The concept of BYOD (“Bring Your Own Device”) is becoming increasingly important in video and business circles. When you walk into a meeting room, the best thing would be that your own device (cell phone, tablet, PC or whatever), immediately and natively discovers the Wi-Fi receiver in the room, discovers the display device, sets up and authenticates a connection, enables you to push video to the display, and assigns a participant as the moderator. And the next time you meet in the same room, you’re logged on again. If only it was that easy…but we do now have EZCast, which combines both the Miracast and Chromecast ideas with cross-platform support, including Apple. It’s also an inexpensive HDMI-enabled dongle, with auto-discovery and arbitration. Users can send video from their desktop to a device with the attached EZCast dongle, which then acts as an integrated Wi-Fi access point. In the conference room, you can mirror your screen, stream from the Internet, or connect to a webcam. EZCast becomes a remote control, a video transmitter, a desktop mirror — and by the way, it has 256-bit AES encryption.
—Paul Berliner, from “Video World,” PLSN, July 2015
