(Photo Credit: Mobility Beat)
YouTube and Netflix have partnered up to offer a new service called DIAL, which is similar to Apple’s AirPlay. DIAL was first announced at this year’s CES. With DIAL you’ll be able to control content from your device to your smart TV or set-top-box.
Unlike Airplay, Dial won’t directly stream a mirror of your content from your device to your TV. Instead, it will rely on separate apps communicating with each other, which means you will need a Netflix app for your device and a Netflix app for your TV. Once you’re connected, DIAL will open up on both your device and TV.
Scott Mirer, Director of Product Management at Netflix, told Gigaom,
At about the same time, we learned that the YouTube team was interested in much the same thing – they had already started to do some work on 2nd screen use cases. And so we approached them on collaborating… We also felt that having two major video services define and promote DIAL would help get it more widely adopted as a common solution to a common problem, vs. taking a proprietary approach. It’s been a productive partnership and we’re confident that we’ll get wider adoption because of it.
Sources are saying, DIAL is being supported by Google TV, and GigaOM was told by developers that Samsung and LG TV’s are looking to support DIAL. In the next several months, Netflix will be rolling out compatible tools that will support DIAL.