Samsung is helping to bring AirPlay to more hotel rooms — what we know

Earlier this year Apple announced AirPlay would be coming to hotel TVs at specific locations in the United States. With the goal of letting guests stream content from their iPhone or iPad onto their room’s TV. This rollout was expected to be rather slow, but it just got a welcome boost thanks to Samsung.

Samsung has announced that it will be rolling out AirPlay support to its range of hospitality TVs. This means that a much larger pool of hotel guests will be able to utilize the service, and watch content from their phones on a bigger screen easily and securely.

The system has you scan a QR code from the TV to establish the AirPlay connection — and automatically connect you to the Hotel’s Wi-Fi network. However this won’t work if you don’t have iOS 17.3, iPadOS 17.3 or a later version of either software. So make sure you keep your devices updated before you travel.

Samsung also confirmed that none of your information will be stored, and that paired devices are automatically removed when you check out.

Sadly what Samsung didn’t say is which hotels will be offering AirPlay on Samsung TVs. So the rollout will still depend on hotels actually switching the feature on. However the company claimed that hotel operators can easily update their management systems to support AirPlay — and hopefully a bunch of them do.

While some people, like myself, tend to travel with some kind of streaming device. It’s not the most convenient thing in the world. You need to remember the device, a remote, potentially some extra cables, so there are a lot of ways things can go wrong. You also rely on actually being able to access the TV’s HDMI port without disassembling half the room.

A lot of modernized hotel rooms do have HDMI ports for this very purpose, but that’s never a guarantee. And logging into streaming services on any smart hotel TVs you find runs the risk of you forgetting to log out — and giving subsequent guests unfiltered access to your streaming accounts.

Honestly, having a compatible wireless streaming system in the room is a much better option. Regardless of whether it’s powered by AirPlay or Google’s Chromecast . And the more companies that are on board with rolling out those features, the better our hotel stays will be.

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