How much of this is an "end" to Chromecast and a rebranding of Chromecast to "Google TV Streamer"? It seems like the bare-bones experience of a Chromecast being tied to a phone (or browser) is getting replaced with an Apple TV like experience. If this is the case, it might be a (rare) example of a good branding shift from Google.
I have had two Chromecasts (the original and an Ultra) and I feel like both were hampered by the phone requirement. Part of this is my house having kids without phone who would have liked to have access to Netflix, and part is due to my Apple TV use, which I use far more often.
I'm sure there will be some loss of functionality here, but hopefully it's with the benefit of a much better user experience.
Emailers are telling me this is more of a rebrand so I've replaced the submitted title "Google is killing Chromecast" with the unfortunately press-releasey original.
If anyone suggests a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article), we can change it again.
The 4K Chromecast "with Google TV" basically was that already, since it has the full-screen menu-based interface and remote. It seems a bit silly to me that they're tossing the brand aside but maybe they're doing that for exactly this reason.
I have one of these and I am going to be blunt: I just can't figure out the privacy. At. All. I have kids (and their many friends) running through the house using TVs and streaming etc and I don't want them browsing through my YouTube viewing history or filling it up with their dumb kid shows nor accessing things I don't think are appropriate at random times.
But for whatever reason when I plug in the 4K with Google it's the annoying nagbot that refuses to do anything unless I'm logged in (not to mention my password is not exactly easy to type using the remote) and then it drags in my whole YouTube history and the device is useless and nags you to hell when not logged in.
It's so much easier and less insane to just use Roku. I can throw YouTube videos at the Roku without being logged in and the device works just fine. Google seems to be constantly changing things and I have no interest in playing wack-a-mole with whatever thing they decide to change this week.
Roku's just work and they rarely change. That trust just does not exist with Google's products.
The prompt to login whenever you cast to an arbitrary TV feels like a footgun. I don't want whatever community I'm watching with to know what the algorithm thinks I like. The distance between "annoying" and "embarrassing" is directly correlated to who is in the room to observe.
Exactly! For the Chromecast at our cabin, the fact that people cast from their own phone is a feature. No shared logins between families staying there, no need to log in and out from some additional device.
Yup, I agree. They really should not have called this "with Google TV" thing a "Chromecast" in the first place. The earlier Chromecast devices were so simple and extremely pleasant to use. They did their thing extremely well. It really felt like a bait and switch when I unboxed this and plugged in. It doesn't even show up as a cast destination in YouTube when not logged in while every single Roku in the house is there and does what the old Chromecasts used to do. To be fair a remote for pause and volume seemed like a natural addition, because that had been a bit clunky with the older Chromecasts when doing like family watching. I also really liked the Chromecast Audio while it worked. After this "with Google TV" thing Chromecast moved from one of my regular recommends to family etc to never being mentioned.
I have had a few generations of Chromecast, including the OG from ten years ago.
The latest one in my bunch has a remote and menus and stuff, and is what I presume y'all are talking about. I've seen it referred to as CCWGTV.
"Privacy" seems easy-enough and is not so dissimilar to "privacy" on any other shared computer: Just set up profiles. One for you, one or more for kids, one for guests, or whatever makes sense.
For your own profile, set a PIN. (The included d-pad remote makes PIN entry easy-enough.)
Aaaand... done?
Mine also does old-school phone-driven Chromecast stuff just fine with zero profiles logged in -- while it is just sitting there at the profile-select screen. In this mode, it accepts Youtube and Spotify and whatever else I throw at it.
I own the 4K Chromecast and it's pretty good. But in my opinion "Chromecast" was always a bad brand name. I guess it originated in the browser, but it's so far removed from that now; "Chrome" no longer makes sense.
Yes but that's really the same as this just in a separate box. Makes total sense to bring it under the same naming tree.
I'd call it "Google TV Box" though. Streaming is too contrived and not everyone knows what it means. Xiaomi use the Box naming too and that seems to go down well.
> Confused as to why "Google TV" didn't win out in the end.
The reason Google TV didn't win (and the reason why it kind of did) is that Google TV already won for something else closely related, which this is being associated with:
It was a good brand name when it launched, but not for how it evolved.
It was a device that made it possible to cast video from your Chrome browser. When it was released in 2013 it reinforced the superior utility of Chrome which had just began to dominate browser market share.
Embedding the Google Cast protocol directly into video streaming apps and having the Chromecast brand name coexist alongside the Android TV and Google TV brand names made things confusing.
I agree, but they're not just rebranding. They also doubled the price, ostensibly because they changed the form factor and added "AI". I don't need a visible device or AI just to stream YouTube or other video apps.
Roku sells dongles at the same price point, without many other services with which to subsidize the hardware. I am sure Roku monetizes the users in the same ways as Google can, so I do not understand how Google cannot make a profit from them.
Sure, but I do not see how that improves by focusing on the “premium” hardware. Unless the box is actually cheaper, I would expect the AI capabilities to cost more (either on cloud infrastructure or higher performance chips). Worsening their margin per unit.
People just want to watch Netflix or Disney with minimum friction. A box that is twice the price of the competition, with questionably useful AI features does not seem a winning play.
> I would expect the AI capabilities to cost more (either on cloud infrastructure or higher performance chips). Worsening their margin per unit.
This is a problem for the next exec after the one behind this has happily parachuted to his next position before the chickens come home to roost on things like "long-term costs" and "fit with the overarching corporate strategy".
How does search make them money? They are paying everyone to be their default search. Isn't search just an input of data to push ads based on the search as well as taking the user with more metrics based on the search query?
"Google TV Streamer" pretty exactly describes what this thing does. It's from Google, and it streams things to your TV.
"Chromecast" was more puzzling. What's "Chrome"? Isn't that a browser? What does this have to do with anything? And what is "cast"? Does it broadcast something? Etc.
> It'd be like if Apple decided to rebrand Macbook to be "Apple Laptop". Sure, it's accurate. It's also crap.
You get used to it. They also called the Apple smartwatch "Apple Watch" from the beginning, and nobody is complaining. So "Apple Laptop" or "Apple Phone" would be just as good.
You could say the same about "Chromebooks" -- but that doesn't matter anymore. Thanks to Chromebooks dominating schools and Google's general ubiquity, almost everyone knows what Chrome is if you've used a computer in the past decade.
The only market who wouldn't know is the same crowd that would never use a smart TV anyway.
This drives me nuts. When I first got the original fire tv it was fast and had no ads. I could easily recommend it. Now it’s stuffed to the brim with ads and is incredibly slow. When this one dies I’ll likely not buy a hardware device from Amazon ever again.
Yep that's what I have now. Same story. It started with ever bigger ads for prime shows, then ads for shows on other streamers I don't subscribe to. And now half-screen apps for chocolates and perfumes etc. In Spain by the way.
Also now I have to pay extra to skip ads on prime :(
I'm thinking of getting an Apple TV but considering how expensive it is I'm waiting for the next version. I don't want to pay top dollar for the 2022 version.
Yeah sadly this doesn't work on a Fire TV Stick. It ignores DHCP and uses its own DNS resolver. Probably DoH or something, I didn't dig that deep into it.
Exactly -- it's not an end at all, just a rebranding.
And it's about time. "Chromecast" was always a terrible brand IMHO, because it had utterly nothing whatsoever to do with Chrome, except that there happened to be a "Cast..." menu item in Chrome. But you can cast from lots of apps that aren't Chrome. It would have made just as much sense to call it "Gmailcast" -- that is to say, no sense at all.
"Google TV Streamer" isn't particularly memorable, but it's perfectly logical and intuitive. And it doesn't introduce confusion with a browser. Google wants the brand to be Google directly, not some sub-brand. Makes sense to me.
As a brand I’m of the opinion that “Chromecast” was a huge success. All non technical people I know basically call any stick/dongle and even devices like an Apple TV a “Chromecast”. For them, if you watch anything that isn’t linear cable TV (so: YouTube, Netflix etc.) on your TV you’re “casting”. And for a while Chromecast was fantastic because it turned any dumb TV into a smart TV.
Now that every TV has apps and even the older people watch more streaming than cable TV, sure, it is a good moment to say goodbye to the mental image of what Chromecast was. But if you measure success in tech by how many people outside of the “HN crowd” are familiar with a thing, Chromecast is right up there with something like Dropbox.
I agree. The branding doesn't really matter as long as casting still works. It seems like an odd choice for Google to frame this in such dramatic terms, especially when so many people have already been burned by their tendency to kill popular products out of the blue.
I get the lamentation of the final nail in the coffin of what was just a simple wireless HDMI dongle, and I agree that there's a real need for that. Having said that, I love my 4K Google TV Chromecasts. All I'd ever wanted was something that combined the Fire TV Stick and the Chromecast into one device, and this delivered perfectly. The compact form factor makes it easy to keep a spare in my backpack for whenever I might need it while away from home, which comes in handy often.
My problem with this is that it sounds like they're discontinuing a product that works perfectly well, and replacing it with something slightly worse (for my use case) at 2x the price. Granted, for now they are still selling the Chromecast, so they have time to introduce a future "Google TV Streamer Mini" that retains the form factor of the Chromecast. As long as they do that, I don't really care what they call it.
For the right user, the Chromecast is the perfect device. Trouble is, for multi-user households or other users that don't fit the perfect mold its flaws quickly become apparent. Hopefully this device can fix most of the flaws while still providing that easy way of getting video from my device to my TV screen without logins and apps or anything getting in the way. I don't use "casting" often but there are times when it is by far the easiest way to view content.
From a user perspective you're right but from a technical sense, Chromecast got its roots as little more than a remote-controlled Chrome session. Alike the Netflix DIAL protocol that it evolved from, Chromecast was for many years merely a hdmi-out stick device that ran Chrome!
It would have been interesting if there was an alternate path where Chromecast really did expose its underlying browser-ness better. If I could just tell my phone to cast hacker news and then scroll on my phone's screen. I wonder if that was ever considered.
Also note that ChromeOS was also a web-centered thing at the time, so there was some symbiosis with that. Both web powered tech platforms. But given the recent announcement that Google is killing ChromeOS & Android is the way forward for everyone, well, extra sensible that Chromecast has to go: finalizing/cementing the (imo unfortunate for all) cultural victory of Android-over-all at Google.
Well, back in the day (and I feel old now), the ability to cast a chrome tab to a TV with a $30 dongle was huge. It was a great brand until it got commoditized.
I never understood the utility. So could a 10$ HDMI cable?
I bought a Chromecast thinking it could play videos from a network drive like XBMP, but it couldn't and I thought it was beyond useless with its buggy and slow interface.
It's like comparing the PSP's un-included HDMI cable setup to the Switch's slick integration of an HDMI dock and saying "well actually Sony did the portable to TV tech first".
You plugged it in once to what used to be dumb TV's and in 2-3 presses I can have whatever was on my phone on my TV, with no fanagling with a USB to HDMI dongle into an HDMI cable, which may phone may or may not even support.
And once it was playing you didn't really have to manage the connection for Youtube; Your phone could die and it'll still play since it's ultimately not actually extracting the content from your phone's network.
> I thought it was beyond useless with its buggy and slow interface.
