Some video lives only on a web page. A football match on a streaming site, a conference feed, a university lecture recording — there is no app to install and no cast button in the player, just a video in a page.
The obvious move is to mirror the iPhone’s screen to the television. It works, and it is worse than it needs to be.
What mirroring actually sends
Screen mirroring sends the television a live picture of your phone’s display. The phone captures what is on screen, encodes it as video, and streams that to the TV several dozen times a second.
Three consequences follow, and they are the reason people go looking for something else:
- The phone is stuck on that page. It has to stay awake, on that screen, for as long as you watch. A notification banner appears on the television. Answering a message puts the message on the television.
- The picture is a re-encoded copy. The original video was already compressed once by whoever published it; mirroring compresses that again, in real time, on a phone. Fast motion is where you notice — a camera panning across a pitch turns soft.
- The whole page goes with it. Banners, cookie notices and whatever else sits around the player are all part of the picture.
There is also the battery. A phone encoding video for two hours gets hot and drains fast, which is its own problem if the match runs to extra time.
The other way: hand over the stream
Behind almost every web player is a file the player is reading. Usually it is an HLS playlist
— a .m3u8 file listing short segments — or a plain .mp4. That address is what the page
itself is fetching.
If something can read that address out of the page and give it to the television, the television can fetch the video directly. The phone is then out of the path: it is not capturing, not encoding, not sending. It is a remote control.
The difference in practice:
| Screen mirroring | Handing over the stream | |
|---|---|---|
| What the TV receives | A picture of your phone | The video file itself |
| Picture quality | Re-encoded on the phone | Whatever the source offers |
| Phone during playback | Locked to that screen | Free, can be locked |
| Battery | Heavy | Light |
| Notifications | Appear on the TV | Stay on the phone |
What exists today
A handful of iPhone apps do the reading-the-stream-out-of-the-page job. All of them are browsers, because you have to be inside the page to see what the page is loading.
iWebTV has been at it since 2015 and has around 175,000 ratings. It is a full browser with tabs, a pop-up blocker and a subtitle library, and it casts to most things. It is free with several separate paid layers on top — a separate PRO app, a subscription, and a paid cloud proxy for streams that refuse to play directly.
Web Video Cast has around 71,000 ratings and sells breadth: Chromecast, DLNA, Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV. Its description names HLS and live sports directly. The free version carries advertising, and some ordinary things — bookmarks, a home page — sit behind the purchase.
TV Cast from Kraus und Karnath is not one app but a couple of dozen, one free-and-Pro pair per television brand, built up between 2014 and 2019. The Pro versions are $9.99 paid up front with no trial, and the ratings are unusually low for apps of that size.
Tubio is much smaller and much simpler, which some people prefer.
What to expect before you try
Whichever you use, the same limits apply, because they are limits of the video and not of the app:
- DRM-protected video cannot be sent to a television this way. Netflix, Disney+ and most paid sports services encrypt their streams precisely so that only their own player can decode them. No app on this list gets around that, and one that claimed to would be lying.
- Some players build the video in the page itself rather than pointing at a file. There is no address to hand over.
- The phone and the TV must be on the same Wi-Fi. Guest networks usually isolate devices from each other, which stops this dead.
- Non-Apple televisions are less consistent. Samsung, LG, Sony and Vizio sets with AirPlay 2 support sometimes refuse a stream an Apple TV plays without complaint.
Which to reach for
If you want the widest device support, Web Video Cast covers the most protocols. If you are on Apple TV and want the most features, iWebTV is the long-standing one. If you want the smallest thing that works, Tubio.
All of them are worth trying free before paying, and all of them will fail on the same protected streams, so test with the actual page you care about rather than a demo.
What I built
VidBeam is my own take on this, and it takes the hand-over-the-stream route rather than mirroring. It is a browser: open the page, and any video stream behind it is listed; pick one, pick a television, and the TV fetches the video itself while the phone becomes the remote — with the controls on the Lock Screen too, so a two-hour stream survives the screen going dark. Opening other pages, or closing the one you started from, does not stop the TV.
Two limits, stated up front: AirPlay and Google Cast only — Roku and Fire TV each bring their own protocol, and are not supported — and DRM video cannot be sent anywhere, by this app or any other on the list above.