Static in the stream
When Apple announced the video-out feature for the iPhone, we rejoiced. Finally, we could watch YouTube cat videos on the big screen from our iPhones—albeit with the addition of an expensive cable. Okay, so maybe we didn't rejoice that much. Cables are a pain. Grabbing one so you can watch something on the TV...and then only being able to stand a few feet away from said TV is pretty much a bummer all around.
Bigstream's urn, Bigstream (yes, the company and product have the same name) takes the cable out of the equation. You add a dongle to the bottom of your iOS device, hook the receiver up to the TV, and boom—you're streaming video and audio wirelessly through the air. It sounds pretty awesome, but unfortunately the actual execution is worse than Brett Ratner's X-Men film.
For starters, the dongle is huge, it has an internal battery that takes up most of the space, but when connected to an iPhone or iPod touch, it looks like you taped a third-gen iPod nano to your device. But that's minor next to its serious hardware limitations. The receiver uses composite video cables to attach to the TV.
Composite, as in the stuff you used to hook up your VCR in the 1980s. While we applaud Bigstream's desire to work with every TV on the market since the Reagan era, the picture quality sucks. We live in an HD world now, and everything else just looks dated. Most noticeably, solid colors fluctuated—but that was nothing compared to Bigstream's biggest problem: static.
Video was rife with static lines if we stood more than three feet away. In fact, the quality of the video degrades rather quickly as you move away from the receiver. Which, of course, defeats the purpose of using a wireless system in the first place. At $119, Bigstream's iffy video quality doesn't compare well to the Apple TV, but the device does have its own advantages, mainly that you don't need a Wi-Fi network to use it and the latency is pretty low. Plus it's pretty much plug-and-play. But ultimately the poor video quality makes those pluses irrelevant.
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