The older Chromecasts' didn't really have an interface once you set it up. I just casted from phone, waited 5 seconds and it was done. Honestly prefer my Ultra to the newer Google TV dongles precisely because there's no unnecesary middleman interface. My phone should and did manage all of that.
the phone/browser lock-in is largely due to lack of a standardized and open protocol to stream content in this manner. in the wireless-display-sharing ecosystem the chromecast is unique in that, when possible, it streams content from the original provider on a local client rather than relying on mirroring your device's display. this gives a better user experience but required participation from each service provider.
i'm surprised netflix or amazon hasn't tried to create a standardized protocol for asking another client to initiate a stream from a provider on your behalf, including passing account credentials and allowing for widevine and other drm. if this was successful, it would open the market for chromecast-like-devices from other vendors.
The standardized protocol already exists and it’s called DLNA which Chromecast initially cannibalized in its first release and then basically killed off every single other DLNA provider and app because they Sherlocked the feature into the Android operating system and to the Chrome browser.
Now that they are at risk of being split up for their monopoly, and as they lose an Antitrust case for their search monopoly, they are probably looking to kill off the Chrome brand because Chrome is how they entirely dominated the web, warping it to their standards and killing more open standards in favor of their Proprietary technology.
DLNA is meant to play media from a media server on a home network. It doesn't make sense for Internet services to implement DMS. The relevant standard for casting using web protocols is DIAL.
I vaguely remember DLNA... Which is to say, I remember it barely working at best and mostly just wasting a lot of time debugging configuration and network nonsense.
Arguably the biggest advantage of Chromecast was just not having to deal with all that.
> amazon hasn't tried to create a standardized protocol
Amazon is pushing Matter Cast, which is in many ways superior to Google Cast, most of all by being open. Its biggest downside is that it's not supported by anyone else.
There's a lot of Matter Cast that feels fairly reasonable as a protocol, but the flaws here are so wildly absurd. I want this effort to sink so bad. As a protocol I vastly prefer Open Screen Protocol, which was begat to support W3c Secondary Screen wg's Presentstion API.
https://w3c.github.io/openscreenprotocol/https://www.w3.org/TR/presentation-api/
Matter Cast has what to me are grevious limitations:
1. Connecting clients can only talk to existing Endpoints running on the target device. If I use Tidal for example, the smart speaker or smart TV needs to already be setup with that app, and needs to be willing to let a background service run & register itself with the platform.
https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip/blob/master/...
2. Only native apps are supported. There's no protocol to say open a webpage & control that. As a solo dev I can throw together a universal Presentation API multi-display experience in hours. Shipping even one native app would take many weekends & lots of legal hoops. Getting on the apps store for even 50% of TV's or speakers seems daunting beyond imagining.
3. No support for multi-party sessions. Only one user can interact at a time.
4. No support for the Web's Presentation API. Since it's not based around urls & web pages, it would require lots of additional work to make it support the standard web pages have to spawn a remote display.
By compare, Open Screen Protocol lets any target device open any web page, which is very similar to how Chromecast development works today (and how DIAL worked before). Whether the target device is Android, Apple, WebOS, Windows, Tizen, or other, the expectation that I could Open Screen Protocol cast to it remains the same. Where-as Matter Cast requires a native app on the device & the app has to be installed & potentially even greenlit by the target device platform itself.
OpenScreenProtocol really looks to have it all, & the model is so much more universal. Really wish we saw some device makers pushing for it these days.
DIAL is literally discovery and launch. The discovery part is just SSDP. The rest of DIAL is entirely state tracking the stream, sending playback commands, requests to launch content, etc. through REST endpoints. It seems entirely possible to me for a revision of the spec based off mDNS for discovery rather than UPnP, and most of the document would be the same.
The DIAL spec documents spend three pages talking about discovery and sixteen pages talking about state tracking, launching, HDMI-CEC, etc.
It's a pretty basic protocol spec since it mostly relies on things like UPnP for discovery and HTTP REST so a lot of complications are already defined in other specs.
> in the wireless-display-sharing ecosystem the chromecast is unique in that, when possible, it streams content from the original provider on a local client rather than relying on mirroring your device's display.
AirPlay has the same capabilities, I believe even in the original v1 version - back then only for Audio as it didn’t support video at all.
>the phone/browser lock-in is largely due to lack of a standardized and open protocol to stream content in this manner.
I feel like the thing you are describing as lock-in is, in a critical sense, quite the opposite. It gave you the power to make a dumb TV into a versatile streaming system that's not locked down and beholden to Smart TV software.
I was at my brother's on vacation and we were sharing some vacation pics. The mirroring worked pretty well but I do wish there were a straightforward way to just cast a browser to a TV in a standard way.
In Windows, you can press Win+K to pull up the Cast menu. Lots of smart TVs and streaming devices will work with it. You can mirror or extend your display to it.
True, but at that point, what does the "Chrome" part of Chromecast mean? It made much more sense when the device was tied to a browser, and then (kinda) apps on a phone. Once they added a remote, I think the writing was on the wall for the name "Chromecast".
but the new brand is actually "Google TV Streamer" (3 words)
why didnt they just go for "Google TV" (2 words)
they also could have played a bit "Google TOP" (because its a table top device) , "Google S" (S for Streamer) , i think the 3 word "Google TV Streamer" , is function over form gone wrong
I think they've always had CEC remote control anyway. Was still a surprise the first time I backed out of a youtube video using the TV remote and saw what looked like the entire youtube app with search and everything.
>It seems like the bare-bones experience of a Chromecast being is getting replaced with an Apple TV like experience.
Weird thing about this is the best thing about Chromecast is it’s not an Apple TV form factor and experience and the worst thing about Apple TV is it’s not a Chromecast style stick.
I just don’t see where a TV would even exist that doesn’t offer what’s in the box built in already, but I definitely know a lot of TVs where Chromecast or AirPlay just doesn’t work on the base unit.
Every "smart" tv is definitely spying on you. Your best defense is never setting it up or buying a dumb tv I'd you can still find them. Control your data! If you're going to surrender your data willingly to apple, google then fine that's a choice, but smart TVs like modern cars have no choice.
No one. No one is making a good non-smart TV. The shitty TVs have smarts in them to subsidize the price by spying on you, and the expensive TVs are not going to compete with less features, right? Oh, and why not make more money by spying on you as well?
If you want a modern TV with correct colours, HDR, and useful inputs, you have to stop yourself from connecting a smart TV to the internet. There's just no other way. Roku's OS is absolutely usable without ever configuring it for internet access, and my particular brand of choice, TCL, offers an option to update the OS with a USB stick.
I use my TV with an AV receiver, and HDMI-CEC switching means the TV remote is literally hidden away. The TV has no say in what's happening to it at all.
Yeah the whole reason I ever recommended a Chromecast to people was that it was basically dummy simple. You know how to watch Netflix or YouTube on your phone? Great, you know how to watch it on your TV too.
My mother who hates every piece of technology and gets frustrated to the point of tears when things don't work like they did yesterday was just fine with a Chromecast. There's no separate Chromecast to learn, manage, or deal with. It's, effectively, a way to mirror your phone to your TV.
I regularly recommended them to people even with Smart TVs and stuff. There were often bugs, UI issues, general confusion... "Just plug this thing in and then use your phone as a remote" added a lot of value.
I don't know why I'd ever want a "Google TV". For $100 what does this give me over the crappy Smart TV UI I've already got? Do I really want to deal with Google's privacy track record over Apple's to save $40?
>I have had two Chromecasts (the original and an Ultra) and I feel like both were hampered by the phone requirement.
I rarely was. Ultiamately I usually have some piece of tech on hand and I just wanted some way to get youtube on my dumb TV.
But I also get it. that tv casting has more or less been built into every modern smart TV (and we aren't getting many good dumb tv's these days). So focusing on something more robust instead of selling a cheap streaming stick seems inevitable.
Wow, even for Google, this seems like an exceptionally well-liked and popular brand name and device to kill.
The replacement ("Google TV streamer") seems to be a quite different device – most importantly, one that will be very visible next to a TV, and not out of sight behind it like its predecessor.
For anyone not particularly interested in having "AI" in their streaming stick (and this being Google, surely that will just happen in the cloud...?), I'm not sure if that's an improvement.
I have no idea why they think that "full summaries, reviews and season-by-season breakdowns of content" is even a feature worth mentioning. The going value of that on the current market is $0. Heck, at times it's negative, you have to go out of your way to avoid the info if you don't want it. And there is no way whatsoever that this is happening locally. A $100 device is not spontaneously ingesting video, running speech-to-text on it or advanced video analysis, and processing it all down to a summary for you.
If this is what we can expect from "Gemini" technology, it's damning it with faint praise. Who even cares. Nobody has the problem of really wanting a summary of a season of TV, but they just can't get it because darn it all they lack access to super advanced AI. Nobody had that problem 10 years ago and they still don't. If I were them I'd scrub that off the marketing, it's a negative if it's anything.
Yeah -- I built a quick movie/show summarizer (easy to do with the latest models with larger than >50k token context window), I got literally 1 customer for $5 haha, but it was a fun little project to learn the various leading LLM APIs.
It's here: recapflix.com (and it's not at all perfect, due to a number of reasons...).
It was actually useful in the rare case that you wana skip an episode or get caught up on some obscure anime/show, but otherwise, meh.
> A $100 device is not spontaneously ingesting video, running speech-to-text on it or advanced video analysis, and processing it all down to a summary for you.
You're clearly underestimating the 2021 SoC in it. It does 20 GFLOPS!
> an exceptionally well-liked and popular brand name
I don't think so at all. I'm not sure if anyone I know outside of tech has ever even heard of Chromecast. It was never super popular. While every single one of them knows what an Apple TV is, and they know what the Chrome browser is.
The replacement makes much more sense. It's just branded as Google, and what it does -- it's a TV streamer. The branding tells you that it's Google's version of an Apple TV, while "Chromecast" told you nothing except that maybe it had to do with a browser (which it didn't).
Chromecast was always a bizarre name to begin with, since it didn't really have anything to do with Chrome. Chrome wasn't necessary to use it, nor did it run Chrome for you.
If something that sells 100 million+ devices isn't "super popular", I don't know what is. And not even counting the millions of TVs that have it built-in (Hi-Sense, TCL, Samsung) the brand is pretty ubiquitous.
I was being generous and said "not even counting," but no despite the internal name change, most still maintain the "Chromecast Built-In" designation on their branding and sites which takes a mere second to Google and see.
remember this is Google -- don't worry, they'll be changing the name again in 2-3 years. Probably YouTubeCast or YouTube TV (yes they already have a "YouTube TV" but I wouldn't put it past them to combine/confuse the two things like they've done with Google Pay / GPay / Google Wallet / etc)
My conspiracy theory is that renaming all products to generic names (Hangouts to Google Chat, G Suite to Google Workspace) are an attempt by Google to prevent regulators from splitting them out from the main company.
It's only a matter of time until Pixel gets renamed to "Google Phone".
That's funny when you consider the rename to Alphabet.
Edit: to clarify, since somebody downvoted me, I'm just saying it's funny that they refactored all their properties into multiple legal entities and now several years later might want to do the opposite. You can't expect consistent behavior from these companies over time.
They’ve sold a hundred million of them and embedded it into millions of TVs. It’s not as mainstream as Chrome or Android but it’s far from a niche product, especially for people who aren’t old enough to have grown accustomed to using dedicated boxes attached to their TVs to watch everything.
