Airplay best practices

PAC
Contributor

We have about 70 Apple TV's on the network. Range of Apple TV 3 and 4's

Allot of the times the staff say they have issues connecting to the Apple TV's from the Macbook Pro's

They will select the Apple TV in the list sometimes the screen resolution will change showing that it knows it needs to airplay but will either just show a black page or don't do anything. or nothing happens but the Airplay symbol in the top right of the menu bar will be blue showing that it thinks its airplaying.

if they restart the Macbook pro then the issue will usually go away.

What i'm wondering is, is there a best practices for settings on Macbook pro or Apple TV is should have setup.

and i'm wondering if i can script something to put into Self service that when clicked will restart/reset some airplay service/utility to save the staff member from restarting the device.

What has worked well for people with large number of airplay devices.

1 REPLY 1

nkuhl30
Contributor

We've been using Apple TVs in the classroom for years now. And unfortunately, what you're experiencing is par for the course. Your end users need to be instructed to reboot both the Apple TV and the laptop/tablet/phone should problems occur. There's no getting around it.

50% of the time the problem is with the Apple TV and it needs to be rebooted. The other 50% of the time, it's the laptop that needs to be rebooted. I'd love to be able to reboot every Apple TV on campus, once per day, with an automated task. You can use Profile Manager to reboot any gen4 Apple TV, on demand, but that would only take care of the issue some of the time. It's more efficient for everyone to have the end user reboot both devices.

However, the lack of manageability is the main problem. Apple isn't nearly as interested in the management of technology in education or the corporate environment as they are in providing products and services for the basic consumer. If they were, there would be an AppleTV Pro for business/education, updates to ARD, and a further commitment to macOS Server.