There is speculation this week that Apple is going to evolve their AirPlay technology so that devices don’t need to be on the same WiFi network to connect. I’ve written a little bit about my experience installing an AppleTV in my teaching lab, and this evolution to AirPlay would be a welcome improvement. I’ve set up enough AppleTVs now to say that, while it’s easy enough if you know what you’re doing, most people have no idea what they’re doing with their network. That means the AppleTV is still too hard for non-geeks.
The big sticking point with the AppleTV in offices and schools as it stands is that it doesn’t support enterprise-level WiFi authentication. It is easy enough to work around this by creating an ad hoc WiFi network, but then you have to remember to switch to it when you want to connect to the AppleTV, which I inevitably forget to do. (The worst part of this is that, so far, I’m mostly just showing off my setup to a colleague. They come in, see how nice everything looks, I go to impress them with AirPlay, and I’m not on the right network. Doh.) Once everything is set up and talking, everything “just works” as they say. It’s getting it all talking that’s the tricky part. If Apple could remove the complexity from that step, which is what this purported AirPlay Direct will do, then they’ve got a real winner.