I'm curious if it's possible for me to write programs that can control an Apple TV, specifically an Apple TV 4th gen running tvOS 9.1.1, like Apple's Remote app for iOS can. I'd like to send it commands for navigating in the four cardinal directions, selecting an item on the screen, going up the navigation stack -- essentially what Apple's Remote app can do.
Has anyone done any work reverse engineering the protocol it uses? Cursory Googling only has so far yielded out of date results about earlier generation Apple TVs and the DAAP protocol which looks like something different than what I want.
For any people still checking out this question, I recommend checking out pyatv if they want to control their Apple TV through a python or command line interface.