The aerial screensavers available on the new Apple TV make for a refreshing change from the photo-based screen savers of prior versions; currently Apple offers up 34 different screensavers covering five specific locations around the world: China, Hawaii, London, New York, and San Francisco. Rather than storing the screensavers permanently as part of tvOS, the Apple TV downloads new screensaver footage from Apple’s servers on a schedule.
If you find that your screensavers are getting stale, you can increase how often the Apple TV downloads new content from Apple’s servers by going into the Apple TV Settings app and choosing General, Screensaver.
Selecting “Download New Videos” will present options for Never, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. More frequent options will provide more variations on which screensavers are shown, but keep in mind that each download is approximately 600 MB, so if you have a data cap on your Internet plan, you might want to dial this one down.
Choosing “Never” will leave you with whatever content was last downloaded onto the Apple TV, but will prevent the device from going out to the Internet and needlessly gobbling up limited bandwidth.
While you can’t control which screensavers the Apple TV displays, several folks have managed to deconstruct the URLs to find Apple’s source for the new aerial screensavers. If you want to take a look at all of the options available, you can find a complete list on Benjamin Mayo’s blog.
