[dkarl]

Chromecast has somehow become ubiquitous without attracting much attention. I think even among the iPhone and Mac users I know, more of them use Chromecast than Apple TV, since they're so small and cheap. I bought one so I could cast a specific show on a specific trip to visit family, and now my household has one for every TV, for about the same price as a single Apple TV. We always take one with us when we travel.

[philsnow]

(disclaimer: anecdata)

I also used to bring a chromecast to connect to hotel TVs, but no longer do. When I stay in a hotel and I see that the TV has a chromecast hooked up to it (or baked into it or whatever), I don't bother even trying to connect to it anymore. The DIAL protocol only allows service discovery on the local network, and in my experience local networks are more or less never configured correctly for it.

The several times I've tried connecting, when the phone fails to discover the TV automatically, the TV offers some kind of pairing code that I can type into the google home app (on ios). Before learning more about DIAL, I had thought that this would enable my phone and TV to connect through some google-managed proxy in the cloud, for just such cases where both the phone and TV can make outgoing connections, but can't open connections to each other for whatever reason.

I can't imagine why there isn't a fallback built into DIAL that lets me scan a QR code on the phone (or have the TV play some audio that the device decodes, if the mobile device doesn't have a camera or for a11y purposes, or whatever) and have both devices communicate through a proxy. Such a proxy would be extremely low bandwidth and would be latency-insensitive, so really really cheap to run. DIAL is predicated on both devices being able to access media URLs, so I think this fallback would only fail in a case where the TV/chromecast can't connect to the internet and is being used to display content from the LAN. This latter case is probably very niche compared to people not being able to connect their devices because of routing issues.

[tomComb]

That was my impression too, so I was surprised to read that they are kinda' giving it away by allowing it to be subsumed by Matter. The casting support in Matter will be a mandatory part of the related profile.

But, whatever the explanation, I think this is a good thing.

[horsawlarway]

I agree. I see this as heading back towards something like Miracast, which really birthed Chromecast in the first place.

That said - I'd really like for genuine screen sharing to still exist, outside of the confines of merely opening an app on the device in question and directing it at a specific URL, while sending user input. That's fine for a lot of uses - but is not really a comparable feature set. So far at least - I don't see that in the matter protocol (I've also not spent a ton of time looking - so if someone knows it's there, please point me at it!)