iBeacon & Apple TV

[lpadmin]

Hello All

I am wondering if any one here as successfully set up an Apple TV to be only visible to MacBooks in the same room using an iBeacon? I went to the JAMF iBeacon sessions and I am loving the potential of iBeacons and would love to get this working.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[justinrummel]

Just thinking out loud, you could create a Configuration Profile for AirPlay and Scope it to "All Computers", but have a limitation to your iBeacon as seen: http://cl.rummel.co/image/2J1Y0v1f081j

[gburgess]

I haven't even seen a way to limit what Apple Tv's a laptop can see in the Configuration Profile. In 9.6, I can see they added an Airplay section, but that's only to add passwords to be used with destinations. In testing, this did not take the other Apple TV's off of the list on the machine. Am I missing something here? I would love the option to weed the list down for users. We have... quite a few Apple TV's that broadcast across the network.

[lpadmin]

@justinrummel, I have set up that policy and computers that have not been scoped to that policy can still see the Apple TV in their drop down.

[justinrummel]

That would be true, however, if you had pass codes on those TVs they would not be able to project unless they were close to the beacon.

Not sure about limiting the Bonjour broadcast to restrict the number of Apple TVs the menu would display. I'm sure there might be a reasonable network solution to prohibit that packet.

- Justin

[stoneacheck]

We currently have 30 Apple TV's across our two middle schools in classrooms (3 per room - 2 TV's + projector), plus in the cafeteria/conference room/tech lab, etc and adding another 60 next year as we keep renovating classrooms. So @lpadmin, to expand on @justinrummel's suggestion, we're looking into making each room it's own VLAN, which then gives you a nice uncluttered list for the Apple TV's in just that room. It's not ideal, cause it'll break bonjour printing and if we do this with every room with Apple TV's, I'd end up adding every printer to Self-Service (not hard but also not something I wanted to do after teaching people to find them over bonjour for years).

We're going this route because our staff keep reporting Airplay drop-offs during the day (and we've followed the guidelines in the new iOS guide as fully as possible).

[Chris_Hafner]

One of the things that we've learned some years ago is that Bonjour is out to get you (large scale network). It's great at home but once you reach a certain threshold, it's just there to flood everything out. We've got something like 60 AppleTVs and over 80 printers so we've been sorting this out via self-service and Departmental groupings for some time and I find the experience to be spectacular. It also keeps your users thinking about using "Self-Service" for all of their myriad needs.

Beyond that, I've seen many colleges going the classroom VLAN route and it's still been problematic as you'll have a lot of handoff between rooms that can screw with you. Have you been testing the new Ad-Hoc airplay with the latest iOS (8.1) as a solution? I'm also working through a bunch of tests using iBeacon to modify profiles to accomplish some of these things without the need for explosive VLAN segregation.