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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Airplay is on a billion devices? There are 365 million iOS devices. Also, don't you need an Apple TV to stream the media to your TV? You're saying you need an Android device to stream to the Q, but you need an Apple TV device to stream to your TV, so it's kind of the same thing.

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I was counting both Macs and Windows PCs with iTunes installed. iTunes can pack up both audio and video and airplay it over to a receiver. "device" was a poor choice of words, apologies.

"There are 365 million iOS devices."

Can AirPlay from Android devices as well...

http://gizmodo.com/5883721/the-top-7-android-music-apps-for-...

I don't know if it justifies the "billion" that the other commenter threw out there, but there are a ton of Airport Express wifi devices, which support Airtunes. That's obviously not exactly the same thing, but saying that there are only 0.4 billion devices instead of 1 billion doesn't seem like a particularly strong argument.

Can you clarify how you think needing a separate Android device to control a Q to stream to a TV is the same as needing an Apple TV to stream to a TV? An Apple TV comes with a basic remote, so you don't need anything other than what comes in the box to actually use the device.

My personal gripe with the entire world of streamers: neither the Q or the Apple TV do anything out of the box - you first need to hunt down a HDMI cable.

That alone throws half the customer base into a frustrating situation, incurring a knock-on $30 expense.

Even Roku doesn't offer this courtesy, although they do upsell an inexpensive cable during checkout.

Fine with me. I can get a higher quality cable for cheaper than they would charge to pack it in, plus electronics retailers have an incentive to stock it at shitty margins for the upsell opportunity on the cable.

Everyone wins, except lazy or ignorant consumers, and they always lose so who cares.

There are a lot of devices and software packages that receive AirPlay streams now; for example I stream to XBMC on a Linux machine - works like a charm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole

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