3 Reasons AirPlay Mirroring Is the Most Important Feature of iOS 5
Apple's AirPlay Mirroring will open up a bevy of new opportunities for content (or app) producers and marketers alike.
Apple's AirPlay Mirroring will open up a bevy of new opportunities for content (or app) producers and marketers alike.
A few weeks back, at its annual developer conference in San Francisco, Apple announced a slew of new features that will be appearing in iOS 5, the next version of its mobile operating system. Some, like the new Notification Center, will improve the usability of iOS – and, as some pundits will note – bring iOS to parity with Android in certain areas where the latter has generally been regarded as the better system. Newsstand aims to make magazine subscriptions even more attractive and easier to use. Tight integration of Twitter throughout the platform makes it easier to share content via the popular microblogging service.
Loads of other new features and enhancements will undoubtedly create new opportunities for marketers and developers alike. Perhaps chief among them is AirPlay Mirroring. This didn’t get a lot of attention during the keynote itself. But since then, however, it has been picked up and demoed by various developers and bloggers who have access to iOS 5 beta (there’s already more than 100 videos up on YouTube). Still, I’m not sure people realize how big this is. I think it’s the hidden gem of Apple’s newest mobile OS. In fact, I’ll go a step farther: AirPlay Mirroring is, hands down, the biggest leap forward in the connected living room that the industry has ever seen. Period.
Simply put, AirPlay Mirroring displays pretty much anything that appears on your iPad onto your TV screen, wirelessly via the new(ish) Apple TV box. It works with the core iPad interface as well as any apps, games, videos, and so on. It even adjusts for portrait or landscape mode, completely mirroring everything you do with your iPad (thus the clever name). This capability exists today via an optional HDMI cable, but iOS 5 and Apple TV make it wireless.
Here are three reasons why AirPlay Mirroring is the most important feature of iOS 5:
Engadget has a great overview of this dual-screen capability working with a popular iOS game – Real Racing. Much like Microsoft’s Kinect, this technology has potential to radically reinvent primetime entertainment. Imagine, for example, if your favorite TV program was distributed as an app in the iTunes store – and you played it on your TV via your iPad with a corresponding rich interactive experience on the tablet that enhanced everything you love about the program. Take a program like Iron Chef America, for example. It’s already a treasure trove of ideas and education for foodies. But imagine if you could go deeper into the recipes, or learn more about the history of a technique, or even get camera angles that aren’t available via the final edited version that makes it to air. The trick here, and a potential limitation, is that both the video and the interactive experience would have to be distributed through the iTunes App Store, since Apple TV, unlike some other connected TV platforms, doesn’t have a way to interact with broadcast TV programming.
AirPlay Mirroring will open up a bevy of new opportunities for content (or app) producers and marketers alike. It’ll be interesting to watch user adoption, and fun to see what everyone does with the capability.