I no longer use iTunes since I really like Spotify AirPlay service. But I had to use it for testing purpose lately and... I was surpised that iTunes actually send metadata to my AirPlay reciever allowing my TV to display artist, album, song title and thumbnail!
It would be great if Spotify do the same 🙂
As Apple docs said (http://bit.ly/TEzb00)
Your audio may be playing on a big-screen home theater system or on a sound system with an LCD display. Your app gives a better user experience if you provide metadata that can be shown on the AirPlay device’s display, such as the artist name, song title, and album art.
Add metadata by passing a dictionary into the setNowPlayingInfo method of MPNowPlayingInfoCenter . The MPNowPlayingInfoCenter class is part of the MediaPlayer framework, but works with all playback frameworks, including MediaPlayer , AVFoundation , and AudioQueue .
In addition to providing the usual song information strings, you should also pass in the playback rate, elapsed time, and media item duration. The playback device can use the duration and playback rate to create a progress bar. Update the elapsed time and playback rate whenever the playback rate changes.
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