It would seem that you, like me, have a shit airplay receiver. Airplay should have nothing to do with distance, if you have a wifi connection, you're fine. And if you can stream hd video from the internet over wifi (ie: youtube), then you can stream it to another device on your network using the same connection.

Now if that device habitually drops the connections, or doesn't support video, it's a problem with the device, not the technology.