Ateme powers live Apple Immersive Video workflows for Vision Pro

Ateme’s integration solves the technical complexity of live immersive broadcasting by providing a standardized signal chain compatible with Apple’s ecosystem. By enabling MV-HEVC compression and HLS delivery at scale, Ateme allows broadcasters to move beyond experimental VOD clips toward sustainable live events. This marks a critical step for the VR market, which has struggled with high-bitrate delivery and a lack of live content. Organizations should watch for the first professional live sports deployments using this stack to gauge real-world bandwidth performance and user adoption.

The activation of third-party encoding support comes as Apple aggressively expands its immersive content library. In late 2025, Apple announced a partnership with Spectrum SportsNet to stream select NBA games in the Apple Immersive format to Vision Pro users during the 2025-2026 season, per Engadget. This expansion marks a shift from recorded experiences toward live vertical-integration, utilizing specialized hardware like the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera. According to Apple's WWDC26 sessions, the immersive production format requires processing video resolutions 32 times larger than standard 2D broadcasts to maintain human visual acuity.

Technologically, the industry is coalescing around the Multiview HEVC (MV-HEVC) codec. While royalty-free alternatives like AV1 are seeing rapid general adoption—with 40% of organizations planning deployments in 2026 per a Netint report—MV-HEVC remains the required standard for the high-fidelity spatial experiences defined by Apple. This technical split necessitates specialized infrastructure, such as Ateme’s TITAN, that can handle both the high-frame-rate pixel processing and the deep metadata required for spatial mapping.

The ecosystem is also maturing at the OS level via visionOS 27, which introduced the Immersive Media Support (IMS) framework. Per Apple's June 2026 developer documentation, this framework enables real-time previewing of immersive feeds directly from a Mac during live production. Combined with new ad-insertion capabilities in the delivery layer, these developments suggest the industry is moving toward a commercially viable model for spatial computing, targeting professional sports and premium entertainment as the primary drivers for a hardware installed base still estimated at under 500,000 units globally.