Despite its focus on casual content consumption, Netflix still hasn’t brought an app to Vision Pro. If you’re looking for a good replacement though, a new app called Supercut has you covered.

A number of streaming giants opted-out of including any sort of app for Vision Pro including Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify, which was a puzzling move since their iOS apps would have been supported by default. It’s ostensibly a snub at Apple, although the lack of these popular apps has left room for independent developers to fill in the gaps, like the paid app Juno does for YouTube on Vision Pro.

Created by Christian Privitelli, Supercut bundles access to Netflix and Prime Video together, allowing videos to stream up to 4K. This also includes features such as Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision, depending on your individual subscription plan.

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Although Netflix can be accessed through Safari, Supercut is thus far the only app that allows multichannel audio on Netflix on Vision Pro, which is possible thanks to its ability to position audio sources spatially. Additionally, it allows both Netflix and Prime Video to play in their intended aspect ratios and also dim your surroundings, making it more than just a web-based video launcher.

Admittedly, the only thing missing is the ability to download TV and film, like you can on mobile devices, although that’s likely an obstacle Supercut will never overcome, as the app is technically accessing the web-based version of both video streaming services, albeit with a number of modifications.

Like Juno for YouTube, you can grab Supercut on Vision Pro, priced at $5 on the App Store.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Andrew Jakobs

    I wonder if supercut is actually legal in regard to terms of use of the netflix/prime service.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Technically Supercut is just a web browser with a very specialized interface. The Netflix features it offers beyond the regular Safari are available to other browsers too, it’s just that Safari doesn’t utilize them. Netflix offers multichannel sound to browsers, but the regular Safari just ignores it or mixes it down to stereo, while Supercut places virtual speakers in the virtual room that then feed into the spatial audio capabilities of Vision Pro.

      As long as Supercut only accesses the same APIs and data Netflix/Amazon provide for browsers, there shouldn’t be any legal issues. Unless Netflix starts to demand using specific browsers in their EULA, and I’m not sure they could even do that, let alone enforce it. It would be easier to block unwanted/”unsupported” browsers, which is basically a web design dark pattern, but we’ve seen enough badly designed web sites/apps working with only Internet Explorer in the past or with only Chrome today thanks to incompetent/ignorant developers. Though Supercut will most likely use the Safari rendering ending, and blocking that and with it all iPhones, iPads and AppleTVs would be a bad business move for Netflix.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Netflix and Prime don’t offer API’s for browsers, it offers a website for browsers. I haven’t heard of any payed API’s that can be used to use the streampart of Netflix/Prime, but maybe there are and Supercut is using those and paying for it. But in a lot of cases these type of apps just mimmic a browser, but filter things like ads out and only show a stripped version of the website, and THAT is against the usage of the website in most cases.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          Mimicking a browser means implementing the minimal function set to use Netflix. This alone should be fine, they’d basically display the Netflix site “wrong” due to their special interpretation. But if they are actively filtering out ads, and Netflix prohibits using ad blockers, you’d be right and this could indeed breach the EULA. Then Netflix could cancel the subscription of users that agreed to the EULA and still use ad blockers/browser mimicking apps that (accidentally) work as ad blockers.

          Though this is legally shaky ground if the users weren’t actively blocking ads in a browser capable of showing them, and instead used a “broken” browser lacking the capability that Netflix didn’t officially support, but still sent data to. Without a way to enforce using a compatible browser, Netflix would have to block those “incapable” of showing the full Netflix interface (including ads). As long as they accept requests from unsupported, “broken” browsers, missing ads would be a glitch, making it hard to accuse users of deliberately breaking the EULA. But I’m somewhat guessing here, I never read the Netflix EULA.

  • FrankB

    Quest could do with a similar app. Netflix & Prime support is pretty atrocious.

  • gothicvillas

    Its faux dolby atmos :) you cant have atmos on stereo output. Unless the user uses his sound system for audio and VP for image only

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      But the AVP doesn’t use simple stereo output. It creates a spatial model of the room, placing different sound sources there and then “rendering” the final sound. This means that the resulting sound not only comes from the correct direction, but also changes with your virtual environment. So the voices coming from the personas of your friends you are talking to will sound differently depending on whether you are seeing your room in passthrough, or are outside in a virtual environment, and also change depending on the direction/person they are talking too, and their and your head position/rotation.

      Dolby Atmos expands beyond previous surround systems by adding height, so instead of having all sound sources sitting around you on the same elevation level, they are placed in 3D space, allowing to discern not only sound coming from front/back/left/right, but also above/below. If you can get the Dolby Atmos signal from the stream, pretty much all you have to do is define virtual speakers placed where you’d also put real speakers for Atmos, and let the spatial audio rendering in visionOS do the rest.

      • Arno van Wingerde

        Only if you believe in that sort of stuff… yes we have only 2 speakers, but we are “rendering of spatial model of the room”. Sounds a bit like: “we only have 640-480 picture, but we scale it up all the way to 8K”! They can do a bit of trickery, just not nearly as much as the marketing guys claims…

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          Unless you have more than two ears, spatial audio rendering is a valid option. If you keep your head still, you won’t be able to distinguish between real world sounds, including changes in direction etc., and a binaural recording of the same if the recording setup matches your ear channels, because what we hear is just the interpretation of a stereo signal by the brain. Things get trickier once you turn you head, as the shape of the ears will cause the sound to change, which is one way we determine the positions of different sound sources, but fortunately HMDs support head tracking.

          Spatial audio rendering is just a way to mix audio signals with volume and distortion levels as they would be received by your ears, plus their reflections in the room. The latter isn’t new, hifi audio processors that add resonance/echo/dampening have been available for decades, allowing to listen to music with settings like “cathedral”, “concert hall” or “wooden chamber”. (Good) VR games use spatial audio rendering based on a user head model to increase immersion, and the head tracking of HMDs allows adjusting the model/sound according to the current head position/rotation. Apple also offers an app to allow AirPod users to 3D scan their own ears with the 3D sensor in high end iPhones, which then creates a user specific spatial profile to adjust for the individual shape of the ears/ear channel influencing sound perception, which actually works pretty well to make audio sound more natural. There’s quite some solid science behind all this, no real need to believe.

          Spatial audio rendering isn’t trickery in the way that e.g. audio compression removes frequencies that humans can’t hear, thus degrading the signal in a barely noticeable way. Nonetheless any rendering will be a grainy model, with the world model simplified to large objects instead of thousands of tiny surfaces. But even trickery can work astonishingly well. I was extremely impressed by the image quality DLSS2 ultra performance mode managed to create from 320*180 upscaled to 1440p. youtu_be/_gQ202CFKzA?si=UEWKTUOVmbq-uCuq&t=495 Not anywhere near 1440p native, but containing way more information than the 180p original, because it not just upscaling, but reconstructing missing information from the previous frames. You won’t get 480p to 4K without very serious losses, but this kind of trickery worked quite well already three years ago and is still improving. The basic principles again have been around for decades, I remember reading about a early 90s MIT media lab project creating HD still images from a VHS video by using similar temporal reconstruction with a lot of computational power. Only today GPUs can do this in real time at much higher resolutions.

  • Foreign Devil

    Need a similar App for Quest 3. The native Netflix and Youtube apps have too many restrictions to be useful.

    • Paul Bellino

      The Netflix app on Quest is Dog Shit. I have seen better looking VR Streaming on Bigscreen. No 3D, they are pathetic.

    • Dave

      I thought the YouTube app now supports 8K on Quest 3?

  • Paul Bellino

    Smart