“While screen mirroring solutions — like Apple’s AirPlay — have reached a relatively high level of awareness, not a lot of people are actually using it, according to a new study by the NPD Group’s Connected Intelligence team,” Chris Maxcer reports for MacNewsWorld. “What is screen mirroring? It’s when you wirelessly project what you see on your smartphone or tablet and show it on an HDTV screen. As it turns out, only 7 percent of U.S. smartphone and tablet owners are using screen mirroring.”
“Apple’s Steve Jobs introduced AirPlay in the fall of 2010. So what gives? Is AirPlay a cool technology that’s underappreciated or is it too much of a pain to be useful?” Maxcer writes. “In my experience, it’s both — wicked cool and a royal pain — but lately the pain has been overshadowing the shine. I thought I was alone in this, but the disparity between knowledge and use of the feature makes me wonder.”
Maxcer reports, “It’s quite possible that a high percentage of Apple TV customers use AirPlay. That leads to insight very different than what The NPD Group reports: You could have high awareness with low use over a large population of smart device owners, and still have a very active Apple TV install base using AirPlay. With a different set of questions, you could determine that AirPlay is wildly successful among Apple TV owners. However, I’m not so sure that it is. In my experience, it’s either handy and awesome — or buggy and slow.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s the thing: We were watching some YouTube videos the other day. We started on our iPad and AirPlayed them to our big screen HDTV. The video played, but started pausing every 3-10 seconds. Very irritating. So much so, in fact, that we eventually switched to YouTube directly on the Apple TV, searched for the videos we were watching, and watched them play flawlessly (so it obviously wasn’t our Internet connection that was causing the problem).
This doesn’t just happen with YouTube,, either. Video content that doesn’t stutter when played on the iPad, pauses every so often on the TV via Apple TV. We are, naturally, using all current model Apple products, from the iPad to the Airport Extreme to the Apple TV. Yet, no go – not smoothly, at least. Mirroring video/audio from iPad or iPhone to Apple TV is generally an irritating, staccato experience. Why doesn’t it “just work,” Apple?
Here’s a thought: Maybe if it actually did “just work,” more people would use it.