Wireless Video

Wireless video has been the fail of the decade. Video projectors have always been messy. Back in the times of VGA, a typical conference would not happen without a presenter struggling connecting her/his laptop to the projector. Something was always wrong. Either the connector pin's were bent or the signal was out of sync or too weak, or the resolution could not match or, when everything seemed to be OK, a video clip embedded in PowerPoint was playing only on the computer's screen, leaving a black box on the projected image.

HDMI has changed this a bit, albeit not fully. It has been sharing similar issues with resolution, synchronization, signal strength, , and loose connector. Only the pins were not bending, as a HDMI connector has no pins.

In the meantime we were promised wireless video would solve all these issues. Unfortunately it still has not... Several technologies arrived in the meantime: UWB, MiraCast, Intel Wireless Display... But none has really prevailed, and as of today, probably the best wireless video experience is delivered by proprietary systems such as Barco. These systems, however, are expensive, and require special equipment to be installed alongside a video projector.

We still cannot just buy a projector, open a laptop and project the screen. Like we do with Bluetooth audio. The reason for this is easy to explain. Bluetooth, as a technology, is too slow for video. And the other wireless video transfer technologies lack a universally adopted application standard for discovering, connecting, and transferring video signal.

This fail, and it is a fail, just show how important an application layer is. It does not matter that we have all those high throughput networks. We still struggle with a very simple task of sending a video stream to a display, without wires.