Today, it occurred to me that I could use a web tool like join.me to share the contents of my headless Apple TV unit by broadcasting the QuickTime window I use. The free version of join.me offers reception for up to 10 people in an ad-hoc meeting, so I sent out a call for help and got a few people to pop in and offer feedback.

You join the meeting using a link supplied by the website. It took most testers a minute or two to hop in.

According to those testers, the results were fairly low quality and occasionally choppy. “It was clear at all times other than the choppiness,” one tester told me. Another said he got about 4fps at best. Artifacts were particularly noticeable during animation sequences:

But during quieter moments, the screens were pretty readable:

All in all? Not ideal, but promising.

Broadcasting a QuickTime screen this way isn’t limited to AppleTV, of course. QuickTime can render any iOS device screen for most modern lightning-based devices. So if you have an iPad app or iPhone utility you want to demonstrate in real circumstances using realworld interact, this is an interesting way to do so.

If you do give this approach a try, drop me a note and let me know how it goes for you. I suspect this will work best for screens that do little animation and are primarily text-based.

Thanks ajfoul, Lyle, Jonathan, David, August