Reply to Message

What a made up scenario
NonZealot 7th Sep 2010
If you?re not familiar with AirPlay, imagine taking pictures and videos on your iPhone, walking into your house, and then clicking a button on your iPhone?s screen.

Okay, I'm imagining it and... not seeing the point. iPhone and iPad are your access to your media, rarely are they going to have the master copy of the media that I'm interested in watching. So if I happen to copy a video onto my iPhone, the master copy is still in iTunes which is where I would want to stream it from, which I've been able to do for years now using any number of devices (a nettop HTPC is my current device of choice).

But what if you've taken the pictures or the video with your iPhone?
Yup, in which case the first thing I do is sync to iTunes and get those pictures or video off my iPhone. Considering that iPhone corruption is common enough that you would be a FOOL to have your only copy of media on your iPhone, you would still be getting that media off your iPhone, into iTunes, and then stream it from there.

The only time I could possibly see this as being useful is if you have a bunch of low resolution movies on your iPhone / iPad (they would have to be low resolution since storage is so limited) and you went over to a friend's house and they had an Apple TV. I simply can't ever see when I would want to stream video or pictures from my iPhone to my TV. Note, I can see a lot of cases where I would want to stream video or pictures from iTunes (or in my case, Windows Home Server) so don't get me wrong, streaming is a great feature. It is this AirPlay feature that I see as a solution to a problem that simply doesn't exist.

But since Apple came up with the solution, you just assume that you have the problem. That is one of the problems with being an Apple zealot.
ie8 fix

The best of ZDNet, delivered

ZDNet Newsletters

Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox