Amazon has received Matter certification for its new casting video player intended for use on Fire OS devices, like Fire TVs, as spotted by Dan Wroclawski behind the @Does_IOT_Matter Twitter account. This is the first step for adding support for Matter’s casting protocol to Fire TV devices. If the protocol receives widespread adoption, as many hope, it could be the first truly universal casting protocol that works across iOS, Android, and Fire OS devices.

Amazon has been doing what it can to promote the adoption of Matter’s casting features. It has been working with streaming industry leaders, including device manufacturers and content providers, to adopt Matter casting since at least late 2021. That’s because Matter casting is Amazon’s best hope at a Fire TV-compatible casting protocol with any kind of widespread support.

While Google has Google Cast and Apple has Airplay, Amazon doesn’t have its own popular casting protocol. This is because Amazon doesn’t have any sort of presence among phones, where casting protocols are built into the OS on Android and Apple devices. Amazon tried to push mobile apps to support a new casting standard it created, called Amazon Fling, way back in 2015 but, just a couple of years into the effort, it was essentially dead in the water.

Since then, Amazon has been relying on Miracast, another open casting protocol, by building it into most Fire TV devices. However, support for Miracast has never been great from mobile devices with just a small number of modern Android phones that actually support it and some Windows laptops. Miracast also isn’t capable of many of the things people expect from a modern casting experience, such as being able to start a video remotely from a mobile device and then putting that device away.

Matter, the relatively new open standard for IoT devices, has lots of support from smart home device manufacturers. However, while it does have a video casting protocol as part of the standard, there’s no guarantee that it will be as widely implemented as the smart home aspects of the Matter standard. Google and Apple seem to be happy with their own closed and proprietary casting protocols. While I expect them to implement their own Matter casting video player receiver on Google TV and Apple TV devices, I’m not expecting them to be as quick to add support to their mobile to make them Matter casting devices. Here’s hoping Amazon has had success getting streaming services to adopt Matter casting in their apps.