Please consider adding “Matter Casting” support to Home Assistant Cast (as an alternative to the Google Cast protocol), and more importantly, please look at adding Matter Casting support to any upcoming Home Assistant’s Assist Voice Assistant Smart Speakers and Smart Displays (regardless if they are based on Wyoming Satellite or ESPHome Voice Assistant platforms) as Matter Casting is aimed at democratize local video and audio casting in a universal way that can be supported by all ecosystems and platforms.
- https://www.matteralpha.com/explainer/what-is-matter-casting (unofficial end-user explainer blog)
- What is Matter Casting? | Know-how | matter-smarthome (Note! another explainer blog)
“Matter Casting” is a new open protocol media streaming standard and the Matter Casting APIs for casting video and audio streams over a local network is only a small part of the currently much-hyped Matter standard suite for IoT which is being led, promoted and developed by the CSA (Connectivity Standards Alliance) and its very impressive list of member companies:
This is simply meant as an informal feature request that can also be as an open discussion about this new open video and audio streaming standard and Matter Casting API/protocol that might eventually become an industry-standard in the future, meant to replace or compete directly with proprietary and closed source media streaming protocols used by Google Cast (Google Chromecast), Apple’s AirPlay (formerly AirTunes for AirPort), Alexa Cast (Amazon Alexa / Amazon Echo), and Miracast. Being an enthusiast of open-source software and non-proprietary standards I am hoping for industry-wide adoption of this new open standard for casting video and audio streams in the future.
Anyway, “Matter Casting” (also wrongly referred to as “Matter Cast”) is a technology standard that uses open APIs to enable you to cast video and/or audio content from your smartphone, tablet, and computer to your TV or smart display and smart speakers / audio-recievers + voice assistant appliances. Matter Casting is primarily meant to let you cast content and control playback from an app on your phone/tablet to an app running on a TV, smart display or smart speaker. From an end-user’s point-of-view Matter Casting is meant to work the same thing as Google Cast, Apple AirPlay, and Miracast or other similar streaming media protocols for sharing multimedia on a local network, with a few major differences: implementing support for this “Matter Casting” is royalty-free and it is based on open-source code, so not proprietary. That means it is designed from the ground up to be a “free and open source” video and audio casting/streaming standard for the best possible cross-platform compatibility.
Matter casting is an open protocol that does not require specific hardware, only that the app on your source device and the app on the target device you are casting to both have the feature enabled. So again, from an end-users point-of-view it is essentially like Apple’s AirPlay or Google Cast but can be available to every app or hardware maker to implement and not limited to specific mobile OS and ecosystems, or partnerships, however under the hood Matter Casting is also superior to those other protocols in many ways.
"In a brief demo at CES, Amazon showed how users would get all the features of its Prime Video app while casting, including its X-Ray feature, and could then back out from the video player to the Prime Video menu. Chris DeCenzo, the senior principal engineer at Amazon who led Matter Casting development, confirmed that with linear apps such as Sling TV, you might be able to flip through channels with the TV remote after launching a channel through Matter Casting.
“It actually is a different architecture from what you see with the other casting protocols,” DeCenzo says. “Matter Casting is really about communicating with apps on the TV.”
Chromecast doesn’t work quite the same way. On Android TV and Google TV devices, Chromecast’s video streams are usually separate from the in-app versions, so you can’t get full controls with your regular remote. While Google does offer a way for apps to connect directly with Chromecast, I haven’t seen any major streaming services use this feature except Netflix. And if you’re using Chromecast on a different TV platform such as Vizio SmartCast, there’s no app connection at all.
Apple’s AirPlay has a similar limitation: Videos you launch via AirPlay are separate from the apps on your TV, and using AirPlay even precludes you from playing other media on the iPhone or iPad from which the video is streaming.
All of which mean that Matter Casting will feel more like an extension of the apps on your TV than an entirely separate way to watch video. That might make you more likely to use it in the first place."
Again, Matter Casting is in its infancy and its current architecture still looks to be missing audio playback features specifically for music, such as audio-only or multi-room and real-time audio synchronization to allow for synchronized multi-room music playback, but at least is it already supporting Android, Darwin (for iOS and Mac), and Linux, allowing any developer to implement it into its products. Hopefully ensuring wider-spread compatibility between devices of different manufacturers and ecosystems.
So the reason why I think this is interesting is that it is the first attempt by the technology consortium governing the overall Matter standard suite to create also an open standard for local video and audio casting that is meant for broader adoption across different ecosystems for interoperability.
https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/
Because the Matter standard matters if adopted as the foundation for all connected things:
https://csa-iot.org/newsroom/building-a-standard-that-really-matters/
Matter in general already has hundreds of member companies, but understand that not everyone has publicly committed to every part of that standard, as most have only announced support for the IoT parts that control smart devices, however, support for additional device types is being announced regularly. “Matter Casting” is needed in this toolkit for streaming audio and video locally in a unified way.
Matter Casting adoption has so far been announced by Amazon who will first add support to newer Amazon Fire TV and Amazon Echo Show series of smart display devices via an upcoming firmware update, (in which it sounds like they might initially only implement video streaming?).
More interestingly, Amazon has already embraced Matter Casting fully have publicly stated that they do not plan on ever adding support for Google Cast or Apple AirPlay video casting to their newer Fire OS based devices (running Amazon’s Fire OS 7 or higher). This is just hot from the press of the CES 2024 (Consumer Electronics Show yearly tech event):
“Amazon is a long-time supporter of using open technology standards to give customers more choice over the devices and services they use in their homes. That’s also why Amazon is a founding member and key contributor to the Matter Standard. At CES, Amazon announced Matter Casting, which enables customers to cast content to Fire TV and Echo Show 15 devices directly from supported streaming apps on iOS and Android. Customers can begin watching a movie or browse for their next favorite show from Prime Video on their phone, and cast it to their compatible Fire TV device or Echo Show 15. This is an industry-first demonstration of implementing Matter Casting.”
“Chris DeCenzo (a principal engineer at Amazon who works on Alexa and Fire OS devices) says that if all the big companies adopted Matter Casting, it would be better for the industry, as app developers would only have to develop for one protocol — one of the founding principles of the Matter smart home standard. “We believe in open standards,” he says, “because it simplifies things for developers.”
“Additionally, it would make things easier for customers. Casting from apps would work with every streaming box, TV, and smart display, and you wouldn’t have to think about what hardware you have in order to cast your content. That sounds great in theory, but — as with Matter in general — it looks like it will be a long journey to get there.”
