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Why is no one discussing Airplay?

7 points by filthylucre ↗ HN
No one is discussing Airplay. As a developer who makes a living from web, mobile, TV, and desktop applications I find the Airplay feature of iOS 5 to be the single most disruptive technology since the first iPhone. TV is important. Google heavily promoted Google TV at their conference a year ago. Apple released two iterations of the Apple TV. All of the cable, set-top box, satellite, and TV manufacturers are gearing up to take on the inevitable huge TV app and content market. But still, no one is really discussing Airplay.

I can't possibly be the only person to see how Apple could immediately disrupt the gaming console market upon the release of iOS 5. For the first time iOS 5 will have cordless screen mirroring. What you see on your screen will be displayed on your TV wirelessly. Now consider the fact iOS 5 will also allow you to use your TV as a second display. You will be able to display something different on the TV than what's on your iOS device. Your iOS device could become the controller while you play your game on the TV. Now take it one step further and assume you wirelessly connect a bluetooth game controller to your iOS device while it powers your TV display. You now have a fully-fledged gaming console, completely powered by your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. The games are affordable, the console is with you at all times, and Airplay makes it easy to utilize your TV.

iOS graphics are inferior to consoles you say? This is true yet I'm not sure it will matter when you consider the fact that you can buy 5-10 games on iOS for the price of 1 console game. The graphics may not be as good but they're nowhere close to 5-10x worse. Also, let's not leave out the fact that companies such as OnLive are quietly waging war against the console market to stream games over the net which would give a device such as the iPhone the ability to provide games that are visually competitive. iPhone 5 + Bluetooth Game Controller + OnLive + Airplay (TV) = something to get excited about.

5 comments

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pedalpete
I think part of the reason may be that AirPlay is little more than a closed version of DLNA which has decent acceptance from hardware manufacturers, but unfortunately hasn't hit the mainstream use from consumers.
wavephorm
It's maybe not as disruptive as you think - not yet. To display on your tv you require a computer or apple device plugged into the tv. Not many people do that yet.

It'll all be super locked down like Apple's typical developer bullshit. It's not like Apple is going to let developers make use of this, it'll just be a built-in feature of iphone + apple tv. And it'll all be geared toward selling tv shows and games specifically for this capability.

In 6 months the same feature set will be available in Android.

If Apple starts to roll out their own line of tv's, then they might really start changing the living room landscape. Got an iPhone, now get an iTV and play all your games on it, that sort of cross marketing.

allwein
>Not many people do that yet.

Apple has sold millions of AppleTVs.

>It'll all be super locked down like Apple's typical developer bullshit. It's not like Apple is going to let developers make use of this

Developer's are already making use of this. Check out Firemint's Real Racing 2, which supports 4-player split-screen using Airplay. It's trivial to enable Airplay mirroring in your application. So there's no reason that every single game on the app store won't at least let you play on the TV as a large screen.

callmeed
Oh I think it will be huge. One of my favorite "ideas I have no time to implement" right now is a collection of games that rely on AirPlay. I'm thinking variations on games like SceneIt, Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, etc.

My favorite is a "never-ending trivia" game based on Wikipedia data/info.

hyuuu
if you want to see disruptive you should check out haxenme.org - it is based on Haxe language, which is ECMA based.

it's open source and it's a 4 year old technology.