status displays showing rack power, network, and alert dashboards on a single mounted Apple TV.
On-call engineers using a spare Apple TV in the home office as a glanceable secondary screen.
Production-line and warehouse displays showing live OEE, throughput, and quality metrics from Grafana.

Replace the Pi with the Apple TV you already own

Free for 7 days. Cancel anytime. No Raspberry Pi, no kiosk plugin, no extra hardware to maintain.

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FAQ

Does PMVW work with private or authenticated Grafana dashboards?

Yes. PMVW captures whatever your Chrome browser shows, so any dashboard you can reach with a normal login — Grafana Cloud, on-prem with SSO, or behind a VPN — works the same way. Authentication happens in Chrome, not in PMVW.

Can I display non-Grafana dashboards alongside Grafana?

Yes. Each tile is an independent Chrome tab, so you can mix Grafana with Datadog, a status page, a Cloudflare dashboard, or any other web tool in the same 4-tile layout.

Do I need to keep my Mac or PC running?

Yes. The source machine running Chrome captures the dashboards and sends them to the Apple TV over your local network, so it needs to be on whenever you want the wall display to work.

What is the latency from dashboard update to TV?

Typically under 50 ms on a wired LAN. Streaming uses WebRTC with H.265 hardware encoding, so dashboards stay in sync with the source.