What is Auracast?

Auracast is the name the Bluetooth SIG gave to broadcast audio over Bluetooth LE Audio. A transmitter sends sound into the air and any number of nearby earbuds, headphones, hearing aids or speakers can tune in. Nobody pairs with anything. The transmitter never knows how many people are listening, and it does not care.

That is the whole idea, and it is a bigger change than it sounds.

Bluetooth used to be a phone call

The Bluetooth audio you have used for twenty years is a private link: one source, one listener, and a pairing ritual before either will talk to the other. Two people cannot listen to the same phone unless the phone maker built a special trick for it. A hearing aid cannot hear the TV unless it was sold with its own box. A theatre cannot send its sound to the audience's own devices at all.

Auracast turns that link into a radio station. The source broadcasts. Listeners tune in. If the venue wants to restrict who can listen, it sets a password and prints it as a QR code on the signage.

Where it shows up first

Hearing aids. This is the use that made the standard happen. For forty years, venues have installed induction loops so that hearing aids with a telecoil can pick up the PA. Loops work, but they are expensive to fit, cover a fixed area, and sound like 1980. Auracast lets a venue broadcast the same feed to any modern hearing aid, with stereo and far better clarity, from a box the size of a paperback. Sydney Opera House, City Recital Hall, ICC Sydney and QPAC all broadcast today, and Brighton Station and Vue Cinemas do in the UK.

Airports and stations. Frankfurt Airport started broadcasting gate announcements in January 2026; Munich followed in July. Bristol Temple Meads broadcasts platform announcements translated live into a hundred languages. You pick the language on your phone.

The TV at home. One transmitter on the back of the television and everyone watches at their own volume, in their own earbuds, with no pairing dance.

Lecture theatres and classrooms. The University of Queensland put a transmitter in all 65 of its lecture theatres in March 2026.

Silent discos, gyms, bars and planes. Any place that currently hands out headphones or plays a TV with the sound off.

What you need

Three things, and your phone is only one of them.

• A source: a TV, a dongle in a laptop, a venue's audio rack, or a phone broadcasting its own music.
• A receiver: LE Audio earbuds, headphones, hearing aids or a speaker. Not all LE Audio devices have the feature switched on, which is the single most confusing thing about Auracast today, and the reason our product database exists.
• An assistant: something that can see the broadcasts nearby and tell your receiver which one to join. Usually your phone. Samsung, Pixel, Sony and Xiaomi phones have it built in. iPhones do not, and that gap is a story of its own.

What it is not

It is not a replacement for ordinary Bluetooth. Your earbuds still pair with your phone for calls and music. Auracast is an extra mode they drop into when you want to listen to something that is being broadcast.

It is not a hearing-loop killer, yet. Loops work with every telecoil hearing aid ever sold; Auracast only with new ones. Venues are keeping both for years. That trade-off deserves its own page.

It is not an Apple feature. As of October 2026, no iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods or Apple Watch can join a broadcast.

Why now

The standard was finished in 2022. The first hearing aids with it shipped in 2023, the first Samsung earbuds in 2024, the first airport in 2026. ABI Research expects about 3.5 billion LE Audio devices to ship in 2030 and well over half a million venues to be broadcasting by then. The hardware is in most phones and earbuds sold this year. What is arriving now is the firmware that switches it on, and the places to use it.

That is what this site tracks: which products work today, where you can hear it, and what changed this week.