From the Editor’s Desk: Silos in the Stream, That is What We Are ⭐

Our kids were home over the holiday and our son Mark approached me on Thanksgiving morning with a familiar question: Did we have a way for him to watch the first of three football games that would air that day? We do not, we don’t pay for YouTube TV or any other live TV service. I will temporarily sign back up for the Christmas and New Years holidays, when the kids are here again for a longer time and there’s more of a need for that.

I suggested that he just go over to my sister’s house if he wanted to watch the game. We were all heading there later for Thanksgiving dinner anyway, and her husband and son, like my son, are sports fanatics. So it would be going all day. He decided not to bother, as it was the least important game of the day to him. And so I figured that was it.

But the next day, there was yet another football game on TV, it never ends, but this time my son had figured out a way to watch it: This game was on Amazon Prime, to which we subscribe. But once again, he approached me for help. He had the game going in the app on his phone, but he couldn’t figure out how to cast it to the TV in the living room.

As we walked up to the TV, my son observed that you’d have to spend $1000 a month to watch every game of every sport you liked, and while that’s an exaggeration to make the point, he’s right. Thanks to the enshittification of sports, games are no longer “on TV,” each can be on any of several networks or streaming services, and each comes with a price tag. Just finding where a game is played can be difficult. But then you have to pay for it too. This game, at least, was free (to him), as we pay for Prime.

Mark uses an iPhone and we have an Apple TV on our TV, so this would be easy, I figured. I mean, this is where Apple shines, right? But looking at the little football game unfolding on his iPhone, I could see that Amazon, which is still technically part of the Android ecosystem, has Google Cast capabilities. And while tapping that button in some apps does bring up AirPlay and other compatible speakers on Apple devices, it did not in this case.

No problem, it’s still an Apple device, I thought. And while I’m not exactly an Apple guy, I use these things enough to know to drag the Control Center down from the top right corner of his iPhone’s screen, locate the AirPlay, um, control, and then use that to find and select the Apple TV from the list of available speakers and TVs.

I will admit to feeling pretty good about myself in that brief moment. I was just fulfilling my fatherly duties and solving problems. But if you are an Apple guy (or gal), you may already know the hilarity of what then happened. The football game did not cast to the Apple TV. The sound did. So we could hear it coming out of the HomePod speakers attached to the Apple TV. But the game was still playing on Mark’s iPhone.

Last resort time. Mark and I both knew there was some way to mirror the iPhone screen on another Apple device but neither of...