Streaming Personal Media from Telegram on Android TV: Architectural Look at VelaTV vs Kodi/Plex

Over the past couple of years, many of us who maintain personal media collections or follow specialized video channels on Telegram have faced the same friction: Telegram's desktop and mobile clients work fine on phones or laptops, but running them on a television via Android TV or Google TV has always been an ergonomic nightmare.

Most users resorted to sideloading the standard Android touch APK, forcing the use of awkward mouse-toggle apps or air-mouse remotes, or downloading heavy multi-gigabyte video files onto a local PC first just to serve them over a local Plex/Jellyfin/Kodi SMB share.

Recently, I’ve been testing an app called VelaTV (available directly as a free app on the Google Play Store for Android TV), and from an engineering perspective, its architectural approach to solving this is quite neat:

1. Native Android TV Leanback UI:

Instead of a phone UI stretched across a 4K screen, it implements a genuine Android TV D-pad leanback interface. Channels, chat groups, and media messages are organized into clean TV rows, making standard remote navigation natural.

2. ExoPlayer Playback Pipeline:

Instead of relying on webviews or clunky external players, it integrates Android's native ExoPlayer framework. This allows it to stream video files directly from Telegram's cloud storage via chunks with hardware-accelerated decoding, auto-framerate switching, and proper subtitle track passthrough.

3. Zero Local Storage Bloat:

On budget TV boxes or sticks (like Mi Box, Firestick, or Realme sticks) that typically come with only 8GB of internal flash, caching massive video files locally quickly causes "Storage Full" crashes. VelaTV streams directly from the cloud without hoarding local disk space.

For engineers and media enthusiasts experimenting with cloud-to-leanback pipelines on Android TV without setting up complex self-hosted servers, it's worth checking out on Google Play.

Curious if anyone else here has experimented with Telegram cloud streaming architectures or built custom bots/clients for Android TV? What playback engines have you found most resilient to Telegram's chunk download rate limits?