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The media template turns a Live Activity into a remote for whatever is playing somewhere else -- a Sonos zone, the living-room TV, a Home Assistant media_player, a Jellyfin session. It draws like the iOS 26 Now Playing card: cover art, the track and artist, a scrubber that keeps moving on the device between your pushes, and a row of transport buttons. Every button fires your webhook; PushWard never talks to the player itself. Your side sends the state, the phone renders it, a tap comes back to you as an HTTP request, and your next push confirms what happened.

Fields

The activity name is the source ("Living Room", "Kitchen TV") and stays on the card in small type; media_title is the big line.

Sending any media field on another template is rejected with 422 rather than ignored, and switching an activity from media to another template clears them, so no card ends up carrying controls it cannot draw. url_action and secondary_url_action are accepted for compatibility but not rendered on the media card -- the transport row takes the button space; tap_action (tapping the card background) still works.

Controls

controls is an object of named slots. Each slot is an Action object -- the same shape as url_action, with the same limits on headers and body.

What a tap does

• An http(s) URL is always a silent webhook: the request is fired from the Live Activity, the app stays in the background, the response is discarded. The server fills in method: "POST" when you leave it out (stored and returned that way), and rejects foreground: true on a control with 422 -- a transport button that opens Safari is not a transport button.
• A custom scheme (spotify:, homeassistant://) opens that app instead.
• Play/pause flips optimistically on the device the moment it is tapped, then your next push is the truth. Previous, next and stop dim their glyph until your next push arrives, so a slow player still reads as "working on it".
• Buttons exist on the Lock Screen and in the expanded Dynamic Island. The compact and minimal Island and the Apple Watch card are tap-to-open, except that the Watch shows one play/pause button.

How the bar ticks

The device does not poll you. From position_seconds, position_at and duration_seconds it derives a start instant and, while playback_state is playing, animates the scrubber and both clocks (elapsed on the left, -remaining on the right) natively -- no update quota spent while a track plays.

• playing with a duration: the bar and clocks run from position_at - position_seconds until the end. Past the end they freeze at the end; they never wrap.
• playing without a duration: no bar, the elapsed clock counts up.
• paused, stopped, buffering: the bar and clocks freeze at position_seconds.
• An activity the server has marked stale (see stale_ttl) freezes too, so a producer that died does not keep "playing".
• Ending the activity forces the wire state to stopped: an ended card never ticks.

Because the device extrapolates, every play/pause transition should carry the position you saw at that moment. Pause with {"playback_state": "paused", "position_seconds": 61.2}, resume with {"playback_state": "playing", "position_seconds": 61.2}. Leave position_at out and the server stamps the receive time; set it only to backdate a sample you took earlier. Position-only patches (position_seconds / position_at) go out at low push priority and coalesce; anything else on the card -- title, state, duration, volume, favorite, controls -- is a structural change and goes out at high priority.

Updates are merge patches

As on every template, a PATCH merges onto the stored content. Two things are specific to controls:

• The controls object deep-merges: sending {"controls": {"stop": null}} removes the stop button and leaves the others alone; sending {"controls": {"next": {"url": "..."}}} replaces only next.
• controls.extra is an array and replaces wholesale, like every array field.
• Re-sending a slot with a new url and no method re-derives the method (POST for http(s)): an explicit method from an earlier push is not remembered across a repoint, so send it again if you need something other than the default. title is ignored on the fixed slots -- the glyph is the label -- only extra buttons use title and icon.

Payload budget

The full example below is about 1.3 KB; eight controls each carrying a 40-character bearer header and a small body come to about 2.2 KB, well inside the 4 KB APNs limit. If a payload still does not fit, the server drops whole controls in this order until it does -- extra, then volume_down + volume_up, favorite, stop, then image_thumbhash, image_url, then previous + next -- and stops at the title, state, position and play slots. Headers and bodies are never stripped from a control that survives: a button that fires without its credentials and gets a 401 is worse than no button. What you GET back is always the full stored content; shedding only affects the push.

Surfaces

• Lock Screen -- art, title, subtitle, source, scrubber with both clocks, the transport row, then the volume row and extras when there is room (the extras row is hidden first, then the volume row, when the card would exceed the height iOS allows).
• Dynamic Island, expanded -- art leading, title and subtitle centred, elapsed trailing, scrubber and a compact transport row below. Buttons work here.
• Dynamic Island, compact -- art or icon leading; while playing the elapsed clock ticks trailing, otherwise a state glyph. Tap to open.
• Apple Watch -- art, title and one play/pause button. Mac and the in-app cards use the same layout as the Lock Screen.

Example: A Home Assistant player

Create the activity once, then push the player state. Every control here points at a Home Assistant webhook automation; the same shape works for anything that accepts an HTTP request.

curl -X POST https://api.pushward.app/activities \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer hlk_YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "slug": "living-room-player",
    "name": "Living Room"
  }'

curl -X PATCH https://api.pushward.app/activities/living-room-player \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer hlk_YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/merge-patch+json" \
  -d '{
    "state": "ongoing",
    "content": {
      "template": "media",
      "media_title": "Snooze",
      "subtitle": "SZA",
      "playback_state": "playing",
      "position_seconds": 47.5,
      "duration_seconds": 214,
      "volume": 0.35,
      "favorite": true,
      "image_url": "https://cdn.example.com/art/snooze.jpg",
      "image_shape": "square",
      "image_thumbhash": "m8QNJRZ3d3B4aIh4iIiHd4iPjvcX",
      "controls": {
        "previous":    { "url": "https://ha.example/api/webhook/pw-prev" },
        "play_pause":  { "url": "https://ha.example/api/webhook/pw-toggle" },
        "next":        { "url": "https://ha.example/api/webhook/pw-next" },
        "stop":        { "url": "https://ha.example/api/webhook/pw-stop" },
        "favorite":    { "url": "https://ha.example/api/webhook/pw-fav" },
        "volume_down": { "url": "https://ha.example/api/webhook/pw-vol-down" },
        "volume_up":   { "url": "https://ha.example/api/webhook/pw-vol-up" },
        "extra": [
          { "url": "https://ha.example/api/webhook/pw-shuffle", "icon": "shuffle", "title": "Shuffle" }
        ]
      }
    }
  }'

Then, as the player reports back (each one a merge patch onto the same activity):

{ "content": { "playback_state": "paused", "position_seconds": 61.2 } }

{ "content": { "playback_state": "playing", "position_seconds": 61.2 } }

{ "content": { "media_title": "Kill Bill", "position_seconds": 0, "duration_seconds": 153, "favorite": false } }

{ "state": "ended" }

The one time position_at is worth sending is to backdate a sample you took a moment ago -- a poll that ran a few seconds before the push. The device starts the bar from that instant instead of from receipt:

{ "content": { "position_seconds": 61.2, "position_at": 1755500000 } }

Typical Flow

1. Start (ended -> ongoing): send the track, playing, the position, the duration, the art and the controls
2. Transitions (ongoing -> ongoing): on pause, resume, seek or track change send the new playback_state and the position you saw; on a webhook from a button, apply it to the player and confirm with the resulting state
3. Finish (ongoing -> ended): end the activity when the player turns off or the queue runs out; the card stops ticking on its own

Use Cases

• Multi-room audio -- one activity per zone, buttons steer Sonos, HEOS or Music Assistant through Home Assistant
• The TV -- what is on, pause and skip from the Lock Screen without finding the remote
• Media servers -- a Jellyfin or Plex session with cover art and a stop button
• Radio and streams -- no duration, the elapsed clock counts up, favorite bookmarks the show