Wednesday 30 November 2016

The Wireless Display – An Introduction to Wireless Display Technology

Wireless display technology is quickly becoming prevalent, even standard infrastructure for meeting rooms and classrooms across the globe. Making displays wirelessly accessible empowers the participants in a room to share information more freely and naturally, improving meeting results and productivity.
In the future when we look back, we suspect the evolution of wireless display technology from our current Wireless presentation system will seem obvious – the same way color televisions were a natural progression from the black and white sets. But, as the adage goes, hindsight is 20-20. Right now, as we live through the adoption phase of wireless display technology, there’s a gap between previous standards – i.e. the old way of doing things – and the new technology that will shape the future. As a provider of a wireless display solution, we want to offer an overview for those that may be new to the technology – what wireless displays are, what differentiates wireless display solutions, and how wireless displays are shaping the future of meetings and collaboration at the crossroads of our digital and interpersonal lives.
So what is a wireless display?
A wireless display is any type of display – i.e. flat panel LED, LCD, projector, video wall, etc. – that can be accessed wirelessly from a separate device – such as a laptop, tablet or smartphone. The vast majority of the wireless display solutions available in the market operate over standard IP networks like WiFi. In other words, users join the WiFi network that the wireless display is attached to in order to connect.  In general, today’s enterprise wireless display solutions are separate consoles or dongles that plug into existing displays to make the displays wirelessly accessible (like our Solstice Pod).




At the most basic level, wireless displays enable users to share content from a device to the display without being tethered to the display by way of a video cable. If you’ve ever walked into a conference room to give a presentation, you probably had to plug an HDMI or VGA cable into your laptop in order to show your presentation up on the main screen.  Wireless display cuts the cable in conference rooms, enabling users to present on the main screen wirelessly. But as we discuss in the next section, wireless displays also do much more.
What differentiates wireless display solutions?
Beyond cutting the cable, wireless display solutions have fewer things in common than you might guess. Each solution has a unique approach to the problem and supports different features. At the highest level, we should distinguish between consumer solutions – that primarily serve entertainment purposes – and productivity-focused, enterprise wireless display solutions employed by businesses and education institutions. Consumer solutions are primarily used for streaming entertainment content like Netflix. These solutions are generally limited to one connected user at a time, and often have limited support for the various user device platforms, such as support for Apple AND Windows devices. A couple examples of these solutions include Google Chromecast and Apple TV. Ultimately these consumer products can be great for home/consumer use but usually aren’t the best solutions for meeting rooms or classrooms.

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