HBO on Wednesday confirmed its HBO Go and HBO Now services will drop support for second- and third-generation Apple TV units this month. Users will no longer be able to stream starting April 30.
The change is being made “in order to provide the best streaming experience,” the company said. There are other ways to enjoy these services on older Apple TV boxes, however.
Switch on a hotel TV, and you’ll likely run into its paywall very quickly. You probably don’t want to view any of the hotel’s stupid pay channels, but maybe you do want to hook up your iPad and watch some of the shows you brought along with you.
You’re typically still out of luck, though. These locked-up TVs won’t let you access their HDMI ports. Nor will they let you connect via AirPlay, if they even support Apple’s streaming protocol. However, there’s an absurdly easy way to disable all this dumb “security” and watch video from your iPad or iPhone to a hotel TV.
Imagine arriving home, listening to music on your iPhone. You want to start that music playing on your home speakers instead, only you don’t want all the hassle of using Control Center, or the AirPlay panel, to do the connection manually.
If you own a HomePod, all you have to do is hold your iPhone near it, and playback will transfer. But what about regular AirPlay speakers? Can you hand off to those? Yes! You can. With a quick one-time setup, you can have the music or podcast app switch from your headphones, and play on any AirPlay speaker you have at home.
Sony is rolling out an update to select 2018 and 2019 TVs that adds AirPlay 2 and HomeKit support for the first time.
The features are part of a wider Android 9 upgrade, which also adds Dolby Atmos. But if your existing set isn’t on the list of supported devices today, it never will be.
In iOS 13, you can share songs and watch movies with a friend, with each of you using your own AirPods. The new feature is called Audio Sharing, and it lets you instantly — and temporarily — pair a second set of AirPods to your iPhone or iPad. It’s like the olde schoole method of using a headphone splitter to plug two sets of headphones into one jack socket, only way more expensive and fancy.
Here’s how to use it.
LG will start bringing AirPlay 2 and HomeKit to its newest Smart TV sets this week.
2019 models will play nicely with iPhone, iPad, and Mac after the update. You will be able to stream content straight from your Apple devices, and control your set in the Home app on iOS.
Netflix has explained why it stopped supporting AirPlay video casting in its iOS app. The change is a result of the new TVs with built-in AirPlay support being released, and apparently not in retaliation for the recent announcement of Apple TV+, a rival streaming service.
You can no longer stream Netflix programs from your iPhone to a big-screen TV via AirPlay.
This feature, which has been available for many years, disappeared just a few days after the announcement of Apple TV+, a rival streaming service. The timing has brought accusations that Netflix stripped out AirPlay in retaliation.
Update: Netflix has released a statement explaining why it pulled this feature out of its app. To learn more, please read Netflix says it ended AirPlay support to benefit customers.
The wait for LG’s first lineup of TVs with Apple tech built in is almost over. After unveiling them in January, the Korean company said today that it will begin rolling out its big-screen models with AirPlay 2 and HomeKit in April.
These are apparently part of Apple’s move to broaden the availability of the video streaming service it’s expected to unveil in a couple of weeks.
iPhone, iPad and Mac should soon easily stream video to Roku boxes if an unconfirmed report is correct. Roku is reportedly talking with Apple about adding AirPlay 2 to its products.
Apple has recently been working to significantly broaden the availability of its proprietary video and audio protocol.
Popular open-source video player VLC is getting AirPlay support “in about a month.” VideoLan, the team behind it, also plans to make it easier for users to switch to VLC from iTunes.
The confirmation comes just as VLC celebrated a staggering 3 billion downloads — around a quarter of which came from mobile devices.
One of the nice surprises to come out of CES this week is that a bunch of TV manufacturers are finally adding AirPlay 2 support to their latest sets. To help you keep track of which ones, Apple has published a list of TVs that are compatible with its streaming platform.
These are the ones to look out for if you want to send content to your TV over AirPlay.
