So I've been playing around some of the awesome projects around here lately, and the Chrome / web-based ones like Chrome Capture for Channels got me thinking...
It might be interesting for custom channels to be able to go to a video URL and instead of capturing (or streaming to an encoding device), I wonder if it would be possible to automatically initiate a cast session to a target device. Automating the URL + cast action from a single click in Channels I assume would be the hard part, but I do know there are command line tools to initiate content to cast to a device. Finding an elegant way to identify the target device would probably be funky as well.
Because it's just doing a hand-off of the video playback from the target computer to a TV, in theory this should work well on even low end hardware (I believe Airplay relies on the originating device more but I could be wrong). It also would alleviate the need for dedicated encoder hardware, provide a "clean" stream straight from the source to an android TV setup, etc.
I'm not smart enough to fork CC4C and do this myself, but wanted to just throw it out there in case anyone might have explored this an option.