I found out the hard way that Apple’s AirPlay doesn’t always work as advertised. According to Apple: “With AirPlay, you can stream music, photos, and videos to your AppleTV, or stream music to your AirPort Express or AirPlay-enabled speakers.” Of course if you’re using AirPlay with any Apple suite of products, chances are the feature will work fine on your phone, computer, or tablet. But what if you’re using Flickr video, or Spotify? Have you noticed that sometimes your video won’t play? You get the boilerplate error message saying something went wrong.

After some serious time troubleshooting and a lot of trial and error, I stumbled upon a solution that allows your video to play. Be aware that since you are connecting devices, notifications from one of your connected devices may interrupt your movie viewing? What do I mean? When you’re trying to access Apple TV and you’re trying to play a Flickr video, the only way I found to make it work is to mirror your screen or connect using mirroring. This allows the video to play both on your device and through Apple TV. Don’t get me started on the inconvenience this causes. Using this option, you’re basically tying up two devices and using up your mobile phone or tablet batteries unless the device is plugged into an electrical outlet.

Everyday Tech Tips, This weeks Tuesday’s Tech Tips departs from my usual business orientation to focus on one of my favorite, personal technology topics: home and entertainment systems!

Today, you can wire and add wireless network connectivity to everything from your air conditioner, appliances and home alarm to gaming, entertainment systems, and tablets. The convenience of going high-tech at home can be an amazing convenience, but it’s not without its challenges.

You have many different options on how you set up your network configuration. You might choose to limit access to certain devices based on the user (different settings for mom and dad or each child), the time of the day, or even set time ranges when each device may be used. Let’s say you have kids who need to use a tablet or laptop for school homework each weekday. You can set up a standard time range internet access will work for each device: Monday through Thursday from 3pm-8pm for example. That way, you can be assured your kids are not up until 1am playing video games on school nights! You can also set internet content filters to limit which sites your children can access. Best of all, these features can be customized for each device and password protected so only you can change them.

Creativity many businesses view creative services as a cost-center, when in truth, a well-defined creative service department should help to increase your bottom line. The potential value of a good creative marketing team extends far beyond copywriting and graphic design services. Instead of utilizing your creative team as implementers, the real value of these professionals is to aid you in addressing your critical business challenges.

Including your creative staff at the strategy level, will enable you to incorporate design thinking, or a human-centered approach into your business process. Start looking at the creative department as an intricate part of your client service and include them in brainstorming solutions to difficult problems.

Repackaging ideas and maximizing creative services within your business is low cost and high impact. Including the creative team in strategy sessions builds buy-in and can provide an entirely different perspective. Best of all, the team approach will ensure implementation is targeted and mission-specific, moving the team forward to develop even stronger campaigns.