I travel quite a bit and I've never encountered one. Never even seen one at all. I've heard of Chromecast because I go on tech sites, but they're suspiciously absent in my bubble of reality. I'm an Android and Linux user too.
It's interesting you mention upfront that you travel. Is that travel for work where you might be staying in corporate hotels?
I ask because when I have travelled for work, it's the corporate hotels that have often baked a Chromecast into their TV experience, even to the point of sorting out their wifi network so you're only able to cast to the screen in your room. Their splash screen offers "live TV" or the option to "stream from your phone".
They often don't shout about the fact that it's a chromecast doing the work, but the telltale standby screen that shows up when you're not casting something normally confirms it.
The protocol is baked into almost every TV sold now. Have you seriously never even tried it? Never wondered what that rectangle icon was in youtube videos on your phone, etc...?
At least Samsung and LG don't include them, and these seem to be the most popular brands in Europe as far as I can tell.
They both support AirPlay these days, I've never been able to use Google Cast natively with a TV here, which is a shame for my use cases (Netflix doesn't support it, and I generally don't like to have my phone connected to the TV via Wi-Fi for the entire duration of a movie).
Edit: Turns out LG is currently in the process of adding it, and Samsung seems to have support in some models as well, but it's definitely not ubiquitous.
Right, because no one buys them anymore as the feature is baked into their televisions already. They were popular originally but don't have a home. If it's just the hardware device you're talking about, sure. It's obscure now, which is why it's being cancelled.
What's frustrating in this thread is how many people are conflating the weird dongle product with the extremely successful streaming control protocol. Only the weird thing is being cancelled!
The whole thread is about Google discontinuing a physical product, not a feature baked into TV's. I've never seen the product they're discontinuing IRL.
A quick Google says that 40M televisions are sold in the US every year, into a market with 130M households. So... a whole lot more often than once every decade and half.
I assume a lot new "households" are created every year. Once a stable household is established it would surprise me a bit if TVs were regularly repurchased.
One important difference is that Airplay is much more of a screen or video mirroring protocol, while Google Cast is focused on the receiver driving presentation, with your mobile device only acting as a navigation source.
Practically, this means that you can take phone calls, hibernate your computer, kill a source app on your phone, leave the house entirely etc. with Chromecast without interrupting whatever's playing on a TV or stereo, while with Airplay, playback usually stops in these scenarios. Airplay is also a bigger battery drain as a result, in my experience.
I had an AirPort Express back in 2004 timeframe that was precursor to Airplay that did beat Chromecast by close to 10 years with AirTunes. AirPlay came out in 2010. Then, in 2017, Apple released AirPlay 2.
Chromecast first gen was in 2013.
Apple actually beat Google on this one in terms of time.
How is a wireless audio technology comparable to chromecast? If it is, bluetooth audio streaming started in 1998, beating airport express by 6 years. And don't get me started on radio...
That's reasonable. Although Chromecast also has a brand identity of dongle you plug into a TV for streaming. If you're something a lot different/more ambitious then rebranding isn't a bad idea.
I'm actually a big proponent of moving TV smarts out of the display just as I am in cars.
I had an original 2013 Chromecast plugged into my TV for ten years. It did its job admirably, until it started becoming more and more unstable and began rebooting randomly with each new OS version that Google pushed.
I finally replaced it about a month ago with an onn streaming box from Walmart for about 20 bucks--less than I paid for the original Chromecast a decade ago:
Works great, and still has Chromecast support. Most of the stuff I used to cast can be handled by Google TV having equivalent Android apps now, but I still like casting my local music from my phone to the TV when I'm reading. There's a $50 4K version out now, as well, if you have a higher resolution TV, but the TV I had the Chromecast plugged into caps out at 1080P, so, no need.
I used a Chromecast for years until we slowly replaced all of the TVs with ones that have Roku built in. Having a remote is definitely better than needing to pickup your phone, switch over to the streaming app, wait for it to link up with the Chromecast, and then pause the video. The OG Chromecast definitely made sense for the time. Video encoding hardware capable of 1080p playback wasn't that cheap so fitting a bunch of extra processing power to run the various streaming apps seemed like extra effort when everyone already had a phone with the streaming apps installed. Roku was already in the business but their devices cost more money so Google came in at just the right time to establish themselves.
One of the first dates with my girlfriend, we were watching TV at her house via a laptop plugged in with an HDMI cord. I bought her a Chromecast the next day (I just got one too) and I think that may have secured my way into her heart.
> Having a remote is definitely better than needing to pickup your phone, switch over to the streaming app, wait for it to link up with the Chromecast, and then pause the video
I would always unlock my phone, and simply swipe down and use the media controls in the Android drawer, didn't really need all the steps in between. Heck, you should have been able to press play/next from your lock screen unless you blocked that specifically.
What I love about the Chromecast at the cabin is that people visiting can just cast whatever streaming service they're using from their phone. No installation, no login, no sharing users.
If instead it will become a more Apple Tv like experience where apps have to be installed and logged in to, it's just a hassle. I will have to log out to avoid guests staying using my subscriptions. A kid watching YouTube will wreak havoc on my suggestions etc.
So not a product I really want. It works well as it is.
I have the same experience. My Chromecast worked great until yesterday, when there was an update and now the remote just refuses to pair. Luckily I can use my phone as a remote, it's not as convenient as the actual remote, but it works.
I'd really like to stop updates when I get something that works, but alas, Google "cares about my security".
I built a Chromecast receiver application for a broadcaster in Belgium back in 2017, and even then the original Chromecast was just a bit of a PITA. Our service was heavily ad supported, and porting our web ads to Chromecast was painful. The OG Chromecast was very hard to work on because of its super limited RAM. When connecting a remote Chrome debugger session you'd have to make sure to clear the console and network request history very often (multiple times per minute), otherwise the whole device would just crash. We generally only developed on the v2/Ultra and an Nvidia Shield, and then crossed our fingers to test on the OG Chromecast.
Google TV does roughly the same thing. It's called "Ambient Mode"[1]. The default timeout takes a while though so I changed my timeout value to be much lower. It does feel like they're kind of hiding ambient mode though, which makes me think it's days are numbered, but on my current Google TV it works great. I set the timeout value very low so it will enter that mode after being idle for 60 seconds.
There may be a way to do it through the settings, but I enabled dev mode and used (wireless) adb to configure the timeout:
adb shell settings put system screen_off_timeout 60000
I have a ton of handy bash functions and aliases to essentially have a CLI remote using adb that I can share if anybody is interested. It's really a pretty neat device and a lot more "open" than most people think thanks to developer mode.
I have Google TV on my Sony TV and found that I was able to disable the ads and crap.
There was a setting to toggle. They tried to make it unattractive by saying I wouldn't be able to use the Google Assistant feature but this just seemed like a win for me.
I don't need my TV to be fancy, it just needs to accept signal from my consoles and HTPC.
I do kinda miss seeing all the suggested dogshit movies sometimes tho XD
The only “google” thing in my home is a nest. That’s only because G acquired the company years back. Only thing they added was forcing users to migrate Nest account to G.
Honestly might disconnect the nest from the network. But only keep it connected and segmented from rest of network for remotely changing the temp from my phone.
One of these days I’ll “hack” (explore) the device so it doesn’t rely on Nest/Google APIs. There’s absolutely no reason why I need a Google auth token to access the Nest other than for Google to collect whatever data and feed to their beast
Last I looked, there was essentially no good programmatic route into local Nest control, unlike most home automation devices which use wifi/bluetooth/zwave/zigbee. I replaced my Nests with a couple of $25 Centralite Zigbee thermostats and drive it via HomeAssistant running on a Raspberry Pi, and I'm significantly happier with it than I ever was with the Nest.
You can either have it display from a Google Photos photo album, and get the version of the interface which constantly displays ads to you, or you can switch the interface to "apps only" mode which will only show you one big ad on the home screen. In "apps only" mode, the thing won't display your photos, either as a screensaver or anything else. You still need to be logged into your Google account, of course; as far as I can tell, not displaying photos is just a way of punishing you for trying to reduce the ads you see.
Is there different version for EU? I see either list of apps and bunch of shows from streamings that I have (home view) or just basically play store, with installed apps on top.
None contains ads. If I leave it alone it will switch to Screensaver in a few minutes. Photos in my case. Bit sad they have hidden 3rd party screens savers, which were better, but there definitely isn't anything I can call "constant ads".
> When it dies, google will be gone from my house.
In case you're looking, I have a friend with a set of special skills that can help with this. This friend is very discrete, and there will be nothing left that traces it back to you. It will look like natural causes. I think you can find an ad in the back of an issue of Solder of Fortune.
As a lot of commenters are already pointing out, this is a bit different than Google’s past escapades with poor product management. In this case, they have a replacement hardware device, they have an operating system that is widely used by OEMs, and there is wide support for casting natively to TVs.
well, they no longer produce the "display-only" Chromecast in favor of their "Google TV" sticks with Remote etc.
Not that much of a shock here, the market moved on from simple wireless display dongles.
Unfortunately no sign of Google Cast protocol being opened for general purpose use. Would be great to be able to run your own custom Receiver-device without needing a Google certificate...
Fun fact: There was a guy who managed to extract the keys out of one of the earlier Chromecasts. He eventually stopped working on (or at least posting on XDA about) it because he was hired by Google.
There isn’t really any decent open casting protocol with adoption. DLNA (UPnP) is pretty well implemented in proprietary devices (besides uncontrollable latency up to 10s on Samsung TVs), but there are neither decent free receiver implementations nor many control options (other than that the concept isn’t bad).
Google Cast is smart (with its „we‘ll just give you a whole browser“ concept) and AirPlay works excellently well. Both are proprietary (guess I’m lucky to have both a Macbook and a Samsung TV).
DLNA is an okay concept, but codec support is all over the place. I've yet to run into a device that doesn't support MPEG-2 MP/ML, and all devices support something above that, but there's not a single codec and profile that has sufficiently widespread support for HD video.
A nice feature of Chromecast is that the device was really just a remote control. After starting a show it would continue even if your phone caught fire. This is obviously great for battery life but also means that multiple people can control the media (works great for YouTube where multiple people can queue videos, play, pause, etc...)
I would love to see something like Chromecast but open.
1. MDNS to find the display.
2. Send a URL to display.
3. Devices can send messages (with some way to tell them appart for security reasons, probably require and explicit opt-in to receive messages from non-initiator devi
This is similar to the current protocol except step 2 is to send an app ID registered and approved by Google rather than an arbitrary URL. (Or some pre-made apps for things like playing a video from a URL or screen mirroring)
> To ensure that the correct name for each application is well-defined and to avoid naming conflicts,
Application Names must be registered in the DIAL Registry.
This has exactly the same "pre approved" list problem as Chromecast. But it is actually worse because you can only launch apps that are already installed on the device. (Better in some ways because there may be advantages to native apps, but worse for openness and small competitors)
Yeah, I was following that activity, but as it's key-based Google simply revoked the keys and devices would no longer stream to it.
There used to be a solution to extract the key from your own Chromecast to simply use it for your own purposes.
But then they evolved the protocol to Cast_v2 which IIRC had more hardened security, so it's just a matter of time until they stopped supporting v1 and simply lock out all devices.
It's a pity, because it would be great to push content to custom receivers in your house (i.e. send a YouTube link to a Squeezebox server)
> Unfortunately no sign of Google Cast protocol being opened for general purpose use.
