Streaming music, photos and Video around the house with iPhone Air play

Having your music videos and photos streamed around the house using Apple TV

Apple airplay came to us with the iOS 4.2 and basically what it is, is a way to stream our content over Wi-Fi from one device to another. What Apple boasts is that you can have the whole of your iTunes library, that is all of the songs and all of the playlists, in all the rooms around your house. What you can do, is to have speakers set up all around the house, maybe have some in the bedroom and some in the living room and then you can stream your music to more than one room at the same time. All you have to do to get set this up is to select multiple speakers from the pull down menu for speakers. Then in iTunes you can choose where you want to send the music. So I opened up my iTunes to checkout iPhone Air play and wasn’t able to find a pulldown menu for speakers, so obviously this is only available if you have the hardware connected up. So you do need to have speakers that are Wi-Fi enabled, so that they can be seen on your network.

The Airplay wireless is integrated into some speaker docks, AV receivers and stereo systems from various manufacturers. One nice detail about Airplay is that when it is working, it will stream information about your music at the same time. So if you have a speaker dock that has a graphical display of some sort, you will see the name of the singer, the song titles and the album names. So when you are in the other room you will see all of the information about the music and will not be playing it blind. Of the manufacturers that do Airplay, you will find famous makes like Marantz and Bowers and Wilkins.

iPhone air play

iPhone air play or iPad airplay set up

If you want to stream content from an iPhone, it has to be a iPhone 3GS or later. With an iPod Touch, it is from the second-generation models of the iPod Touch that you can do this. You are also required to have iOS 4.3 or later to stream from third-party applications or from websites that have opted in to the use of . If you want to stream content that is DRM protected so it will play to the Apple TV, then you also need an active Internet connection for it to actually work. What it all comes down to, is that you will need to have the hardware to be able to take advantage of the iPhone airplay mode and the iPhone airplay apps.