What you need to know
- Matter is an Apple-backed smart home standard.
- It could increase interoperability with smart home products from different brands.
- The group now appears to be working on a universal casting system to rival AirPlay.
A new report says that Apple-backed smart home standard Matter may also have a universal casting service to rival AirPlay up its sleeve.
From The Verge:
Matter TV, as we'll call it for wont of an official name, will allow control of a television's core functions — volume up / down, changing the channel, controlling inputs and outputs, and switching between HDMI ports. "But importantly, you can also do casting," Chris DeCenzo, Principal Software Development Engineer at Amazon Lab126, told The Verge.
DeCenzo said the area currently had "at least five proprietary protocols today" including AirPlay and Google Cast. He says this is "a complete opportunity loss for everyone." According to the report Amazon "is leading the effort to define the specification for Matter" because it doesn't have a casting standard currently. The Verge explains:
When Matter arrives in 2022, the Matter TV specification will use app-to-app communication, at least until the TVs and streaming video players become Matter enabled. The spec supports casting from a Matter client (e.g., a remote, a smart speaker, or a phone app) to an app running on a Matter-enabled TV or video player device, explains DeCenzo. It also supports URL-based casting, which means a Matter client can cast to a TV even when there's no app for that client, if the TV supports Dynamic Adaptive Streaming (DASH, an international standard for streaming) or HLS DRM streams (HLS is a video streaming protocol developed by Apple and widely supported across Android devices and browsers).
You can read the full report here.
