MediaTek’s UltraCast Technology Adds 4K Capabilities to Miracast

Miracast was launched back in 2012, and it allowed for a wireless connection from devices like a smartphone, tablet or laptop to other devices like TVs, monitors and projectors. Many people described this technology as HDMI over WiFi, and we saw a number of products using it as a selling point. As of April this year, the WiFi Alliance said there were over 5,000 devices that support this Miracast technology standard.

While there were a lot of reasons to get behind such a standard, it did have some pitfalls. For instance, the Miracast standard has "optional components" like Wireless Multimedia Extensions (WME) which is also known as WiFi Multimedia (WMM). This does improve the user experience when the component is used, but not all devices have it and that can lead to some issues when a user expects something that isn't here. The certification for Miracast also does not require a device meet certain latency requirements, so again, this can lead to some issues when a consumer expects their device to perform a certain way.

Nevertheless, Miracast is very convenient and MediaTek wanted to improve upon it. MediaTek describes it as the "first chipset-enabled streaming technology on the market that enables users to enjoy the stunning clarity of 4K video content generated by their smartphones and stream it wirelessly to a 4K-ready television or set-top box." But there are already other products on the market that do this (like the Chromecast Ultra for instance).

Competition is always good though, and it's nice to see MediaTek building upon an open standard and adding 4K support on top of the Miracast standard. MediaTek says this new chipset will be included in MediaTek Helio series smartphones, but doesn't go into detail as to which ones we can expect at this time. The company is also encouraging 3rd-party vendors to integrate this technology in their smartphones, TVs, set-top boxes and more.

Source: PR Newswire

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