News
AirPlay to allow streaming from apps to Apple TV, more?
By Charles Starrett
Contributing Editor
Published: Friday, September 17, 2010
News Categories: iPad, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV
AirPlay, Apple’s revamped version of AirTunes meant for streaming audio, video, and photos to compatible devices, may also allow for streaming of content from third-party applications, according to a new report. Citing testing done by a reader using the first iOS 4.2 beta, Mac Rumors reports that every application that uses the standard iOS audio/video playback interface now shows an AirPlay button for streaming. While the second-generation Apple TV, the only AirPlay device announced so far to accept video and photo streams in addition to audio, has yet to be released, a reader was successfully able to stream audio to an Airport Express from the following applications: Safari, YouTube, Netflix, Videos, iPod, BBC News, and MLB At Bat, suggesting that third-party apps may be able to stream video as well as audio to compatible devices. Notably, the software is still in beta, and as such the feature could be removed and/or tweaked prior to iOS 4.2’s public release.
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1
Well, I hope so. I ordered the Apple TV with the assumption that this will be possible. There is no reason, aside from trying to force people to stay within the paid iTunes model, to not allow this.
Posted by Mark Holmes on September 17, 2010 at 12:43 PM (PST)
2
I’m less concerned about whether Apple will allow this, than I am about whether 3rd party applications will support it. Are we certain that Hulu for example won’t disable this feature, seeing as they’ve blocked access in the past? Presumably since this is the paid version they’ll allow it. But are we sure?
Even Apple. Lots of stuff doesn’t display video over the VGA out connector dohickey. Why not? And are we sure they won’t do the same here?
Posted by Fanfoot on September 21, 2010 at 9:06 PM (PST)
3
Current speculation over on the MacRumors forums, which seems likely to be correct, is that AirPlay doesn’t send the iPhone/iPad screen image over to the Apple TV but rather simply transfers the MP4 video. Reason being the resulting video uncompressed would take too much bandwidth, and recompression to a reasonable bit rate is beyond the capabilities of the A4 processor (assumes it doesn’t have h.264 encode assists, which we don’t know for sure…). Anyway, suggests that something like VLC won’t be able to be streamed to the AppleTV via AirPlay while something like AirPlayer or the SkyFire browser WILL work since they transcode the video to MP4 format externally—AirPlayer on your desktop or other device, and SkyFire in the cloud. So probably SlingPlayer is going to be out as well. But ABC app or Hulu are certainly possible if they don’t block it.
Posted by Fanfoot on September 21, 2010 at 9:53 PM (PST)