Skifta Streams Media To Your Phone Or TV From Anywhere

Windows/Mac/Linux and Android: We’ve long waited for the Air Video of Android, and Skifta fills that void and more — not only can you stream media to your phone from anywhere, but you can also stream media from your phone to your TV.

Skifta allows you to play media pretty much anywhere, on any device. You can stream media — whether it’s music, photos or video — from your phone to a TV, from your home PC to your phone, or even from your home PC to your friend’s TV using your phone as an intermediary. All you need is a DLNA-compatible device, which includes lots of different things, from a PlayStation 3 to an XBMC box to a simple Windows 7 computer.

Most of the setup is pretty simple, too — you can do almost everything from the Skifta app on your phone. When you start it up, you go through three steps: you pick the source of the media (which could be your home computer, your phone’s SD card, or one of its online content channels like Revision3), then pick where you want to watch it (which could be on your phone or on another computer or TV), and then get to watching. If the media’s on your phone or on the web, you can just install the app and go.

If you want to stream media from your home computer, you’ll need to do a little bit of extra preparation. First, you’ll want to install the Skifta helper app. Note that this only alerts Skifta to your media’s presence; you’ll still need to set up sharing in XBMC, Windows Media Player, or your other favourite program to access it on your device. Once you’ve done that, though, Skifta should detect your shared media at home the next time you start it up and pick a source.

The big downside of Skifta is that it doesn’t transcode media on-the-fly like Air Video does. As such, your videos will need to be in a format your phone understands—and probably of lower quality if you want to stream over the net — but so far, it’s one of the best Android apps we’ve come across for this sort of thing. Hit the link to check it out.

Skifta is a free download for Android devices, and the desktop app works on Windows, Mac and Linux. Skifta is still in beta, so there are bound to be a few snags here and there, but in our testing it worked pretty darn well and without too much fuss.

Skifta