Please consider adding “Matter Casting” support to Home Assistant Cast (not Google Cast) and any upcoming Home Assistant Satellite displays/speakers (that also support Wyoming for remote voice)
“Matter Casting” is a new open protocol standard that 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 protocol that might eventually become an industry standard in the future, competing directly with Google Cast / Google Chromecast and Apple AirPlay closed source protocols. Being an open-source enthusiast I am hoping for industry-wide adoption of an open standard for casting video and audio streams in the future.
Anyway, “Matter Casting” is a technology that allows you to cast video and/or audio content from your smartphone, tablet, and computer to your TV or smart display. From an end-user’s point-of-view it is meant to work the same thing as Google Cast and Apple AirPlay with a few major differences: implementing support for this “Matter Casting” is royalty-free and it is based on open-source code. 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.
It is under early development and still looks to be missing 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 stated that they do not plan on ever adding support for Google Cast or Apple AirPlay video casting to their new devices. This is just hot from the press of the CES 2024 (Consumer Electronics Show yearly tech event):
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/amazon-ces-2024-announcements
“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.”