Open Screen Protocol exists and is very similar. It works and you can use it today (via the one and only reference implementation in the Chromium source tree)!
It's even pretty good & makes sense!
This was kind of part of the bargain for adding Presentation API to the web back in 2014/2015. Your site can itself trigger Chromecast! If that's true, then it seemed clear there should be a standardized way to talk to devices too, otherwise this wasn't really much of a standard. The same front-side/back-side happened with Web Push API for web sites which lead to the creation of a Web Push Protocol backend for actually sending push messages to the browser. It's not perfect but so far the web has somewhat stayed honest with APIs for the page having implementable backend protocols too. Presentation API sample (which oddly cant find my Chromecasts?):
https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/presentation-api/
I really really wish there was some hardware support for this! I've been meaning to set it up locally & start using it some. Writing a native client seems not too absurdly hard.
> Open Screen Protocol exists and is very similar.
Like any client-server protocol, it's useless if the devices and apps you use don't support it. Exactly zero of the apps I use to cast to my Chromecast supports Open Screen Protocol. And this isn't a case where I can just switch to a new client app. Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Jellyfin, etc. would have to all support it.
It's still in draft (but seemingly has stabilized a lot in the past 2 years). And there's such a a chicken & egg between software & devices neither supporting OpenScreenProtocol. I get your skepticism but what do you want? The same could be said about any other option than Chromecast: it doesn't exist on devices or software.
The really good news is that At least for many many apps, the effort to port to OpenScreemCast should be reasonably minimal. Chromecast for much of it's life has - under the covers - been web o ly, and rejiggering for the mild differences between Cast and OSP shouldn't be that wild.
Where-as Matter Cast requires native apps on the target device, and the app has to be pre installed to work.
The "Chromecast with Google TV" main upgrade for my use case (watching YouTube) was to introduce longer ads. For that reason I've lost faith in this product line and this rebranding (and price increase) guarantees I won't be getting one of these.
> the market moved on from simple wireless display dongles.
Has it? Then it must have left me behind somewhere.
My Chromecast does 4K, Dolby Vision, runs Android TV, has a usable remote. What needs to change? There's no newer A/V standard available anyway! I literally couldn't think of anything else I'd want it to do.
(Google could, of course, and it's somehow "AI", even though that probably just runs in the cloud anyway?)
You haven't been left behind. You've already made the transition.
In the old paradigm, the Chromecast was not the starting point for TV watching. Some other device, typically a smartphone, was. That's why the old Chromecasts did not include a remote control or have a home screen.
In the new paradigm, the Chromecast is the starting point. It has a remote. You can install apps on it, and it has a home screen to launch them from.
The first device of the new paradigm was still called a Chromecast, even though casting was no longer the core functionality. Now the brand is being made more consistent with what the devices in the new paradigm actually do.
> My Chromecast does 4K, Dolby Vision, runs Android TV, has a usable remote
That's what Google calls "Google TV" now, a product which still exists. During the transition they called the dongles "Chromecast with Google TV". Now the "Chromecast" part of it is discontinued and its all "Google TV".
So that's not going away? I really can't tell from TFA. The entire thing seems like a hot mess – the link I was hoping would explain why I'd want AI in my Chromecast successor is dead/404 as well in the "Google TV streamer" announcement (https://blog.google/products/google-nest/google-tv-streamer/).
From what I understand, this is the product they mean with "we're ending production of Chromecast, which will now only be available while supplies last."
They kept using the "Chromecast" brand just for dongles, and are now discontinuing all dongles in favor of a single new product.
My guess is that they reached a point where it's more economic to merge the GoogleTV reference design (ADT-3, ADT-4) with their Dongle-line and create a single box which serves both purposes...
miracast is a decent standard. i'm not sure why we'd need chromecast's proprietary equivalent as well.
the fact that google dropped it from stock android kind of says it all - they clearly think that chromecast isn't good enough to compete without being coddled.
Miracast is not content-aware, it's just a standard to stream a video over Wi-Fi, competing with Intel Wireless Display (and other proprietary Wireless Display implementations)
The beauty of the Google Cast protocol is that you can hand over meta-data as well as the actual source-URL to the receiver and it can initiate the stream directly.
> the fact that google dropped it from stock android kind of says it all - they clearly think that chromecast isn't good enough to compete without being coddled.
Google had a basic implementation in AOSP to kickstart things, but when being deployed to the market it turned out to be too cumbersome and complicated:
1. Each vendor had to certify his device for Miracast implementation with the Wi-Fi Alliance.
2. The Miracast receiver (sink) was buggy in many TV-sets and often didn't even work well with devices from the same vendor (i.e. Samsung Galaxy with Samsung TV)
3. Mobile Chipset vendors (Qualcomm, Mediatek) started to provide their own Miracast implementations to make more efficient use of their HW-architecture
4. Power-consumption of Miracast was too high (the device has to encode it's display content into a H.264 stream)
In the end Google saw the potential to deliver a good experience with a cheap dongle and took matters in their own hands. Miracast on AOSP was not maintained further because it was anyway not used by any major device-vendor (Samsung, LG, Sony, Motorola)
Most major vendors add it themselves because google refuses to put it in stock. Samsung calls it smart view, for instance. My phone calls it screencast.
I use it every day and the experience is decent. Google just didnt like the competition from an open standard i guess. but, they dont control what vendors do.
I dont want a proprietary content aware equivalent. There is no beauty to sending metadata separately. There is beauty in having a dead simple way of mirroring whats on my phone that will play any kind of video.
> Most major vendors add it themselves because google refuses to put it in stock. Samsung calls it smart view, for instance. My phone calls it screencast.
No, as said, vendors add it themselves because the core functionality is now provided and maintained by the vendor of the device-chipset. A generic AOSP ("stock") implementation was proven to be inferior to a custom Miracast component tailored for i.e. Qualcomm DSP/GPU, that's why AOSP didn't continue maintaining it.
Miracast is for streaming a video feed from a device. This is horrible for battery life, AV sync and cannot deal with things like HDR content and remote input.
Cast and Airplay makes the device itself fetch and play content, with local control and importantly much better display and video manage.
(AirPlay and Cast both support screen sharing, but that is not the main use case.)
The practical upshot is the same. Whether I get my TV to play a youtube video or play it on my phone and cast, it still plays, at least with wifi 6 (earlier versions were flaky).
I also DGAF about battery life. If im watching TV, I have power nearby and im not moving anywhere. Id be charging my phone anyway.
The practical upshot is not the same in any way or form. Miracast is complete garbage for video content.
With one solution, you get good quality playback (including anti-judder from your TV), correct color handling (e.g., 10-bit, HDR, Dolby Vision, whatever), HDMI CEC volume control from the “source” device, and remote control support on the TV.
With the other, you get recompressed content at random source resolution with improper frame pacing (TV cannot so anti-judder of a re-compressed 3:2 pulldown source), poor AV sync, a color space likely crushed to 8-bit with incorrect gamma, no integration and a device that is throwing its battery out the window - even if you don’t feel like you need your battery, Miracast still has no redeeming qualities for this usecase.
Miracast is great for presentations and other scenarios that strictly need screen mirroring though.
I'm suddenly reminded to ask this community whom I assume might know: Are there any good "dumb tv" solutions out there? I'm thinking 1-4 HDMI ports, and a maximum of RF tuning and input-switching on the firmware.
Products would be preferred suggestions, but I'm even at the point of considering DIY solutions, if something looks lego-ish enough!
Most "smart" TVs work perfectly fine as a dumb panel if you just don't give them internet access. And because they're sold expecting to get a bit of money back on ads, it's generally cheaper than a truly dumb panel of the same quality. I've got a Samsung QN90B and it has never once complained about not having internet access, and the UI is plenty responsive.
I have a QN90A that operates as a "dumb" panel via a HDMI-CEC through a combination of receiver and Apple TV 4K. Rarely/never need the TV remote and there's zero point to giving the TV internet access. The receiver has internet access so it can play Tidal.
You can't even get "dumb" panels of the same quality. They're all built to be used as digital signage, so they usually skip consumer-oriented features like HDR, VRR, eARC, even 4k can be rare. I'm not sure there are any OLED options.
I love my TCL tv. It’s not “dumb” since it’s actually a “google tv” , but if you don’t connect it to the internet, you don’t have to deal with that. It only shows a notification when turned saying it has no internet, but it goes away on its own after a few seconds.
When I turn it on, it will automatically select the previous input, so I don’t have to interact with the “smart welcome screen” or whatever it’s called. It can even be turned on and off by my set top box which actually handles the media playback. I only need to reach for its remote to change the brightness. I think it’s supposed to have some kind of adaptive thing, but it doesn’t work since I’ve disabled everything that sounded like “camera” or “mic”.
It has 4 HDMI ports, dvb-t, dvb-s and can play things from usb. It also has optical audio out and can output audio to Bluetooth headphones.
Image quality and brightness are great for my needs. Audio is surprisingly good, so I can use a low volume without issue.
The model is 65c845 and cost me less than 1000€ new. My understanding from reviews is that the panel is pretty good, but that they skimped on the “smart” side, which was the right choice if you ask me.
In my case, I did connect it once to the internet, to see what's up, and since it had prime video which is pretty much the only thing I watch, it could have allowed me to not have a different box and cables laying around.
And, indeed, it started showing ads on the homepage and the UI was pretty laggy, even compared to my several-year-old firetv. Fortunately, I was able to do a full factory reset and it forgot everything.
Now I only use the software to switch to an HDMI input which doesn't handle the control bits, like a PC, and to increase the brightness in case I'm watching at noon and don't want to close the blinds. 90% of the time, though, I don't even know it exists, since I only use my set top box' remote to do everything I need (change channels and volume, turn on and off). The other 10% it works well enough that I can't really complain.
Bought an LG “C” series OLED a month or so ago. Never gave it a WiFi password. Everything (Apple TV, XBox, Switch) uses HDMI CEC, so I just turn on the desired device, inputs are switched and devices powered on. I never see the TV’s Home Screen, and it doesn’t complain about lack of network. The LG acts as “dumb” as the truly dumb TV it replaced.
I had my brother stay over a few months ago and he gave it the wifi password. Luckily it didn't update to a firmware version with ads (as their cheaper/older devices apparently do), but that's the risk with this approach.
We looked into this when moving house a few years ago in the UK. There didn't seem to be any viable options, so we bought a secondhand TV. I've heard that there are ways to get hold of shop display monitors but didn't figure out how to do this.
Call me paranoid, but I just don't trust it not to look for nearby unsecured wifi networks. Ontop of which I feel dirty and complicit by paying for functionality that I will never use and believe is detrimental to society.
Find the Wi-Fi antenna and remove it if you are so worried. Unfounded fears without action is merely handwringing, while unactionable fears aren't worth worrying about.
Yeah, this is the frustrating part. I've worked with retailers on in-store displays, so I know that you can get high-quality, cheap panels that are "dumb" in that they don't have apps, but they do have full local-only operating systems that can access wifi networks and list files. Some of them can even boot into a chrome-based kiosk mode, indicating a full html rendering stack.
