The ability to share your content wirelessly from your laptop or smart device greatly improves meeting efficiency. Whether you are sharing sales figures, training your service staff or brainstorming with peers, there is a wide range of presentation tools available that offer that possibility: from consumer to professional, and from a few bucks to thousands of dollars. They all, however, require a sender, a receiver, and - in between those two - a wireless communication protocol. In this series, we'll take a closer look at the latter and review some of the most popular options. Today: Miracast.


Miracast is brought to you by the Wi-Fi Alliance, a non-profit organization set up by leading companies such as Dell, Intel, Motorola, Cisco, Apple and Comcast. It facilitates wireless peer-to-peer screen casting via Wi-Fi Direct connections, thus enabling you to share audio and video from computers, smartphones, tablets and other devices. To see how Miracast works, check out this video from CNET.

Unwiring the possibilities

Powered by the alliance partners, most hardware released today supports Miracast broadcasting. On the receiving end, however, Miracast is a lot less common. Most TVs and projectors don't support it. In response, companies like Roku have developed dongles that turn your screen into a Miracast receiver.

`Wireless HDMI'

Miracast is often referred to as `wireless HDMI'. The Miracast receiver creates its own network, and the sender connects directly to it without using your device's Wi-Fi network. This means that your PC or tablet can still be online through its Wi-Fi connection while streaming over Miracast.

Other advantages of Miracast include the ease of set-up, its ability to stream audio and video in real time, and the relatively keen price of the receiving dongles. Microsoft also jumped on the Miracast train when they recently announced their Wireless Display Adapter and incorporated the Miracast sender in their Windows 8.1 operating system.

Casting shadows

A frequently cited limitation of Miracast is the fact that your sender's screen needs to stay on all the time, as the connection gets lost when your tablet goes into standby mode. Moreover, due to its peer-to-peer technology, only one device is allowed on-screen at a time. And last but not least, the Miracast protocol is incompatible with Chromecast and AppleTV.
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