This Is How AirPlay Should Work

AirPlay arrived this week, perhaps not quite as ass-kickingly as we had hoped. Here’s a clip of Air Video, the excellent stream-any-video-you-want-to-your-iPad app rigged up to beam video to an Apple TV. Basically, this is how AirPlay should work.

And hopefully will, once Apple sorts out the relevant APIs. This demo was done with private ones, so the functionality won’t be in the App Store’s Air Video anytime soon. In this case, the workflow is admittedly circuitous—the video’s being streamed from a computer to the iPad, encoded on the fly, and beamed from the iPad to the Apple TV—and it’s not clear if the iPad has quite what it takes in terms of processing power to do the on-the-fly conversion itself, say with an app like VLC, and then stream that video to the ATV. But it all comes back to what we really want here, and hopefully what Apple will let developers implement, once they iron things out a bit more: use AirPlay to send any video we’re watching on our mobile devices, in any app, to our big screens. Here’s to hoping. [AppAdvice]