Vizio Adds AirPlay 2 & HomeKit to Free SmartCast 3.0 Update

Your Vizio TV is about to get a lot smarter in 2019 with the SmartCast 3.0 update that brings Apple AirPlay 2 and HomeKit to Vizio TVs.

This isn’t just on the epic 2019 Vizio P Series Quantum X, and the feature packed 2019 Vizio M Series — it’s coming to Vizio TVs and Displays from 2016 and up.

That means later this year you can turn your TV on and you’ll have access to AirPlaying content to your Vizio TV without the need to buy an Apple TV, mirroring your screen, connecting to show a Keynote at an office and controlling your playback with Siri. With HomeKit, you can even set this up to turn the Vizio on, to the right input and control smart home devices.

The video above shows the SmartCast 3.0 features and walks you through some of what you can do with AirPlay 2.0 on SmartCast 3.0. We saw a demo of AirPlaying a movie, and one of the nice things about this is the movie is basically sent to the TV as a URL, so the TV handles all the streaming. That means you don’t lose battery life, and you can still use your phone. The movies will play back at the highest resolution your TV can handle and that you’ve purchased.

This works with iTunes and Apple Music, but also with a range of streaming services including Amazon Prime Video and many premium video services and even some sports focused apps. You can stream music with Apple Music and with competing services like Spotify, essentially turning your Vizio TV into a smart speaker as well.

When playing music and watching movies over AirPlay you can control everything from your phone, including the volume and asking Siri to go to a specific section of the movie based on time.

With SmartCast 3.0, users also get more support for Google Assistant controls, including the ability to use your voice to launch apps, change inputs, pause, resume, and more. Vizio already supports Alexa, making them the first to market with support for all three popular voice assistants.

This new SmartCast release includes Vizio WatchFree, which is a free streaming service with live news, sports, movies, TV shows and much more. It is totally free and built-in to the Vizio TV without plugging anything in or signing up for another payment.

SmartCast 3.0 is coming in Q1 as a beta for US and Canada and rolling out wider in Q2 2019.