Are you a late-night movie watcher with sensitive neighbors? Do you hate watching your Apple TV with the volume set too low? Then you might love today’s tip. Did you know that you can use your AirPods with your Apple TV? Sure you did. But did you also know that you don’t need to dig around in your Apple TV’s menus to hook them up? There’s a Siri Remote shortcut that makes switching ultra-convenient.
At WWDC 2017, Apple announced speaker support for the Home app, powered by an update to AirPlay. While introducing Airplay 2, they highlighted several speaker makers that would add support for the new protocol. Nearly a year later, iOS 11.4 finally launched with support for the updated wireless audio protocol.
As of today – 4 months after becoming available in iOS – speaker manufacturer Libratone has made good on their AirPlay 2 promise.
It’s possible you have an old AirPort Express wireless router in a box somewhere. Dig it out and set it up, because it can now be used as part of an AirPlay 2 audio system.
Even though it’s been discontinued, Apple just issued a firmware update for the second-generation AirPort Express that adds AirPlay 2 support.
Sonos is opening its speakers to a new world of listening experiences today with the addition of AirPlay 2.
The smart speaker company teased AirPlay 2 support last month during the introduction of its Beam speaker. Now, just over a month after Apple added AirPlay 2 as part of iOS 11.4, Sonos is the first third-party speaker company to dive head first into the new tech. And the company added a few tricks your HomePod can’t match.
Sonos is making a power play to take over your living room with its latest smart speaker called Sonos Beam.
Beam is a new sound bar that is smaller than Sonos’ Playbar and Playbase, but it also packs some new features like a five-microphone array and it plays well with Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and of course, Siri.
Watch out HomePod, this thing looks amazing:
The iOS video player is pretty full-featured, although most of its advanced tracks are hidden. Today we’ll take a quick look at what it can do, including how to control the entire app from a hardware keyboard.
Almost a year after it was first announced, AirPlay 2 is finally ready and running on iOS. AirPlay 2 lets you stream audio from your iPad or iPhone to more than one speaker at the same time (something that has always been possible on the Mac). And if you use AirPlay 2 with a pair of HomePod speakers, you can choose to treat them as the left and right speakers of a stereo pair, giving a much bigger-sounding audio picture.
Here’s how to add this to your home entertainment gear or desk setup. (Yes, some people are lucky enough to use HomePods in stereo pairs with their computing rigs.)
iOS 11.4 looks like it’s on track for a public release sometime around WWDC 2018.
Apple just released a big batch of betas for developers this morning, including the fifth build of iOS 11.4 which brings a number of new features and improvements to the iPhone and iPad.
Apple is about to let Siri control your AirPlay speakers.
As part of the latest beta for iOS 11.4, Apple has added the ability to use AirPlay commands through Siri, allowing users to use Siri on their iPhone to play something on their HomePod.
HomePod owners no longer need to be a developer to test AirPlay 2.
Apple seeded the first public beta of iOS 11.4 to testers today, allowing anyone who signs up for the beta testing program to play with some of the new features coming out later this spring.
This tip is less of a how-to, and more of a why-to. Did you ever think about creating a sleep playlist for your HomePod? It’s a great idea for a few reasons.
Let’s see how it’s done.
Do you want to stream music from an app on your Mac to your HomePod? Good luck with that. The only app that supports AirPlay streaming is iTunes, and what’s the point in using that if you can stream your iCloud Music Library directly using the HomePod alone? For apps like Spotify, or VLC, you can resort to streaming your entire Mac system audio via Airplay, but then you have to listen alerts booming through the HomePod, and you can’t remote-control the Spotify Audio using Siri.
But if you use Rogue Amoeba’s AirFoil, you can fix all these problems.
The HomePod takes a lot of flak for being the dumbest smart speaker around, but it can do more than you might think. In today’s video, I’ll show you 20 HomePod tips you need to know.
(Just a quick heads-up: I’m going to be saying “Hey Siri” a few times in this video.)