But if you check for anything DIY, they're either sourcing panels directly from manufacturers in China, or ripping apart smart TVs (or just "not using" parts of them). There's a happy middle ground and I know, from experience, that's it's not an expensive one, even though I also know from experience that it's often times an extremely pricey one. By which I mean, the panels themselves are cheap for an outlet to get and use, while actually trying to buy a panel from those outlets is reserved for B2B applications and is priced for enterprise work.
What I was hoping for is that someone who knows about those kinds of panels and that kind of work would be able to say "Ah, yeah, here's a great panel that we use for our displays which is a good deal".
But, so far, I've never had any takers on that. It's a small industry (or, at least it was when I was involved), so that's not unexpected. But I keep hoping that some dogged youtuber or some experimental blogger will figure out how to source all the bits for the TV that so many of us want, but that there's is strong business disincentives to create.
That's what's most galling, I think. Samsung/LG/Sony could make this and sell it, but they refuse to because it would provide an alternative to the market they really want which is ad capture/data harvesting. And I'm just so tired of that being the only option for that specific reason. Because now I'm stuck here hoping that someone out there makes the least-complex, cheapest, and fastest thing for a TV manufacturer to make, which seems like the dumbest thing to have to hope for.
This is gonna be me if or when my quite functional dumb LG from 2012 ever gives up the ghost. I just don't see the appeal of smart TVs when that functionality can be outsourced to a cheaper modular device.
I'll echo what other people are saying, that you should just not connect the smart tv to your wifi, but I am nervous about smart TVs that ship with cell chips to connect to the manufacturer's servers when people don't hook the device up to wifi.
I'm not sure how to determine which models do or don't ship with cell chips.
That's not a thing. Do you seriously believe OEMs would ship a 4G/5G modem and bundle an unlimited data plan with low margin consumer electronics, just to earn a few dollars per year from ads?
And man, oh man, wouldn’t we all just love a device with a free cell modem and a data plan ripe for the hacking?
IOW, if it has been done, hackaday, et al., would have already shown us how to bypass the weak obfuscation and get free data. Or at least an article on “my new Samsung TV has a cell modem that they don’t advertise. ‘da fuq?”
That seems like old advice. Why are we still hacking on Amazon Firesticks?
And the last Intel Compute Stick was released in 2021 -- the Compute Stick is just another consumer product that Intel has killed (along with their NUCs and their reliable/inexpensive desktop motherboards).
I mean, Kodi is wonderful, but the platforms to use it with seem to have moved on.
As an example: For years now, a Raspberry Pi 4 with LibreELEC is a fine way to watch local media on even convoluted AV rigs with its dual HDMI outputs. A Pi 5 also works. (And both can use CEC, so navigation can happen with the normal TV remote without additional fuckery.)
The latest Firestick 4K Max is slow, full of ads, and locked down to where some of the more fun side-loading features don't work anymore like remote button remapping. I ditched it and got an Apple TV that doesn't force you to watch ads for Ford pickup trucks.
I use it to run the Jellyfin client, but it's still painful to use because you can't bypass the Firestick home screen, which is bloated with ads and takes seconds to load. I find this unacceptable in a commercial product.
Any normal TV, just don't connect it to the internet. Use an external box like an Nvidia Shield or Apple TV, its remote will control on/off/volume on the TV via HDMI-CEC.
Now your cheap replaceable external box is the internet-connected computer and your expensive wall-mounted TV is an appliance.
I've got an Iiyama 42" monitor running as a TV for AppleTV and an Xbox. Panel quality is a bit meh, I think it's some sort of weird 2k/4k thing done for dynamic range. It's a signage one, rather than a strict monitor, so there's a little bit of firmware, and I could put rotating pics on it using a usb key, but I'm using the apple-tv for it. No RF (which is good, means I don't have to pay for a tv license that I woudln't used), and 2 hdmi inputs.
This makes me sad as I have multiple chromecasts, it has its issues but for the price they're amazing. I guess they need to throw more money at AI search nobody wanted or likes instead.
I feel like nobody running product at google has any idea what they're doing.
Chromecast symbolizes the older Google I loved. The one that did a damn good job competing with Apple. Exciting projects like Google Glass that while weren’t successful were still optimistic. Not today’s Google, the parking garage cloud company. Readers digest ad agency Google. I will admit that without those ads we wouldn’t have the cool stuff, I just don’t see that stuff much these days. I see 90s Microsoft monopoly dressed in Apples aesthetic.
Real shame, I prefer controlling with my phone more than the shitty smart tv interfaces. Don’t even get me started with controlling said interfaces with my phone, it’s not as simple.
I use a tv from 2010 , Chromecast is the retrofit that lets me do modern streaming. Of course we’re far past the transitional stage the device served as every $100 tv is equipped with streaming.
They also announced Google Streamer, which is just Google Chromecast but more expensive I guess, and also with the Nest technology for smart home stuff, which they also killed iirc.
I have to say, I don't really see this product strategy as being good, or working. Google's product is just a mess, they are nearing Microsoft levels of incoherence. When you compare Google with Apple, it's such a night and day experience.
Apple makes fancy five-course dinners for the wealthy. Google throws half-cooked ramen at the wall for the masses. It's not terrible, but you have to finish eating it before it falls off. Your favorite flavor won't be there next time, and they might be serving burritos instead, but at least your loyalty card still works.
I agree with your second paragraph for a lot of reasons and product lines of theirs. But -- I decided a while ago to bite the bullet and go whole hog on using Google everything for my personal life (for better or worse).
The decision was either to avoid them entirely or resign and buy into the ecosystem. I have a Pixel, my home uses Nest, I use their cloud storage personally, their AI, etc.
FWIW it is a better experience than using only a few of their products in isolation. At what cost, we will find out. But I imagine Google Streamer will be useful for people like me, the user group Google is presumably trying to expand.
The problem is that Google makes it hard to go all-in on their products even when you want to.
I was an early user for Google Apps for Your Domain, which was a free version of what is now Google Workspace that you could use with custom domains. I signed up for Google Play Music with that account.
Then they introduced Google Family, with app sharing and a family plan for Google Play Music, but you couldn't use Google Workspace accounts as part of a family plan. So I went back to using a regular Gmail account, manually moving my playlists for Google Play Music, and repurchasing the handful of apps I wanted to be able to share with my kids.
Google bought Fitbit, and we got some Fitbit Ace watches for our kids. Then Google decided that Fitbit accounts needed to be converted to Google accounts, but the kids can't use their watches with their Android tablets anymore, because the Fitbit app won't let you log in to use your Ace (the kid watch) with a child account from a Google family. The watch designed for kids doesn't work with the account management designed for kids. My wife's Fitbit died and she was ready to buy the newer version of it, except that one doesn't work with the Fitbit app store because (presumably) they want people to buy the more expensive Pixel watches and use that completely separate app library.
Somewhere in there I had to switch my playlists from Google Play Music to YouTube Music. They also decided to start charging for the free Google Workspace plans, eventually relenting only if you solemnly promised it was only for personal use.
I'm the kind of person who should be a loyal Google customer, but I've been burned enough that my immediate response to a new Google product is to wonder what I would do if it suddenly disappeared.
Yeah, I'd emphasize this is for personal stuff only (doubt I'd build a startup on top of Flutter tomorrow).
It may be the product of how boring my personal digital requirements are but I haven't been burned yet by their many abandonments. I really only use pretty core services (Gmail/ Drive/Calendar, ChromeOS/Android/Pixel Watch, Google TV) that I don't anticipate going anywhere soon.
The biggest downside so far is overcoming the ethical dilemma of such a resignation. I'd prefer to use what's best in every case independently, but the value I put on convenience grows every year.
FWIW I was all in on Google years ago. But as features and products kept vanishing or degrading and being replaced with ad driven crap, it eventually drove me to swear off all Google products. The only one I still use is Workspace.
While I'm not all-in on the ecosystem, I'm pretty far. It's still terrible.
I still can't "cast" YouTube audio to my Google Home Mini unless I use the Home Mini in Bluetooth mode (I have more reliable Bluetooth speakers for that) even as a YouTube Premium user.
My Nest devices are stuck in limbo between the Google Home and Nest apps; it's been like this for years.
Integrating new Google devices into Google Home tends to fail without helpful troubleshooting a few times before they succeed.
I refuse to upgrade my Nest Thermostat 1, even though it doesn't support needed features like the temperature sensors. I've also had to turn off all the learning because it decides I'm not home, and doesn't infer that I am home from my Google Wifi hubs.
> I still can't "cast" YouTube audio to my Google Home Mini unless I use the Home Mini in Bluetooth mode (I have more reliable Bluetooth speakers for that) even as a YouTube Premium user
YouTube Music casts toy Google Home Mini. Are you trying to watch YouTube on your phone but have the audio come out the speakers?
Yes, I prefer YouTube and use it for background audio when I'm not listening to podcasts. YouTube Music is a product trying to kludge way too much into a single app to be good at any one thing. It's an okay music player, decent podcast tool, and back YouTube secondary/audio only augmentation.
Microsoft's products are so incoherent they have certifications for navigating their offerings and pay. I don't think their consumer facing stuff is poorly thoguht out, but their business facing stuff is full of weird and changing names, discontinued and merged products.
> With this, there are no changes to our support policy for existing Chromecast devices, with continued software and security updates to the latest devices.
It bothers me when these company blogs link to the wrong page for finding the aforementioned policy. It feels so deceptive. I've seen it happen multiple times. Is it intentional?
They’ve been getting more sluggish for years. When the Ultra launched I could stream something to the TV from my laptop or phone nearly instantly. Now it’s a 20 second wait and only 80% chance of success. Why the fuck can’t products by Google improve performance over time? What perverse incentives do they have to slowly and steadily make them worse than they were out of the box?
I speculate that they give them a trial period to prove runaway success, and when it invariably does not meet their unreasonably high demands (of being 'Google scale'), they focus on something else and leave the products on auto-pilot using minimal resources.
The old Chromecast experience -- choose media on phone, play on TV -- is all I ever wanted. I hate using a remote to browse -- my phone is much better. I hate having my TV logged into an account -- my family, kids, guests all use the same TV and I don't want them using my account, nor do I want to see their account when I'm using it.
The Chromecast protocol is the only thing that the entire ecosystem of Android streaming apps integrates nicely with. I wish Google would open it up to third parties to create Chromecast-replacement devices... but of course they won't. They aren't doing what's best for users, they are doing what's best for their engagement metrics and revenue. And thus, our experience actually gets worse.
The absolutely killer feature of the Chromecast is that I can have guests over (or be visiting someone), and anyone can stream any content they're authorized for. Movies I've bought can be watched anywhere there's a Chromecast; my buddy can come over and we can watch something together with his Paramount+ subscription. Keeping the accounts and authorization linked to personal devices, and letting the Chromecast essentially be a way to translate that to a bigger screen without having to actually stream it out of your pocket is fantastic.
They aren't getting rid of the Chromecast streaming. Google TV does both Chromecast and the Android interface.
The one difference is that Google TV runs the app for service if installed and streams with that. It is nice to use the remote when streaming instead of pulling out phone to pause or change volume.
> They aren't getting rid of the Chromecast streaming.
I understand that, but the new Chromecast devices and presumably the devices replacing them require you to log into the device before you can even use it as a Chromecast stream destination, and then when the video is done instead of going back to nice photos they try to shove algorithmic recommendations in your face. I want the old Chromecast back.
