Streaming TV apps with the Apple TV and Airplay Mirroring

AirPlay mirroring has been around since the iPad 2, I haven’t had chance to play with it but since I have a nice new iPad I thought i would have a play with it. With Airplay mirroring you can mirror the output of an iPad 2, iPhone 4S or the 3rd gen iPad to a TV using a 2nd or 3rd gen Apple TV (confused by the gens yet?)

As it theoretically mirrors everything from the iPad to the Apple TV I thought it would be good to have a look at trying some of the TV streaming apps available on the iPad and see how they work on the Apple TV. The Apple TV an iPad where connect to my network via wifi.

First I tried BBC iPlayer, with the app you can watch BBC content from the last 7 days along with live TV. The app itself works fine and the picture quality on the iPad was very good but on the Apple TV it wasn’t very good, there was no lag it was just that picture was a bit fuzzy and low resolution however it seemed to get better over time. On the iPad the video stream stopped displaying and had the TV show cover art and the transport controls on the screen.

ITV Player is another TV catchup app this time for ITV content, this worked better than iPlayer with the content being an exact mirror of the iPad and the picture quality was very good, certainly watchable.

Demand 5 from Channel 5 also had very good picture quality, I did get a lot of buffering of the stream but that is the limitations of my bandwidth and if you have a good internet connection this won’t be a problem.

4oD Catchup is Channel 4’s catch up service and like ITV and C5’s apps mirrors the display on the Apple TV.  It works well with good picture quality, again I have buffering issues but faster broadband would fix that.

Finally there is Sky Go from Sky, this is Sky’s streaming app and doesn’t work at all with Airplay mirroring. On the Apple TV you get a message saying HDMI is not supported so it looks like Sky has deliberately displaying Airplay which is disappointing (the audio worked).

So Channel 4, Channel 5 and ITV apps works great, BBC iPlayer is just about useable and Sky Go is a no go. Really it’s no substitute for having a proper app on the Apple TV and hopefully that will happen one day but it’s useable and could be a good way of getting live TV to a room where you don’t have an aerial cable connected to your TV.

Next I am going to try some of the movie streaming services and DVBLink