Samsung, Intel prepare wireless devices for AirPlay-like streaming

WiFi Alliance certifies network equipment and consumer devices for Miracast.

Jon Brodkin – Sep 19, 2012 2:01 am | 48

The Samsung Galaxy S III, released in mid-2012, is the newest phone involved in yesterday's injunction. Credit: SamsungTomorrow

The WiFi Alliance today unveiled its certification program for Miracast, a new wireless technology for streaming video from phones, laptops, and tablets to television sets.

Samsung is the biggest smartphone vendor to get on board with Miracast, which aims to be an industry-standard alternative to Apple’s AirPlay. Samsung’s Galaxy S III smartphone and its Echo-P Series TV (which was revealed at CES this year but is not on the market yet) were both certified as compatible with Miracast. LG’s Optimus G smartphone was also certified.

Miracast builds upon WiFi Direct, a previous effort driven by Intel to enable cross-platform video streaming. WiFi Direct didn’t take off as vendors hoped, but Intel is on board again with Miracast, which takes the basic WiFi Direct technology and makes it more user-friendly.

To get the certification program going, there are six testbed devices against which all others will be tested to ensure interoperability. Intel’s contribution is the Centrino Advanced-N 6235 AGN wireless adapter. Wireless cards and adapters were also contributed by Broadcom, Marvell, MediaTek, Ralink, and Realtek. Sony’s mobile division and NVIDIA also expressed support for the program, although they did not get devices into the testbed. NVIDIA reportedly plans to support Miracast in its Tegra 3 chips.

Separately from Miracast, Intel researchers are working on integrating WiFi capabilities into processors, and creating wireless docking capabilities for Ultrabooks, tablets, and smartphones, using the forthcoming 802.11ad wireless standard.

Samsung has its own Miracast-based implementation called AllShare Cast built into the Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note 10.1, Galaxy Note II, and other devices. But joining Miracast will ensure that a Samsung phone will stream to a non-Samsung TV, as the Miracast certification guarantees interoperability.

While Samsung is the first consumer device maker to get products certified, the WiFi Alliance expects broad adoption across different vendors’ products.

“The primary use cases will be enabled at launch. This isn’t going to take years for the devices to proliferate,” WiFi Alliance Senior Marketing Manager Kevin Robinson told Ars. He expects a big push in the upcoming holiday season and into 2013. “You can expect to see tablets, phones, laptops, televisions, and set-top boxes with Miracast,” Robinson said.

Because Miracast negotiates the connections between devices and selects the right codecs and resolutions, streaming should be pretty close to a one-click process for users. In addition to streaming from devices to big screen TVs, Miracast could enable streaming content from a cable box to a tablet, or from a laptop to a projector in business settings.

Miracast runs on 802.11n, using both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. Miracast supports WPA2 security and copyright protection systems like HDCP to prevent users from making copies of content. Robinson said this will ensure that copyright owners don’t block content from being used with Miracast.

“Not all solutions support premium content,” he said. “It’s important that all these types of content are supported.”