[prehkugler]

> Apple TV lets you do the same thing with AirPlay, and it works great.

Not entirely. AirPlay is baked into the OS, so devs don't need to do extra work to support it. Chromecast (or, the Google Cast SDK) is built into the app level, and works in a fundamentally different way (i.e. streams from the internet and allows multi-user queueing vs. streams from the audio/video output of the device).

I don't think it's terribly disruptive - it's essentially AirPlay 2.0 - but it is new.

[roc]

"Streams from the internet" isn't inherently superior. There are things about it that are nice and things about it that are not so nice.

1. it requires the dongle to have equivalent internet access as the 'controlling' device. So it would seem you'd be out of luck if you wanted to stream from a mobile device using a cell modem, to a chromecast on a display in, say, a hotel, conference room or cabin without (unfiltered) wifi access to the internet.

2. sometimes internet-streamed video, even when possible, is far inferior to just soaking some processing power from the mobile device. People who locally-save video content for performance/quality reasons aren't going to be wild about it happily ignoring that local store to pull down a choppy/compressed stream.

3. it seems to limit the stream to codecs the device supports. So one can't likely chromecast from an HTPC that's otherwise perfectly capable of streaming xvid/divx/etc.

multi-user queue-ing is nice. Airplay really should pick that up.

But I'm not at all wild about "it's own internet stream". While the pros are neat in certain situations, the cons are a deal-breaker for me.

[ash_gti]

AirPlay also lets you use the Apple TV as a second window for iOS apps. Basically, you can just create a new UIWindow and assign it to the Apple TV and then it won't mirror your app, it will just display whatever view you have on the screen. It does have some lag time though so its hard to do real time graphics on the Apple TV.

[jckim]

What makes it AirPlay 2.0?