Play To Overview
The Play To feature allows you to stream music, photos and videos from apps to Xbox and other supported devices on your home network. Imagine being able to easily flick photos and videos from your app to the big screen TV. Or music from your app to your living room speakers. Using the Play To contract, you can easily enable those scenarios for your users from your apps. It’s a great way for you to make your apps more engaging in users’ living rooms.
To deliver a great end-to-end user, developer, and device experience, we designed Play To with a couple of things in mind:
- Users: On networks where users enable Sharing (like home networks), Windows 8 automatically discovers and installs Windows Certified Play To devices. The operating system provides a consistent user experience where users can swipe and tap devices from the Device charm to start Play To from any supported app. All the media focused Microsoft apps have a built-in Play To experience including the Music, Video and Photos apps. Even Internet Explorer 10 implements the Play To contract so users can stream photos and HTML5 music and videos from webpages.
- Developers: The Play To developer contract is a high-level abstraction of the underlying media streaming technologies (protocols, format matching, transcoding, etc.), and makes it easy to quickly implement (and test) Play To experiences in a wide range of apps. All apps (and HTML5 webpages in IE) get a basic experience enabled by default – and can then tailor the experience, or opt-out.
- Devices: The Play To experience in Windows 8 is designed to work with Windows certified Play To devices. Certified devices provide a consistent and reliable experience. There are a number of consumer electronics companies working on Play To certification for their devices spanning multiple device categories.This includes TVs, set top boxes, speakers and audio receivers. As disclosed at the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) earlier this year, Play To receiver support is a new feature that’s been rolled out to about 70 million Xbox 360 consoles as part of this year’s fall dashboard update. Keep an eye on the Windows blog for more device announcements!
