Like many of its competitors, ZumoCast is comprised of two parts: an application that runs on your home Mac or PC and a universal app that you install on any or all of your iOS devices. Unlike many of those rivals, though, ZumoCast is free--and you get more than you pay for. The app allows you to access not only videos and music but also pictures and even documents from folders that you designate.
Setup is simple: when you install the iOS app from the App Store, you'll be prompted to download the desktop version for your platform; ZumoCast requires an Intel Mac running Mac OX 10.5 or later or a PC running Windows. Allow a little time for ZumoCast to scan your media folders and you'll be off and streaming in no time.
ZumoCast takes care of all the heavy lifting for you, meaning that there's no need, for example, to convert videos into iOS-compatible formats; for music, it can access your iTunes library, making available not only all of your artists, albums, and songs, but also any playlists you've created. And because ZumoCast takes advantage of iOS 4's multitasking abilities, it can keep playing music in the background when you're checking your e-mail or Twitter.
I ran into very few media files that ZumoCast wouldn't play back, mainly those protected by Digital Rights Management such as videos and older music purchased from the iTunes Store. It's also worth noting that larger videos--those in high-definition, for example--take longer before they're ready to play. On a local network, I rarely noticed any skips or jumps in video performance. The app adjusts the streaming quality of video depending on your connection, but it appears to prioritize quality over small size; on a two-bar 3G connection, I was presented with a slow-loading but still good-looking video. Music played back smoothly on a 3G connection, though ZumoCast lowers the audio quality by default (an option you can disable in the application's Settings).
But one of the things that sets ZumoCast apart from other streaming apps is that it also offers Dropbox-style access to files on your home computer. Just point the software running on your Mac towards any folder and those files will show up in the iOS apps. You can also access your files via a Web browser using Zecter's service, which provides 1GB of free storage (you can get more storage space by trying out different features of the service or by referring friends).