Apple's AirPlay: Bring the walled garden home

by Volker Weber

A few years ago, Apple did the consumer electronics industry a huge favour, by introducing wireless music streaming (AirTunes) that worked beautifully simply and reliably. Now I'm not so sure. The CE business got its act together and came up with a common open standards for device discovery and streaming, and today, they work pretty well. With AirTunes becoming AirPlay, and Apple going it alone, punters now must decide between devices that may or may not support two incompatible streaming standards - which is bad news for everyone.

AirPlay will be introduced with iOS 4.2 in November. It will let you stream music, videos and photos from your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to Apple TV. And also to new devices from Denon, JBL and Bowers & Wilkins. This is not a software thing only. You need to buy a chip from Apple and build that into your device to be able to receive the encrypted data stream.

Repeat after me: DRM is bad for the customer.

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Comments

You need to buy a chip from Apple (or at least the encryption stuff) for EVERY accessory you make ... wireless or tethered. Even if your accessory works with anything else you have to modify your hardware to make it work with apple products :/

Sebastian Herp, 2010-09-08

Did you see that iTunes 10 won't play music from remote iTunes servers that use the DAAP standard? (source) It works through iTunes 9. Talk about bad DRM.

Charles Robinson, 2010-09-08

There is no issue unless you (a) use DRM tune formats and / or (b) rely on iTunes for your streaming content.

Remember that, and you will be peachy.

Ben Poole, 2010-09-08

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