Those hoping to to use the Nokia Play To app on Nokia's new Windows Phone 8 devices will have to be patient. That's because it's not yet compatible with the new version of the Windows Phone platform. The good news? Nokia is planning to support Play To, and the DLNA services it enables, on Windows Phone 8. The bad news? You'll have to wait a little while before it happens.

As noted by WMPoweruser, a post from the Play To product team on the Nokia Beta Labs website indicates that Nokia is planning to add Windows Phone 8 support to Play To, but there are some "underlying dependencies on DLNA services which can only be delivered with updated firmware". The team gives as estimated availability date for Play To on Windows Phone 8 of Q1 2013.

The dependencies mentioned in the Beta Labs forum post relate to functionality of WiFi on the device, which is provided as part of the system on a chip (SoC) that is based around the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor. DLNA functionality requires additions to the WiFi software drivers, and it is likely this area was not completed during the initial hardware integration phase. Typically phone manufacturers and silicon vendors, especially those working on tight time tables, concentrate on core functionality, and then later add extra functionality and optimisations (e.g. power consumption) via software updates.

Something similar occurred with Nokia's first generation of Lumia devices when WiFi hotspot functionality was made available some time after the launch of the device, via a software update. A separate series of updates also improved optimised the power consumption of the SoC, leading to improved battery life.
   

In the mean time

DLNA is typically used to playback media (music, video, images), stored on your smartphone, on other WiFi connected devices (e.g. TVs and computers). One partial alternative to Play To is the recently released Nokia Photo Beamer, which makes it very easy to show photos from your phone with any Internet connected device.