@agiletortoise As a person who works on a pretty popular non-standard streaming app for AppleTV, I can confidently say there are dozens of reasons to not support Apple's native video player. Top of the list:

- Ads. Streaming services live and die by ads (like it or not), and the built-in player has very rudimentary ad-insertion options, and no options for interactive ads, pause-screen ads, or overlay banner ads (i know, they all suck - but they pay the bills)
- playback enhancements like custom scrubber thumbnails and chapter marks
- personalized "next episode” and autoplay logic
- enhanced closed caption rendering (fonts, styling, placement- CEA 708 is fine, but an old standard)
- proprietary accessibility audio description triggers
- Non FairPlay DRM
- Dynamic forensic watermarking
- Device concurrency limits (i.e. "only 2 screens on Netflix”)
- Playback telemetry
- Custom dynamic bit rate logic (ours is frankly better than Apple’s, and I bet Netflix's is even more tuned)
- Cross platform consistency (we have the exact same video player on iOS, Android, Web, AppleTV, GoogleTV, and most smart tvs)
- Branding - AppleTV already has people skip the app mostly from the “Next Up" row in the TV App or home screen. The player is the branding these days.
- Eliminates dependency on Apple, and waiting for the yearly update cycle to add any new features (if any) to the player.