Apple TV

Live TV – if you’re lucky $4.99

Apps and hardware for your Apple TV.

If the lure of 500 premium channels for a one-time purchase of five bucks sounds too good to be true, well… it is. TV Deluxe makes bold claims about bringing live TV channels to your Apple TV – even touting “the highest number of TV channels in all the App Store” – but you get what you pay for.

First of all, don’t expect to fire this app up and start watching feeds from the four major networks. The majority of TV Deluxe’s content comes from publicly available web streams or questionable online sources like FilmOn, but it ultimately depends on what you’re looking for.

We found foreign channels to be more reliable – many American sources failed with a prompt that “an error occurred loading this content.”

You can also add your own channels in .m3u8 format, but it’s a bit of a chore from the TV, and the developer’s universal iPhone/iPad app requires a separate purchase.

Can you really get the likes of the Disney Channel and Fox HD for free using this app? If you’re raising an eyebrow right now, you know the answer…