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I have videos in iTunes on my Mac desktop (in the TV Shows and Movies sections) that are shared using Home Sharing with my Apple ID. Home sharing is turned on and working; I can watch the videos on my Apple TV.

I used to use Apple's Videos app to watch on my iPhone. As of iOS 10.2, Videos seems to be gone, nominally replaced with TV. Apple's instructions for Home Sharing, published Dec 6, 2016, refer to Videos and don't mention TV at all.

I don't see any obvious way to watch shared videos with the TV app. I went to its Settings pane and signed out of my Apple ID and back in, but still nothing. The Settings pane does explicitly list Home Sharing, which suggests that it should be possible, but I am stumped.

How can I watch videos shared from iTunes using Home Sharing on my iPhone with iOS 10.2?

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4 Answers 4

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I found that once i downloaded a free tv episode my shared library showed up. enter image description here

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  • Worked for me! Except when I tap the name of my shared library, I get a blank page with a spinning progress indicator that never ends.
    – Robert
    Commented Dec 27, 2016 at 7:50
  • I don't know why this was down-voted. Indeed, I had my "Home Sharing" library missing from the TV app and it started showing up after I "purchased" a free episode of some show.
    – Bogdan Calmac
    Commented May 7, 2018 at 6:06
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The TV app will show all iTunes libraries that are shared under the same Home Sharing account right on the "front page"

When you start the app, you should be on the "Library" tab (check tab at bottom, you have "Library", "Watch Now", "Store" and "Search").

Your home sharing libraries will be listed on the Library page, you have "TV Shows", "Movies" and then the name of your library, with the name you picked in iTunes' General Preferences, Library Name. If you have more than one iTunes instance running on your network, and they're all shared on the same account, they will all show up there.

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  • Here's what I see on the Library tab when I start the app. I haven't purchased or rented any videos, so that is OK, but there's nothing about home sharing at all.
    – Robert
    Commented Dec 27, 2016 at 1:33
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    And here is mine, showing "Peter's Library" from home sharing. Makes me wonder if they have a bug that doesn't show home sharing if there's no content for the other items.
    – Peter Dennis Bartok
    Commented Dec 27, 2016 at 3:16
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I have multiple devices for the family with multiple accounts, all of which share the same Home Sharing account. It used to work, and does on my personal device, but not the rest of the family sharing the same home sharing account. Use a different iCloud ID and login with your home sharing account and you'll see.

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  • In the same situation. We started purchasing TV shows, movies, and music from iTunes when iTunes first made them available over a decade ago I'd guess. We've thousands of dollars of shows and movies that our children love to watch again and again, stored on our NAS. With recent changes, introduction of the TV app, none of these are listed anymore and even restoring past purchases on other devices via child accounts is ridiculous difficult. It's coercive with the intent on making consumers accidentally purchase again or switch to their new, expensive subscribe-per-show business model.
    – Michael Prescott
    Commented Feb 8, 2017 at 1:24
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If you have no purchased/rented content, it will not show up. As soon as you load some kind of content it will show up on the Library page. If this is intentional, it stinks...

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