Airplay 2 at home
Apple’s evolving media streaming format explained
The past, present and future of AirPlay 2 explained, how to use it with macOS, plus the best speakers to go with it.
sonos launched its multiroom audio solution in 2002, utilizing a circle controller suspiciously similar to that of Apple’s crazy–popular iPod. Rather than unleashing its team of legal attack dogs, Apple responded in kind with the Sonos–esque AirTunes, released alongside iOS 4 in 2004. This enabled the sending of audio from iTunes to a speaker– connected AirPort Express, though AirTunes was, given the benefit of hindsight, a fairly limited protocol. It wasn’t until 2010, when Apple upped its abilities to go beyond audio streaming, that the rebranded AirPlay came into its own.
It’s a very easy system to understand: a sender device (an iPhone or iPad, a Mac or Apple TV) plays some media, and a receiver device (a speaker, a TV, or anything else with AirPlay capabilities) plays that media back. Pretty basic. Some devices, notably the Apple TV, can pull double duty, acting both as a sender and a receiver, and there’s a certain level of two-way communication between all but the dumbest device and your media source, since on-board controls will allow you to pause, tweak the volume, skip tracks et al. Everything in the chain needs to be Wi–Fi connected, although if you run a guest network alongside your main SSID AirPlay is smart enough to traverse the two.
The third major step change came last year, when AirPlay 2 hit the scene: this turned AirPlay from a one–to–one streamer to a one–to–many, allowing multiple AirPlay 2 devices to play the same media at the same time. Multiroom is arguably a feature which should have been part of AirPlay 15 years ago, but let’s not pick holes: it’s here now. It’s also far from the only improvement. On the audio side, AirPlay 2 introduced shared playlists, meaning anyone on your network can queue up the songs — possibly a blessing, possibly a curse, depending on your friends’ tastes.
Brain Boost
AirPlay 2 bumps up the smarts in a whole load of other ways. If you’re an Apple Music subscriber, you can ask Siri to play different songs on different AirPlay 2 compatible speakers around the home, for
example, and the updated protocol also brought all its compatible devices into Apple’s HomeKit ecosystem. This means they appear in the Home app, which offers two benefits: you can control everything from one place, and you can add that hardware to your automations – switching your TV on with the rest of your media equipment, perhaps, or incorporating a speaker into your home-brewed intruder alarm.
HomePod users also get a few extra niceties through the Home app, the most prominent of which is the ability to use two HomePods together as a stereo pair. Certainly an expensive way to listen to two-channel audio, but if you’re all in with your Apple hardware it’s a feature that makes a huge difference.
All of its little upgrades do cause the second generation of AirPlay to demand a little more from its receiver hardware, particularly in terms of memory: in order to ensure slick playback, AirPlay 2 buffers a significantly larger chunk of data. It doesn’t, though, necessarily need any different hardware than the original. In turn, this makes most modern devices upgradeable, and a huge amount of existing hardware has already been able to make the jump to AirPlay 2 with a simple firmware update.
uPgrade or not
There are no formalities here, though. Certain hardware either cannot or will not grant the firmware upgrade required for full AirPlay 2 compatibility, and this includes Apple’s now end–of–life AirPort Express. That’s disappointing, but the appearance of its successor doesn’t mean the first–gen AirPlay is on its way to the tech graveyard; devices which run the original version continue to work.
When it moves into new sectors, AirPlay 2 gets a little more tricky. In the TV market, for example, compatibility is something which requires new hardware. While certain manufacturers have been able to roll AirPlay 2 into models released before Apple formalized the upgrade, if your TV was released before 2018 you’re likely out of luck.
At least that’s currently the case. With our prediction hats on, we’d say that, if not full–on AirPlay 2, at least some form of more convenient streaming will soon be coming to a wider range of smart TVs, games consoles, cable boxes, etc. Apple’s subscription–based Apple TV+ service demands a strong platform — if it’s compatible with only a limited string of smart TVs, it’ll be at a huge disadvantage against Netflix, Amazon Prime Video et al. Watch this space.