As Android users we’ve all been through having an obnoxious friend who is a massive fan of Apple products and won’t hesitate to call AirPlay and other such technologies the best thing ever. Often, we don’t care much for these displays of “superiority” from Apple fans as we smugly know that there’s a lot more that we can do with our devices that Apple will never let them do with theirs. These friends of ours, that want to make sure we know that Apple, clearly, invented everything and are bringing the future of technology to us drive us crazy and yet, we still think AirPlay is pretty cool. Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware of methods to get music and movies on to my TV with Android, in fact, there are a number of methods but none of them are as simple as AirPlay.
To this end, Google are reportedly working on an alternative to AirPlay that will allow people to beam content to a supported device just like the Apple technology. It’s no surprise that Google are looking to bring something like this to the market, after all, this is what they wanted to do with the Nexus Q and while that little experiment didn’t work out it looks as though Google are looking to take apart the Nexus Q experience and spread it far and wide throughout all of Google’s services. At a YouTube event recently Google Product Manager, Timbo Drayson, sat down with GigaOm and had this to say on the technology – that made a brief debut sharing YouTube videos to second screens – “We really want to move the whole industry forward.”
AirPlay has been around for a long time now and, as with a lot of things, it looked like just another ploy to sell more devices and we’re also pretty sure they’ve made a lot of money on all of these “works with AirPlay” stickers on every speaker system that comes out these days. Google’s alternative however, is going to be yet another Open Standard which might sound a little trivial but, if there’s little price to pay for producing a compatible product then more and more manufacturers will climb aboard, bringing the standard millions of users very easily. If anything, I’m pretty excited by this, as someone that doesn’t feel any need to go out and buy a Google TV, something like this would be a perfect compromise. I often like to watch YouTube through my Xbox and while this is a perfectly fine experience, it could be a lot better and if it were from Google, I have no doubt that it’d be better.