Being able to use your AirPods to switch from iPhone to iPad to Mac to listen to audio without having to do any special pairing is a wonderful thing. When you want to listen to music or watch a movie, all you have to do is take your AirPods out of their case and place them in your ears. On Apple TV, however, pairing your Airpods is more of a standard procedure instead of an automagic one.
As first discovered by 9to5Mac, in tvOS 11, AirPods have iCloud support, which means they will automatically pair with your Apple TV without you needing to manually enable them.
In tvOS 11, AirPods are in the speaker configuration section. When you're signed in to your Apple TV with your iCloud account, they will automatically connect to it, as well. No need to manually pair them!
As far as I know, you still have to click through a lot of Settings steps to switch from external audio to AirPods. That's one of the main reasons I don't use AirPods with Apple TV very often (or any Bluetooth headphones, for that matter). Too many steps to get through.
I'd love to see an audio shortcut that sends you directly to the AirPods connect setting. How about you?