That is not the case. Only YouTube and Netflix have exceptions where the Android app on Google TV / Android TV intercepts the standard Chromecasting where the TV just pulls up the receiver web app in an ephemeral browser. And even for YouTube it'll automatically log you in in a temporary way when you cast. For anything else, casting to an Android TV device is exactly the same as casting to an old-school Chromecast.
Just to try, I just logged out of my Google Chromecast with Google TV (yes folks, it may time to rebrand...), and started playing a stream from Spotify using my phone.
And now I'm listening to Spotify.
I did this with both Google Cast and Spotify Connect (Spotify, at least on Android, allows selection of this).
No issues.
Am I not holding it right? It sure has the appearance of working correctly, but we may not be observing the same things.
Same. I was so sad when my old chromecast broke. And casting was basically the only thing that kept me on the chrome browser all these years. So perhaps its a good thing and this change will finally allow me to move to a more private browser.
Call me cynical but it’s a shell game as far as I can see: same product but new name, probably cheaper parts, more expensive so more profit per unit…except they won’t sell as many units, but on paper it will look good so the market will reward them. I can’t tell though if investors and analysts are too stupid to see it this way or maybe they don’t care either? I guess it’s better to not care because you make money so instead of calling it out when you see it, just give it pass and everyone makes more money. I know Google isn’t the only company that does this it’s just a sad commentary on tech and the market that it works.
>same product but new name, probably cheaper parts,
The new $100 TV Streamer has 32GB of RAM. 32GB of consumer RAM alone is at least $50, and that doesn't include any of the other stuff (graphics, cpu, nic) that makes a minimally useful device.
In this case "premium" just means "expensive, right? What new features are there? AI summaries? I don't think there is anyone that would think AI summaries would be worth paying extra. But I do think people would pay more if there was a version that completely removed any and all AI integrations.
Yes -- it is very difficult to get a customer to pay for "AI summaries" for movies/shows especially if they are not bundled with anything else. I tried it about 6 months ago at recapflix.com (it's not perfect and we got 1 paying customer over like 3 months haha).
The 30 dollar price point was the big deal. A 100 dollar price point opens up competition to a lot more devices.
As a consumer, this is completely unexciting.
Chromecast is core to how my family’s television usage works. I got a free Chromecast recently and it’s a much worse UX than the ones I got many years ago.
What I wish for is for the ubiquitous Cast button found everywhere to be open and neutral and for there to be a whole market of devices that’ll work. It feels frustrating and kind of ugly that there’s an Apple version and a Google version, etc.
I am taking a look at the Nvidia shield, which also uses the cast button. I have 3 Chromecasts that need to be replaced, but the cheapest Shield is $150!!
I guess each time Google kills something and I remove one more part of my life from their ecosystem they are doing me the real favor.
They are hoping you will subscribe to their streaming service, but it works just fine without subscribing to theirs. It also aggregates multiple streaming services into a consolidated guide rather nicely.
Not as nice as Channels DVR (which also lets you record streams and will strip commercials), but one of the nicer streaming boxes for the money.
They only reason I went with a Chromecast over a Nividia shield was the price. Now that the gap has narrowed the shield looks much more enticing. The pro version can run a PLEX server and has 2 USB 3.0 ports for storage. And Gforce Now is actually quite nice for games where a milliseconds don't matter all that much.
As someone who ran their plex server on the shield for a year, don't plan on keeping it there if you want get serious with it and/or want to open up it up to external users. As your library grows, it will start to struggle and I had to rebuild my library two or three times.
A $100 SFF or micro computer off ebay with an 8th+ gen intel cpu will serve as a much better plex server, with plenty of room for other things like HomeAssistant etc. The iGPU will do 15-20+ simultaneous 1080p transcodes, and my machine idles at around 10w. The shield can serve up 1 or 2.
The shield pro is hard to beat as a plex client, though.
Is there a replacement device out there for the ability to cast a tab or your full desktop to a TV? We use this functionality all the time and I would rather not deal with HDMI cords.
Your Chromecast should still keep working. The replacement streamer device would still work too, or the last gen chromecast with google tv.
Apple TV also works if you have a Mac. Many TVs also have Chromecast built in. Miracast is another option but it's really terrible. Steam Link is another option. There are also wireless HDMI adapters.
Miracast devices have pretty decent compatibility. Some TVs have it built in, but there are dongles that implement it as well. IIRC Microsoft has (had?) one that worked quite well.
I suspect that being a dongle is part of the appeal of Chromecast for many people.
At least I definitely don't want more visible external boxes behind/next to my TV, especially if they don't even need line-of-sight to the remote since that's all Bluetooth anyway these days.
Google has a really horrible brand reputation though. Would be bizarre if someone at Google thought tacking "Google" on a product would improve the product's reputation.
Is there any substitute for chrome cast audio? I love being able to play in sync audio to the group of receivers I choose throughout the property, using any amplifier. I’m not even using the digital optical input and I love them
I think Sonos sued the heck out of Google for those, and it caused those devices to disappear for a few years. Sonos lost that case late last year though, so hopefully we'll see a resurgence?
I am fairly certain that the academic open source community had already published prior art for delay correction and volume control of speaker groups (which are obvious problems when you add multiple speakers to a system with transmission delay). IIRC there was a microsoft research blog post with a list of open source references for distributed audio from prior to 2006 for certain. (Which further invalidates the patent claims in question).
Before they locked Chromecast protocol down, it was easy to push audio from a linux pulseaudio sound server to Chromecast device(s).
> I think Sonos sued the heck out of Google for those, and it caused those devices to disappear for a few years.
Oh so that was why they disappeared? Seriously, it's time to rework the entire patents system. You should only get a patent granted when you attach a reasonable (!) price tag and agree to non-discriminatory licensing.
I think that's the reason, but I can't be sure. It probably didn't help, that's for sure...
Had I known Sonos would be like that, I wouldn't have bought their products. Their latest app also totally broke the speakers. Stay far far away from Sonos.
The awkwardly-named "WiiM Pro" is a device that claims to support Chromecast Audio (and a bunch of other stuff like Airplay and Spotify Connect). It's been getting good reviews but I haven't pulled the trigger yet.
A lot of networked receivers/audio systems have C4A (Cast 4 Audio) built-in, and they should support grouping. I have a Sony receiver-esque audio system and it plays in sync with my Google Home speakers very nicely.
The point was that you could have an optical out connection to a Hi-Fi system and things would just work from Spotify, etc... The google speakers don't even have an aux out. A Rasperry Pi isn't at all equivalent as it's not plug and play.
I got a free Chromecast ultra when I got a free Google Stadia box kit a few years ago.
I didn’t use the Chromecast ultra much but I thought it was pretty neat. Kinda sad to see it go.
Honestly the Google Stadia controller is probably the most comfortable and well designed controller I’ve used. I still have it and use it for PC gaming stuff. I don’t play video games much anymore so I don’t know if the other controllers nowadays are better but that was my experience.
The point I’m trying to make is that it seems Google has talented engineers and designers. So I wonder why so many of its products fail and why it cancels so many things…
I find it funny that Google managed to sell you not one but two products in the same box that they unceremoniously discontinued. At least it looks like your Chromecast will continue to work for a while.
What reasonably priced alternatives are there for streaming from a phone/laptop to a screen via HDMI port? Ideally a portable solution that I can use when traveling and staying in hotels or AirBnBs (as I can currently do with my Chromecast unless the hotel WiFi has an annoying sign-in process). Even more ideally, something that's free/open-source and can be guaranteed not to collect and send data to third parties.
Roku supports both airplay (mac, iphone, iPad) and miracast (windows and some android devices).
Most android devices support Miracast, but Google abandoned support for miracast in their firstparty devices in order to promote their proprietary (Google cast/Chromecast) solution.
Also interested. I run a self hosted jellyfin setup and it's really fun to visit someone's house that has a Chromecast, connect to wifi, hit the "cast" button in the jellyfin app, and play whatever content we want, including music. I'm sad that one day that easy UX will be gone in favor of needing to install the jellyfin app on someone's device, login, etc, which is the current UX for smart tv style devices.
" Android TV has expanded to 220 million devices worldwide and we are continuing to bring Google Cast to other TV devices, like LG TVs."
This line in particular puts a bad test in my mouth, because my $2k LG G2 OLED has the worst support for casting I've ever experienced. In fact the software in general is so bad I was excited to pre-order the new Google TV Streamer this morning, so I don't have to deal with it again.
Too bad, the Google TV Streamer seems to be targeting a higher price and performance (not gonna say no to that..), which the Chromecast did a decent job at a relatively low cost, and made some low-end "smart TV" usable with a quick drop-in replacement.
Hopefully they'll try to reach back that low-end market in some way.
We had this coming. Over the years, the various chromecasts in our house are slowly getting worse. I had the sense they are cutting costs on the software and servers powering these devices.
Spend way too much on the chromecasts and home devices. I guess they will continue to work for a few years, hopefully.
> We had this coming. Over the years, the various chromecasts in our house are slowly getting worse. I had the sense they are cutting costs on the software and servers powering these devices.
I can't imagine they will get better. It seems smart devices always crap out after a few years. I am regretting buying my Samsung TV last Fall because it's already slowing down. It takes 5 seconds to load the options menu.
Just plug an external streaming box into it and move on. Embedded apps were always a dumb idea. Double bonus - disconnecting the TV from the 'net will stop their spying on you too.
This is totally true, but unfortunately it is hard to find a good TV that doesn't have embedded software. So whether or not I plug in a Roku, my options menu will always be handled by the TVs OS.
I wonder if there is a way to reset the firmware? My wife connected out Samsung TV to the interwebs and triggered an update. It is not notacibly slower but there are ads placeholders.
Whenever I submit Google Home/Chromecast bugs/feature requests I include some snark in my sign-off like "I know you don't care about this product and it will be killed soon, but if I'm wrong please consider the suggestions above."
I expose my home assistant entities to Home so that I get voice commands using their speakers.
Stuff that you install in your house is generally expected to last a long time. Imagine centering your home around Google and having them unceremoniously kill it. I'm glad a vendor neutral open source project like Home Assistant exists.
>When we launched Chromecast (...) connecting your TV to your phone, tablet or laptop was clunky and hard
I would argue that this still holds true today. Is there any reliable way to do the screen mirroring/photo sharing from an Android phone to a Samsung smart TV without additional devices? My Pixel works great with Chromecast or a similar dongle(e.g. Xiaomi Box) but I really couldn't make it work without them. I tried a couple of options from plain Android sharing, through Samsung's SmartThings, to some sketchy apps that ask for your CC for trial but none of them worked before I gave up and asked my host for a HDMI cable.
Sigh, of course. At least this isn't quite Google's usual product shutdown; Chromecast sorta more or less will love on.
But "Google TV Streamer"? No, I don't want that. I just want a relatively dumb device that allows me to stream stuff from my other devices to my TV. Chromecast has always been that, and has always worked fairly well. I don't need or want yet another media center platform.
Google inexplicably killed the Chromecast Audio as well, and it was an absolutely perfect device for a very particular niche (streaming audio to an old stereo/amplifier without needing a permanently connected phone as is the case for Bluetooth).
I hope mine still lasts for a long time (I believe there are some Google-signed certs on it that might expire some day?).
TIL to get a Stadia controller to work with Chromecast Ultra for longer than one session, you still must buy an 8bitdo USB wireless adapter with a pairing button.
