While Apple has AirPlay and seems comfortable with it and Google has today announced the expansion of their Chromecast sharing capabilities, Amazon, the only big player without a native screen sharing protocol, is adding support for Matter casting, an entirely different casting protocol.
Amazon has today announced that they are the first founder of Matter to add support for Matter casting to their apps, displays and devices. Matter casting is part of the Matter protocol that allows users to control TVs and other streaming devices directly from a connected app.
Amazon’s Prime Video app will be the first app to receive Matter casting and at this stage only the Echo Show 15 can receive the casting. Support for casting to FireTVs will be “coming soon” finally making them a lot more useful — although their usefulness has increase exponentially over the years.
To use this new Matter casting all you need to do is open the Prime Video app, tap the cast button and select the source you are casting the video to. Support for other apps is also coming this year including Plex, Pluto TV, Sling TV, Starz and ZDF.
At this stage neither Google nor Apple look set to introduce this Matter casting standard to their ecosystems given that both of their solutions are already widely used, and function as expected. Of course, the whole idea of Matter is to make interoperability a lot easier for the user (and manufacturers and developers) but this it seems only goes so far. Matter casting across the board would mean that developers would only have to code for a single protocol and users would be able to cast any app to any device at any time.
We may well be revisiting this in a few year’s time but at this stage it seems unlikely Google or Apple will come onboard the Matter casting train. At least now there is a decent casting solution for those of us with FireTVs, assuming developers can add it to all streaming apps.
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