Matter Casting looks superior to AirPlay, Chromecast. Can it win?

Amazon has never offered a great way to beam video from phones and tablets to its Fire TV devices, but that’s about to change.

At CES 2024, Amazon announced Matter Casting, a new method of using your smartphone to play video on a TV. As its name suggests, it’s the new Matter smart home standard supported by all the major players in that space: Not just Amazon, but Apple, Google, and Samsung, and many others.

Matter Casting sounds a lot like Google’s existing Chromecast feature, except Matter Casting is an interoperable standard that other companies are free to use. It also addresses a pain point with both Chromecast and Apple’s AirPlay protocol by tying directly into video apps on smart TVs and streaming players, regardless of which platform they run on.

The big question is whether it’ll gain any traction. To make Matter Casting feasible, Amazon needs the backing of streaming services and device makers alike. At the outset, it doesn’t have much support from either side.

How Matter Casting works

Using Matter Casting will be similar to how you use Chromecast: If a mobile app supports casting, it’ll display a Cast icon somewhere on the screen, and tapping it will bring up a list of TVs to play on. Once the phone and TV are connected, any video you select on the phone will play on the television.

But there’s one notable difference: Videos will always load in the corresponding app on the TV. That means you can pick up your TV remote and gain full control over the app.

In a brief demo at CES, Amazon showed how users would get all the features of its Prime Video app while casting, including its X-Ray feature, and could then back out from the video player to the Prime Video menu. Chris DeCenzo, the senior principal engineer at Amazon who led Matter Casting development, confirmed that with linear apps such as Sling TV, you might be able to flip through channels with the TV remote after launching a channel through Matter Casting.

“It actually is a different architecture from what you see with the other casting protocols,” DeCenzo says. “Matter Casting is really about communicating with apps on the TV.”

Chromecast doesn’t work quite the same way. On Android TV and Google TV devices, Chromecast’s video streams are usually separate from the in-app versions, so you can’t get full controls with your regular remote. While Google does offer a way for apps to connect directly with Chromecast, I haven’t seen any major streaming services use this feature except Netflix. And if you’re using Chromecast on a different TV platform such as Vizio SmartCast, there’s no app connection at all.

Apple’s AirPlay has a similar limitation: Videos you launch via AirPlay are separate from the apps on your TV, and using AirPlay even precludes you from playing other media on the iPhone or iPad from which the video is streaming.

All of which means that Matter Casting will feel more like an extension of the apps on your TV than an entirely separate way to watch video. That might make you more likely to use it in the first place.

Which apps support Matter Casting?

Now for the first piece of discouraging news: Amazon has listed precisely six streaming video services that are on board with Matter Casting: Its own Prime Video, Plex, Pluto TV, Sling TV, STARZ, and ZDF. Of those, only Prime Video is available now, with the rest to come at later this year.

DeCenzo told me that adding Matter Casting support to a video app shouldn’t be difficult. That sentiment was echoed by Plex senior director of product design Jason Williams, who said via email that he expects Matter Casting to be straightforward to implement. But he also noted that Plex hasn’t actually started the work to do so.

More broadly, it’s unclear how many media companies will care. As I documented back in 2017, Amazon previously tried to set up its own Chromecast alternative called Fling, but it never gained traction. Streaming services that already offered full-blown Fire TV apps saw no need to support Fling as an extra feature, and some even had no idea that Fling existed because Amazon seldom brought it up.

Chromecast, by contrast, is essentially coasting on the runaway success of its original Chromecast dongles from a decade ago, which at the time compelled thousands of developers to get on board. AirPlay, meanwhile, is built into Apple’s standard media player on iOS, so it’s widely supported as a result.

DeCenzo says Matter Casting will be successful because it was borne from listening to media companies, which have asked for a casting solution that ties directly into their TV apps. But we still don’t know how loudly Amazon will champion Matter Casting now that it’s here.

What about TV and speaker support?

Right now, you can check out Matter Casting on Amazon’s Echo Show 15. In the coming months, it’ll work with all Fire TV devices, including smart TVs with Fire TV software built in.

But Matter Casting won’t be much of an industry standard if it only works on Amazon hardware. Whether other smart TV and streaming platforms get on board ties into broader questions about Matter as a whole.

Matter launched last year as a way to unify the smart home industry behind a common standard. The idea is that if you buy a smart light bulb, dimmer switch, or door lock, you shouldn’t have to puzzle over whether it works with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, or Apple HomeKit. Matter gives device makers a standardized way to work with all of them.

Media casting aligns perfectly with Matter’s mission: Having to decide between Chromecast, AirPlay, and other proprietary casting methods is a drag for consumers, and ideally you should just be able to send video to your TV regardless of who made any of the hardware and software involved.

But so far, Matter support has been lukewarm and marred by inconsistencies in the experience compared to what users get with proprietary platforms. Chris LaPre, head of technology for the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), which maintains the Matter standard, notes that support for Matter Casting isn’t mandated on TVs with Matter support. (There are just aren’t many TVs with Matter support to begin with.) He acknowledges that this will need to change, both for Matter Casting and for Matter more broadly.

“We need to start mandating both sides of a thing … because there’s market confusion about that, but I don’t know what that’s going to look like or how that’s going to start to get teeth,” LaPre said.

Amazon’s Chris DeCenzo also confirmed that Matter Casting only works on devices with screens. The protocol supports playing music through TV apps, but it doesn’t address the separate (and equally irksome) problem of having too many connected-speaker protocols, among them Chromecast, AirPlay, and the entirely proprietary Sonos OS.

“In the future, I can imagine the CSA and Matter specifically taking this to the next step and having a pure speaker device type, but it’s not there today in Matter,” he says.

Its early days for Matter Casting

I don’t want to be too pessimistic about Matter Casting, but building up an all-new casting protocol in 2024 will likely be a slog, and media companies might have higher priorities as they fight for every scrap of streaming revenue. It’s hard enough getting them to support things that would clearly lead to more engagement, such as integration with “Continue Watching” rows on TV screens, let alone a nice-to-have playback feature that doesn’t directly translate to more viewing.

Even so, Matter Casting deserves credit for trying to fix the problems with other media casting protocols, and it is only just getting started. If Amazon puts in the work of getting partners on board, it might finally have a better second-screen experience that anyone can tap into.

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