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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

A somewhat related question -- why is the industry able to agree on a single standard for how data will move over a wire from a device to a display, but yet can't come up with a single standard for doing it without a wire.

I can take my Mac laptop or my PC laptop and roll up to my TV and with a single cable make pictures and sound come out of the TV.

But yet neither one can talk to the TV without a cable, unless I get a special device (which is different for both and ironically uses the same cable).

And even worse, if I had a Samsung phone, it could connect to the TV wirelessly.

Why can't we have a single wireless display standard? Is there a technology problem I'm missing, or is it really just walled gardens?

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Miracast is such standard. Thousands of devices support it. However two major players ( Apple & Google) dont. Apple has traditionally been a closed system, so it is not a big surprise. What surprises me is that Google also removed support for Miracast from Android and started promoting their proprietary casting protocol.

Miracast is heavily broken on many devices and rarely works at a reasonable level. Netflix and Google worked to create a good streaming standard names DIAL. Google took the idea and ran with it to create the Cast system which ended up working really well.

But the Cast system doesn't send arbitrary bits to the TV. It's a protocol for handing off authorized streams which are then processed by the TV (or in most cases the device connected to the TV by, ironically, HDMI).

So it's not really a method to stream arbitrary visual and audio data to a TV.

Well, you _can_ do screen mirroring with Cast, at least on Android. In my experience though it has fairly high latency and will occasionally freeze for a few seconds at a time.

We also have had DLNA for around a decade now. It was never perfect, but it was fairly well supported in the past. Unfortunately it didn't evolve quick enough so proprietary solutions overtook it.

The problem is that Miracast interoperability is terrible and often doesn't work.

Because doing it without a wire was, until relatively recently (5 years), something only iPhones did well, or at all.

Consumers have been used to cables for decades, so they demand something that just works in this area. The same goes for data. Apple tried Thundebolt and it failed, because consumers already have something that just works and is compatible in this area (USB), and they wouldn't let go of it. Wifi streaming is relatively new, compared to cables, but once we get used to it Just Working, there's no going back for consumers.

It's almost the same with Wifi voice calls, where, unfortunately, consumers don't demand something that just works, but are left with two incompatible protocols (FaceTime and Hangouts, or whatever Google's version is called these days).

DLNA has been around for ages but Apple and Google have NIH syndrome.

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