Controller support would have been a selling point of the existing line of affordable devices.
Hopefully this is not the case with the $20 Onn Android TV device with USB ports FWIU instead of another $100*n TVs for updates through when now?
I don't have a Chromecast, but I do have an Nvidia Shield for more than 5 years now. I use that a lot but in recent months is getting unreliable for some reason (I think it's lack of memory), apps get stuck and sometimes the apps crash (the OS remains fine, I just have to reopen them).
Still, from what I can see, it's the best device available barring Apple TV.
I've been searching around, but ready made there isn't anything that's better (on paper) and the DIY route, the only alternative I can see is LineageOS in the Banana PI. [1] AFAIK, that's not great because it doesn't have hardware acceleration, which for a device to do heavy media consumption in a 4K TV, is not an option.
I would be really happy to know about some better alternatives.
I wish they'd sort out the actual experience of casting, maybe it's OK with a Chromecast - but with AndroidTV and an Android Phone, it's a complete gamble how well it's going work, and there are always so many options you can choose (most sub optimal).
Seems really dumb not to continue using the name Chromecast, even if it has a remote now. It is essentially the same product and the best one on the market in its class.
So, pretty typical product/marketing shitshow from Google, unfortunately.
Looks like I'll be moving towards Roku, most of my friends use it and I've been using a Chromecast because I was gifted on. But the experience w/ Roku seems to be superior to Chromecast nowadays anyways.
Roku has always been pretty great -- simple, straightforward, limited UI clutter (source: have been a user since 2013).
However, lately they've been adding more and more suggested/sponsored content to the home screen. Most of these things can be turned off, and even with them on, it doesn't slow down the experience significantly (I'm looking at you, Fire TV) but it is a shame. I suppose they've got to make money somehow...
Got a Roku stick last year after two FireTV sticks bricked themselves. First thing I noticed was that the volume on the remote can only control Roku devices. Then there’s the ads that are creeping in everywhere, but I admit they do stay out of the way… for now.
Going back to AppleTV for my next device. I don’t like how search steers all results through Apple, but I can work around that. Plus I can use it as an exit node on my Tailscale network.
> First thing I noticed was that the volume on the remote can only control Roku devices.
Rokus can send volume/mute commands through CEC. The volume buttons on my Roku control my home theater receiver, they controlled the volume on a sound bar on a different TV, and they controlled the TV volume.
But the thing is Roku has far less data on me than Google. They might have viewing history or whatever, but it's not tied to my entire identity on the web the way Google can do that. So not it's not as creepy or worse than Google, not by a long shot.
> But the thing is Roku has far less data on me than Google
Do they? They have your IP address, most likely email, user IDs for various streaming platforms, your location... All of that for sale to anyone that will pay Roku for it.
Yes, they do have much less. They do not have two decades of email history, map/location data, photo libraries, advertising profiles on the web, etc...
Does it have the same level of content provider support, though?
Almost any app or content I've ever wanted to stream to my TV supports Google Cast on both iOS and Android, which definitely can't be said for my TV's native OS, Apple TV/Airplay, Miracast etc.
I have 5 Chromecast with Android TV around my house, I paid about $30 for each one. There's no way I'm going to buy 5 of these new devices at a $100 price.
musing: It feels like Google has a reputation of creating a bunch of products and killing them off within 3-5 years.
It seems like this helps with initial adoption of the product (backed by Google!) but erodes trust in the brand every time they axe a cult-favorite ("why would I invest time in ${x} when they'll probably just kill it off in a couple of years anyway..?")
Would it be better if Google launched these products subsidiaries without (obvious) links to Google?
Total Arm-Chair QB exercise, but one I feel might be interesting to get feedback on...
Chromecast is actually super useful for my immigrants parents. Since some foreign languages' input method on remote is horrendous, Chromecast helps them selecting youtube video easily.
This is really just a rebranding. For the past few years, we've already had a Chromecast with Google TV, which is pretty much the same thing. This is just a hardware refresh, adding AI freatures and doubling the price.
I'm hoping this hardware is faster. The previous model was very laggy compared to the Apple TV or Nvidia Shield. But probably not. It just looks like the Chromecast team is tyring to shoehorn in AI features because it's 2024. I guess the description summaries could be helpful, maybe.
Chromecast was an endless source of frustration for me from having the first prototypes while at Google, to the latest devices.
It solves such a simple problem that no one else seemed to want to tackle - put a video on the TV - and yet, it never quite worked reliably.
We used it every evening for years and 19/20 times it streams effortlessly and instantly... 1/20 times I'm restarting browsers, TV's, WiFi until we give up and watch on a laptop.
Back to the HDMI cable. In retrospect, I should have never left it.
We have 5 Chromecasts with Android TV and they all work perfectly. We really only use Plex, Youtube, Netflix and a few other streaming apps, but none of them has any problems. It sounds like your problems with Chromecast are due to the rest of your network infrastructure and not the Chromecast.
I think I am going to stock up some chromecasts with google tv 4K, reasons:
- they are going to be lower price than before
- which will make new streamer to be 3x price
- they are losing the dongle feat which is amazing, zero footprint
- smart home features, sorry, they are a scam
- core functionalities are the same, 4k, dolby atmos/vision
- its a streamer, don't need 32gb of rom
- don't need AI, another scam
I honestly don't see the point on upgrading or even buying over prev. version
The people at Google that thought killing Chromecast and replacing it with a $100 device certainly do not have the consumer in mind. This is entirely a political play within the company.
They said they sold 100 million Chromecasts, but do 100 million houses really have (or need, or want) home automation? I seriously doubt it.
A bought several chromcasts pver the years, mainly because they provide a simple and uniform way to retrofit multi-room sound into my collection of sound systems from different brands an eras.
Surprised not to see more comments on this topic here.
Yes, video streaming can be done easily nowadays. But finding a multi-room audio solution that works across different brands and also on offline devices was my main reason for getting into chromcast.
I used to love Chromecast and I love the concept but since 2020 My ISPs have sent me non-configurable routers, they broadcast 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz Wifi on the same spectrum. This bricked my older devices that can't figure out how to find the 2.4Ghz only network.
I never bought the newer Chromecast and its just been sitting idle, hopeless dangling off of an HDMI port since. My world has moved on as literally everything else can get shows displaying on a TV including the TV.
I don't care much about Chromecast hardware, but I wonder if the protocol and application support for casting in apps will survive. I imagine third-party hardware vendors could step in to produce compatible devices.
Example use-case: I was recently in a hotel, travelling just with my phone. The hotel TV supported Chromecast, and I was able to connect my phone and watch some movies from Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and YouTube apps. This was super convenient.
The product page on the Google Store[1] calls out “Enjoy content from compatible apps on your phone, tablet, or laptop and cast right to your TV.”, so it seems clear that it will still support the Cast protocol.
was there ever any information (released by Google or other parties) as to why Google decided to remove the functionality to "Cast" *any* tab, and not a tab from a site that was whitelisted by Google?
who pressured Google to do this? or did they "pressure themselves" to do it?
the BEST feature of early Chromecasts was the ability to cast any video from any page. it was revelatory!
ahhh... when i try to Cast from my desktop to my Roku, i see the Roku as a destination, but only "Available for specific video sites". i think it must be that the _Roku_ is restricted as a Cast[ing] destination. my Chromecast HD is in a drawer so i can't test it right now.
so using a real Chromecast, it still is possible to Cast any tab at all?
Yes, it is still 100% possible with the real Chromecast. My TV also has an option to cast to it (not sure what it uses under the hood) but it is similarly restricted.
Like others are saying, this just looks like a rebrand. Hopefully this competes in performance with the 2019 Nvidia Shield TV Pro which is to date still the only streamer that performs well enough for high quality audio and video, but is starting to age (and no longer works with things like google home audio groups). If anyone knows of a comparable plex streamer let me know :)
It sounds like Google wants to get more edge compute in people's homes so they have a new vector to deploy AI products on, but they're still so far from actually deploying an innovative product that they can't announce anything to actually drive up hype.
Then, the rebranding is only because they've abandoned the original "minimal footprint" ethos of ChromeCast.
This is the least suitable market for AI that I can think of. People love writing summaries for TV shows and movies. They do it for free. Why not focus on making AI do jobs that humans don't like.
I also don't think people actually long for having the machine recommend new movies and shows. At least I get enough of that from my human friends and family. ("Have you seen game of thrones? You have to watch game of thrones")
This is very annoying. Even with the prevalence of smart tvs some tvs just don't come with all streaming apps I want and Chromecast was a great inexpensive option. They are discontinuing it in favor of a product that appeals to a totally different market in mind at 2x-3x the price. Roku still mostly fills that niche but I don't see the logic in this move at all.
"The time has now come to evolve the smart TV streaming device category — primed for the new area of AI, entertainment and smart homes. ... With Google TV Streamer, you can not only indulge your entertainment needs, but also have a hub for your whole smart home."
Your home, controlled by Google. What could possibly go wrong?
I've used chromecast to power all my "dumb" tvs for years and being able to use my laptop or any phone that's on the wifi has been amazing to avoid using a clunky roko or firetv interface. Sad to see one of the most personally useful pieces of google tech ending.
I wonder if sales are down that much now that every new TV has Roku or something similar built-in. The Chromecast's form factor was fantastic, but it really left a lot of features on the table compared to Amazon, Roku, and even Onn (Wal-Mart's house brand) streaming sticks.
Makes sense. Chromecast is built into most tvs. That way they can eliminate the hardware costs and focus fully on software. The tv manufacturers will be happy to work with them as they, hopefully, will get a share of the ad revenue too.
Also this is the first product they killed that I agree with.
Except that means that you'll have to hook the TV up to the internet instead of just connecting a dongle to it (which means the TV may spy on you and/or display ads), and when they inevitably stop supporting it you'd have to replace the whole TV instead of just a dongle.
At least there still is a separate device you can hook up, at least for now, though it's more expensive, clunkier, and packed with a bunch of needless stuff.
I picked up the Google TV 4K and generally like the experience, but in 2024 the performance feels really sluggish. I was considering getting an Apple TV as a result, but maybe this new "streamer" device will be competitive.
It's a shame Google had to ruin the Chromecast with the Google TV platform. It's so bloated and obnoxious and just a shame that we have to keep getting "suggestions" crammed down our throat disguised as ads.
If brands can be put on the balance sheet as "goodwill", how much money was burnt by obliterating this brand name - one almost as generic as Kleenex, for its product category (small streaming-first HDMI dongles)?
Chromecast always a little slow / finicky. But I doubt Google can fix for twice the price, not because they can't squeeze in better components, but just can't expect them to do it right.
I thought this bit from the replacement device marketing was funny:
> And thanks to Gemini technology on Google TV, you can now get full summaries, reviews and season-by-season breakdowns of content, so finding your next marathon-watch just got easier.
They know it needs to be "AI powered" but they can't figure out anything that actually needs modern AI, so it's relegated to doing ordinary internet searches.
It's interesting, though, because there are existing sources for this content, like IMDB and wikipedia.
I wonder if the real point is more about selling ads while avoiding having to cut a deal with those existing sources. An LLM can essentially "launder" content so that, in general, it's hard to determine the sources for any given response. (There are plenty of individual examples where you can tell exactly what the primary source was, but those are the exception.)
