Amazon Matter Smart TV Standard Promises Universal Casting and TV Control

Last Updated on December 10, 2021 by Nachiket Mhatre

Corporate greed in the form of proprietary communication protocols has stood in the way of the smart home space unlocking its full potential. However, Amazon promises to iron out the interoperability mess plaguing the multitude of smart home ecosystems with its Matter smart home standard. The upcoming endeavour is currently under development and aims to tackle inter service smart TV casting, in addition to another major issue in the space—universal TV control.

Presently, there is no interoperable standard to feed televisions with smart TV content, thanks to players such as Google, Apple, Samsung, LG and others having their own proprietary smart TV control and content casting protocols. Amazon’s Matter smart home standard promises to be platform agnostic and could potentially either replace or serve as an intermediary between existing content streaming protocols such as Apple AirPlay and Google Cast.

Speaking to The Verge, Chris DeCenzo, Principal Software Development Engineer at Amazon Lab126, revealed that Matter will also allow users to control the core functions, such as volume, channel, and input/output controls, of modern televisions in addition to casting. Universal remote control is still a pain point for televisions, to the extent that the HDMI consortium had to take another stab at it with the updated HDMI-CEC 2.0 protocol.

DeCenzo also brought attention to the current state of smart TV affairs, where a multitude of proprietary protocols complicate what should otherwise be a simple matter of streaming, casting, and otherwise controlling televisions. He also spoke about the difficulties consumers face while trying to remember which voice assistant to consult when fetching smart TV content spread across myriad proprietary platforms.

Amazon is presently working with smart TV makers to make media and TV control a brand and platform agnostic affair. The company’s goal with the Matter project is to make it the one protocol for all device communication. However, Amazon will have to forge alliances with Google, Apple and TV manufacturers to convince them to integrate their services and products with its yet unreleased Matter protocol.