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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.
Top Rated Comments
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.
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;)
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.
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.