Just as the Matter smart home standard aiming to clear a thicket of competing smart home ecosystems, so is a new and open video-casting standard looking to upend the stranglehold that Apple and Google have on casting video from one device to another.
The new open casting standard is called Matter Casting, and yes, it’s part of the Matter smart home standard. At CES this week, Amazon announced that it will roll out Matter Casting to Fire TV and Echo Show 15 devices.
For now, users will be limited to casting Prime Video content to Echo Show 15 displays. But Amazon says it’s working on Matter Casting support with other streaming services, including Plex, Pluto TV, Sling TV, Starz, and ZDF. Meanwhile, Matter Casting will arrive on compatible Fire TV devices in the “coming months,” Amazon says.
The Matter smart-home specification has long incorporated video casting, as detailed in a two-year-old report from The Verge. But the “Matter Casting” name for the feature is new, and Amazon—a founding member of the Matter group—is the first company to bring Matter Casting functionality to market.
There’s nothing new about video casting in and of itself, of course; both Apple and Google have been doing it for years, with their respective AirPlay 2 and Chromecast technologies.
But AirPlay and Chromecast are proprietary standards, both subject to the whims of Apple and Google, and manufacturers must pay a licensing fee to implement them.
Matter Casting, on the other hand, is an open standard, meaning TV manufacturers and streaming services won’t have to fork over any cash to add Matter Casting support to their products.
Hopefully, Matter Casting will have a smoother rollout than the Matter smart-home standard itself.
Touted as the solution to making Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, and other smart-home ecosystems play nice with each other, Matter has had a bumpy first year, with consumers often struggling to add their Matter-enabled devices to their various smart home hubs.
At the same time, Thread border routers (which connect Matter devices to the internet) from the likes of Apple, Google, Samsung, and others still refuse to work seamlessly together, although a just-announced update to the Thread standard may finally iron out the kinks.
Author: Ben Patterson, Senior Writer
Ben has been writing about technology and consumer electronics for more than 20 years. A PCWorld contributor since 2014, Ben joined TechHive in 2019, where he covers smart speakers, soundbars, and other smart and home-theater devices. You can follow Ben on Twitter.