Zebcast exists because users do not care which decade their TV is from — they want the video on their phone to appear on the big screen. Behind that one expectation sit three protocols that disagree about almost everything.
Three protocols, three philosophies
Chromecast is a receiver-app model: the phone is a remote control and the TV fetches the stream itself. Clean, but you live inside Google’s SDK and its device ecosystem.
DLNA is a discovery-and-control protocol from the UPnP era: ubiquitous in smart TVs, wildly inconsistent in implementation. Two “DLNA-certified” TVs will happily interpret the same request differently.
Miracast is not media casting at all — it is screen mirroring over Wi-Fi Direct, with its own peer negotiation and a very different battery and quality profile.
What shipping it taught us
Discovery is the hard part users never see: three scanners running together without stampeding the network or the battery. Session handoff is the hard part users always see: what happens when the router hiccups defines your app-store rating. And protocol honesty beats protocol pride — the right UX tells the user which path their TV supports and why, instead of failing mysteriously.
That sender-side scar tissue is why we also build the receiving side — receivers, set-top devices and signage players — covered in our TV & Casting capability.