On Wednesday at the company’s Uplinq developer’s conference, Qualcomm CEO and Chairman Paul Jacobs announced their new media-streaming platform called AllPlay. This platform will allow users to wireless stream music from mobile apps to multiple speakers in your home, and the great thing is the speakers can be different brands from one another.
AllPlay is built on Qualcomm’s AllJoy framework that is an open solution for connecting proximal devices. This is Qualcomm’s version of Apple’s Airplay, but built to be open and universally accessible by developers that want to build wireless streaming capabilities into the iOS or Android applications. It really replicates having the Sonos System in your home without worrying about what brand of speaker you are using as well as Spotify Connect, but adds multiple device control. AllPlay takes the best from all formats and puts them into one neat package allowing for more diversity and control for the developer and the user.
Qualcomm’s partner Rhapsody demonstrated the platform during the keynote by wirelessly streaming tracks to Wi-Fi connected speakers in the auditorium. They also demonstrated how you could stream different songs to different speakers at the same time, while also being able to adjust their volumes simultaneously or by each individual speaker!
Jon Irwin, president of the digital music service said that “Rhapsody wants its customers to be able to listen to any music they want on any speaker in their home, regardless of brand.”
The AllPlay SDK will be available to developers before the end of the year, so early next year we should see some amazing applications that will allow us total control by using our mobile apps to wirelessly stream music to multiple speakers in our home. CEO Jacobs says the company is working closely with a number of major brands so that the technology can be brought to market as soon as possible. Hopefully with Qualcomm backing the project and their extreme popularity, we should be able to experience AllPlay in the near future.