These are interesting times for music streaming around the home. Long reserved for a narrow range of manufacturers like Sonos, the question of how people can play music through speakers controlled from their smartphones and/or tablets has already attracted attention from Apple (AirPlay) and Google (Chromecast / Cast), with the announcement of the Spotify Connect technology earlier this week spicing the brew (Bulletin, 3-Sep-13). Now tech giant Qualcomm is also getting in on the action with something called AllPlay. It’s a technology that will be built into home audio kit, and then made available to digital services as an SDK. Rhapsody is the first music service to use AllPlay – its president Jon Irwin was on-stage at the press event to announce it yesterday. The various technologies and partnerships mean more choice for consumers wanting to stream music in their homes, although there’s a risk of more confusion too. Keep an eye out for the strategies of the mainstream hi-fi and speaker makers, in terms of which technologies they choose to integrate.
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