Aerial4.1.10

Aerial turns a Mac into an Apple TV-style screensaver, playing Apple’s high-fidelity aerial footage or displaying it as a live desktop wallpaper. Its library spans cities, deserts, oceans, and the International Space Station, with the complete Apple collection presented at native quality, including the 4K 240fps set.

You can place your own .mov and .mp4 files in Aerial’s folder, then title, tag, hide, or assign them to playlists. It also streams RTSP cameras, HLS feeds, and YouTube live URLs directly as screensaver content in real time without caching. Clock, weather, location captions, and other overlays can be dragged into seven screen zones with a live preview, while multi-display layouts, per-monitor playback, global wallpaper hotkeys, and curated community expansion packs provide deeper control. Playlists can be shared across devices, and the application updates itself automatically.

Aerial suits Mac users who want changing scenery in a home office, presentation space, or multi-monitor setup, especially when Apple’s built-in selection is too limited. Its live-wallpaper and setup experiences are marked beta, and 4K 240fps footage is slowed for desktop use; smart pauses also respond to window occlusion, thermal pressure, Low Power Mode, or camera use. The current 4.1.2 release requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later on Apple Silicon (arm64).

Aerial is freeware and open source, collects no telemetry, and accepts optional support. It remains macOS-only and traces its distinctive role to bringing Apple TV aerials to Macs nearly a decade before Apple added its own basic version.