Apple TV question.

[Mottie]

On my iPad, I have the sky go app and I use my sons sky account to mainly watch the odd footie match and the F1 racing. Problem is, it’s an iPad. I noticed that there is screen mirroring in the drop down menu. When I click on that, it says 'looking for Apple TV'. If I were to buy one of those Apple TV boxes and connect that to my smart tv, would I be able to watch all sky go content on my TV or has Apple something in place to prevent that? Any other ways to watch the Sky Go app on my TV?

 

[Lucid]

AFAIK, the official answer is No. It's a rights issue. The Sky Go app will only play on the registered device which is your iPhone.

Someone had mentioned a workaround in that if you can mirror from the phone playing in landscape, and have both devices playing at the same time, then it may work, but this is old info relating to ATV2 or 3. Not sure it'll apply equally to a 4.

The other thing to be aware of is the limited resolution of the app. To help make it stream to portable devices the res is restricted to 720p and it might also be more heavily compressed too. Neither are so much of an issue on a small, high-res screen, but would be more apparent on a larger TV.

 

[Keithmac]

Best off with a decent Android tablet and ChromeCast or similar.

Can also use a laptop if you have one.

Apple are very restricive regarding content.

 

[Sandtree]

This has nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with Sky. Both Apple and Google allow app developers to choose if they allow mirroring/casting etc to another screen. Obviously most do but Sky, and Channel 4, both used to block this. That said, there are various online posts saying that Sky recently relaxed this.

The only advantage of Android in this case is the existence of things like MiBox that can load the phone app directly and so avoids the casting restrictions whereas AppleTV cannot load iOS apps and so its remains in Sky's control.