iOS 5 Beta 3 Adds AirPlay Support for FaceTime

As noted by TiPb, the third beta of iOS 5 released earlier this week has activated new AirPlay streaming support for FaceTime video calling. The feature allows users to display FaceTime video calls directly on a large-screen TV for easy viewing by larger groups of people.

If this makes it into the final release — and not everything does — it’ll be fantastic for families and businesses alike.

The ability to easily start a video call and beam it onto the big screen is compelling. Whether it’s grandpa and grandma, or the team in England, it takes FaceTime from a small, personal experience to a big, group experience at the touch of a button.

With the FaceTime camera of course remaining on the iOS device itself, users taking advantage of the new AirPlay feature while participating in a FaceTime video call will need to ensure that they are looking in the proper direction, but it certainly appears that FaceTime over AirPlay does add some utility for video calling in group settings.

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Tom Grant

109 months ago

Would really like to see AirPlay Mirroring for the Mac as well one day.

Rating: 6 Votes

squirrelist

109 months ago

An AppleTV is easily worth $99 just for AirPlay. But the thing that bugs me about viewing the iPad screen on a TV through AirPlay or Cable is that the resolution remains the same and you get those black pillars.

Yes, I know you can't just stretch out the UI just because it's on a big widescreen tv. But for thing like FaceTime or viewing fullscreen Hulu/Web Video then there should be a way for it to be optimized to wide.

Applications that are "secondary monitor aware" like Netflix will show the video properly. The TV acts as a secondary monitor and will run at full resolution. When mirroring you have to go with the least common denominator, which is going to be the iPad screen itself.

Rating: 4 Votes

Mak47

109 months ago

...and we've now reached Back To The Future 2 style video calling. Very nice.

Now just give us some high quality forward facing cameras on our iOS devices to take advantage of this feature and we can all get fired by our bosses in big screen HD!...and then look extra sad when we call Grandma afterward to ask for help paying the bills;)

Rating: 3 Votes

urkel

109 months ago

Rating: 2 Votes

virus7

109 months ago

Man, Apple is making it hard for me to not want to upgrade my 1st gen ATV.

The main thing holding me back is ATV2 not being able to act as an airplay source.

I typically play music over my ATV and stream it to a connected AP Express.

Rating: 2 Votes

litchie

109 months ago

Time to buy an apple tv for my dad

Rating: 2 Votes

Anonymous Freak

109 months ago

Now make a dock to hold your iPad on top of the TV, with the good backside video camera pointing out, and allow FaceTime to use full HD resolution.

Rating: 1 Votes

icibaqu

109 months ago

Very cool. Goodbye skyping with the baby and my parents (baby's grandparents) hello FaceTime.

Rating: 1 Votes

swarmster

109 months ago

Would really like to see AirPlay Mirroring for the Mac as well one day.

Very much agreed. I would buy some as gifts for those that have no easy way of cabling to their TVs (and swapping cabling all the time is a pain), but would like to be able to.

Rating: 1 Votes

nagromme

109 months ago

At some point I’m going to think, $39 for an iPad video cable, or just 2.5x that and go for AppleTV instead. AppleTV will win! Plus, I plan to return to Netflix some time.

I’ll be hooking it to a projector, though, not a TV. Don’t own one, never will. A big iMac (or Mac Pro) meets my daily needs thanks to EyeTV, and for big-experience movies and games, there’s the projector.

I definitely wish for AirPlay Mac video mirroring too. I’d snap up an AppleTV instantly (well, maybe waiting for the rumored 1080p version) just for that.

Rating: 1 Votes

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