Streaming help - Apple TV vs Chromecast etc?

[Lupine]

Church installed a few Vizio e470i-a0 TVs in some of the classrooms over the summer. This weekend one of the teachers asked about wirelessly streaming content from his iPad to the TV, specifically asking about the Apple TV. Apparently most of those using that room have Apple products, so that might be the best solution. Still, would rather run something a little more device agnostic if possible. I've heard good things about the Chromecast, and I'm pretty happy with our Roku device - though "Play on Roku" can be a little hit miss. Honestly I'm a little surprised that these "Smart TVs" don't all support device to TV streaming natively (maybe they do, and I'm just missing something).

Thoughts / recommendations? Thanks!

 

[caveman-jim]

Yeah, smart entertainment ain't very smart yet... everything seems to have a gotcha. I got a chromecast this black friday because it has support for just about everything, but mostly because you can cast from your chrome browser - meaning if you can view it in a web page (i.e. using the VLC web player extension) then you can stream it to the chromecast. The weak point I've found has been the network, not the devices. I only wish that kindle/fire could stream/control to a chromecast.