I suspect the quality of the LLM-generated content will be worse than existing sources, but since the real point is to avoid sharing ad revenue, not providing good content to the user, that will probably be fine. It content doesn't need to be good, just good enough.
Welcome to the AI future! It's a lot grubbier than I expected.
That’s what happens when you always get too fancy with names. Chromecast, duo, wave, plus, Stadia, all sht names. Keep it simple like messages, [company name] TV, cloud = win
The way they forced reconnecting to the same Wi-Fi network that was used to configure it the first time rendered it useless even if you changed just the SSID!
If I have an MP4 video file sitting in cloud storage somewhere, does UPnP/DLNA provide an easy way for me to use my phone to tell my TV to play that file? Also same question but for Netflix.
Netflix at least could easily provide a link. When it is on a fileshare somewhere, is that something Chromecast can handle? If so it will be essentially serving the file from your device, and I see no reason you couldn't similarly ask DLNA to stream from a server you're running locally. In fact I do very much the same thing regularly (using swyh, quite a useful tool)
Like a lot of Google products, the branding story has been very confusing. Small possibility that this is a step toward cleaning up some of the historical mess:
Good riddance. I tried a "Chromecast with Google TV" because it was so cheap, and seemed to support everything. It was easily the worst experience I've had with a set-top-box:
1. Sometimes it took 2-3 minutes to wakeup from the sleep state.
2. The remote is so curved on the bottom (literally a semi-circle) that I struggled to pick it up and the only ways to reliably pick it up successfully resulted in inadvertent button presses
3. The remote is overly minimalist. 8 buttons total. Missing buttons include a play/pause button, which is easily the most vital button for a device dedicated to playing media. Sometimes the center button acts as play pause but other times not. It has taken me 30s to pause what I'm watching when I'm already holding the remote (add in #2 and it can take me over a minute to pause)
4. Sometimes media playback just crashes and I need to start over.
5. Tons of ads. I was expecting this from a Google product, but thought I'd mention it anyways
TL;DR: If you want a STB, just pay the extra $20 for a Roku, everything about it works absurdly better. If the Roku cost $100 more, I'd still recommend it for anyone not on the most extreme of budgets.
We have 5 Chromecasts with Android Tv around the house, and we don't have any of the problems you describe - no 2-3 minute wake-up, it's pretty much instant on all of them. No ads, we use "apps only mode". The remote is just fine, your hands may be the problem. Media playback never crashes.
That said, I'm not paying $100 for the same experience I recently paid $30 for. I'm going to test on the Onn 4k streaming device for $20.
Lots of shade here. The Chrome served to make dumb tvs smart. It did its job. It changed the world of TVs. We don't use it anymore because TVs are smart out of the box. Google could spend the next 20 years trying to service and repurpose these things or cut technical debt and move onto the next.
I have a "smart" Samsung TV from 2015 and it definitely doesn't have Chromecast software, its hardware is too weak to handle modern streaming apps, and it stopped receiving updates from Samsung years ago anyway. The picture is still good, I've disconnected it from the network, and it has HDMI input, so there's no good reason to replace it yet. Friends have had problems with newer/smarter TVs so I'm still not seeing what's so great about baking the apps into the TV.
Honestly I'm pretty happy with a 2010 iMac with LibreElec and no streaming subscriptions payed. I keep dodging bullets, like this one.
What I miss and I might get to write myself is a plug-in for Kodi to act as a Chromecast.
On the other side, Chromecast is something that's been essential in my family's home for years, so it's worrisome what alternatives my, for example, mother will have.
I really disliked my Chromecast...despite being able to output 4k, the OS was sluggish and it barely had storage to hold the streaming apps I was interested in using. I ditched it for the Apple4K.
IMO this is a part of the reason why they're dropping the Chromecast branding. The product is very different from the original Chromecast streaming stick. It is now mostly a cheap Google TV device.
I also quickly ditched mine. I mean it worked sorta fine - but the usability was absolutely terrible. Often apps lost connection with it so any requests to pause or resume the media was several seconds delayed. If I got a phone call I often wanted a quick way to pause my media but chromecast made this super inconvenient, slow and stressful when the phone is blurting out it's ringtone.
App support was also spotty at best.
In the end I realized that since I've already chosen between a rock and a hard place (went with the Apple ecosystem), I could just screenshare using an old Apple TV. This ended up working much better in practice (although lower quality video stream) than Chromecast. Today I don't cast much video anymore for some reason, not really sure why. I have an Apple TV 4K and just mostly use the native apps from various services. Having a remote to a system that is completely detached from your phone is much nicer usability wise IMHO.
The worst thing about modern TVs are all their smart shit.
I just want a monitor, no speakers, no nothing, just HDMI input and a large, good image, it's what it should do.
Sound should come from the stereo system.
Input should come from input devices, such as chromecast and gaming consoles.
Not really a surprise. I'd have been more unhappy a number of years back but mostly use an Apple TV these days. Not quite a 1:1 replacement for everything though.
Thanks for the tip. For streaming from the web I mostly find that just connecting a laptop to HDMI works pretty well but you obviously have to be near the TV. At one point, I bought a second Apple TV for another TV and I confess I haven't really used Chromecast--which at one point I considered pretty essential--in a while.
Chromecast is a great device to have with you on the road. Now it's this massive brick?. Why would I want this?
It's just another reason to not get invested in anything Google related. Whatever you do you'll always end up with a discontinued product or a brick in the end.
Damnit. I'm so tired of buying Google products only to have them cancelled. I literally just bought chromecasts for my entire home less than 6 months ago.
That's it. I'm NEVER buying another google device again.
What difference does this announcement make to you? I am still using a 2013 Chromecast for some purposes. It does all the things it originally did, even though "support" for it ended a while back.
Chromecast used to be a great product. I had my gen 1 Chromecast for the last 10 years until recently when it got fried by this piece of crap TV I plugged it into.
It was exactly what I want in a device: Do one thing and do it well.
I decided to replace it with a new "Chromecast" device to find out that it bears next to no resemblance to the original. Today's Chromecasts are just wannabe Roku devices with actual casting being relegated to the status of unwanted stepchild. It forces you to sign in to a Google account, which the original did not force you to do. The original was a small stick that could be powered by the USB coming from the TV itself, whereas the new one is a larger white puck that needs a wall wort and can't be powered by a regular (non-C) USB connection. My final disappointment was that VLC fails to cast to it, even though it worked perfectly with the original.
All I want is a way to cast any video I want to my TV. This is apparently a huge ask in 2024. I looked up alternative devices on Amazon and they all seem inferior or have deal breakers like trying to Do Everything(TM), not supporting 4K, using some weird protocol, requiring a login, etc.
It's a bit clunky, but the only real solution is just "a computer" with an old Logitech K400 keyboard + mouse combo. You won't be "casting," (although I suppose you still could) rather you'll just be using the keyboard directly. This is low tech but also sort of "bomb proof." A company can't sweep the rug out from under you, your setup will always work, and given that it's literally just a computer running whatever OS you want, you can perform nearly any task with this device. You might complain "but my embedded [company] product does X." Yes, but that product will be dead in two years, and they'll keep making the UI worse, and injecting more ads. Your computer will just keep working, and changing only as much as you let it change.
The pro move is getting a K830, a far superior keyboard/trackpad combo with backlighting. Unfortunately, also with a very weak microUSB charging port. Logitech perfected, then discontinued the best HTPC keyboard ever.
We just have old macs connected via HDMI to big flat panel TVs, and remote keyboard/trackpads. That's it. It's 'clunky' but has not failed in 10 years.
I bought a huge and nice new Samsung TV last year and tried to pair it with a NUC running Win11, and the TV insisted on doing some weird "detecting your device, you should use our remote to control this device" bullshit with it every single time I switched inputs, such that it would miss the HDMI handshake and one side of the connection would give up and result in "no signal", and then I'd have to sleep and wake the NUC to get it to work.
I switched to iPhone, in part, because Chromecast's casting protocol was so unstable. It just... stopped working consistently. AirPlay seems to still work rather well, but it was substantially more expensive and doesn't really work with non-Apple devices (though the remote mostly alleviates this).
Idk, I think the real issue was it was probably "too complicated" for the average consumer. The type of person who is sitting at a TV probably wants something with a remote that behaves independent of their phone, not relies entirely on it for it to work. I love Chromecasts, but I can see why they're going away even if it makes me sad.
> I switched to iPhone, in part, because Chromecast's casting protocol was so unstable. It just... stopped working consistently.
I had a similar problem with some (Android phone) apps. Casting a movie, and after half an hour or so the app would lose its connection to the Chromecast. Which meant you couldn't control (e.g. seek backward/forward) the movie anymore without restarting it (the movie). This didn't happen with some other apps though, e.g. the Google TV app. Apparently it is easy to not properly implement the Chromecast connection. Perhaps the connection gets terminated when the phone goes to idle mode, unless you do something to prevent that.
Yeah, that was a common issue with me. I had significantly worse issues though, my chromecast would hard lock and/or have very strange visual glitches that required a reboot to fix, typically about 10-20 minutes into playing something. That's if I even got to that point because half the time it would just refuse to actually play anything without a reboot 95% of the time I went to use it.
I actually just bought a current gen Chromecast because I was looking for a "plug it in so I can watch YouTube on my TV" device similar to the Gen1 and was also dismayed at being forced to register/log in with a Google account and go through all of the hoops. I wish I had done more research and had I known that current Chromecasts are basically just a thin proxy of the exact same "Google TV OS" that ships on a lot of current smart TVs I would have paid the premium to buy a Nvidia Shield or something
I recently bought two TVs, one for my sister and one for my father. My sister's has Roku built in and my father's has GoogleTV built in. Meanwhile my sister dug out an old game console and wanted to see if we could get it to work. Upon unboxing and attempting to use the new TVs, I found absolutely no way to access an HDMI port without going through the process of creating and logging into an account on each. My next TV will be a dumb TV.
Current-year Vizios have no problem using ARC or whatever it is, and the smart/network stuff is completely disabled. It just works with whatever HDMI is sending it.
The smart stupidity is why I didn't cry at all when the kids broke the Samsung piece of shit. Vizio has my vote, at least for now.
> I found absolutely no way to access an HDMI port without going through the process of creating and logging into an account on each.
This is crazy and infuriating. I would have returned both TVs to the store if this happened to me. Was this advertised on the box? This feels like it shouldn't be legal because you're being forced into a legal agreement after purchasing the product.
With Airplay? I do not think I have ever been prompted to. The TV is a Roku so technically I am signed in there and I have an AppleID but the iPad is my wife’s and the Roku account isn’t the same email as either of those accounts.
Isn't AirPlay only good for screen casting as opposed to casting videos directly? My conclusion was that it's not feasible to use AirPlay to cast a video at the full frame rate and sound synced.
AirPlay can do both. There's a "screen mirroring" button in Control Center that streams your phone screen to the TV, but if you tap the AirPlay button on a video player or in the audio device selector, the TV will stream the video directly from the server at native resolution and FPS, without going through your phone (you can turn your phone off and playback will continue).
AirPlay or more accurately "screen mirroring" does cast sound and more often than not recognizes the video content and casts it full screen (from most iOS media apps such as youtube at least). It doesn't always work on my samsung TV without an Apple TV device though, in about 10% of cases it'll just fail to connect to the TV altogether
You can cast video e.g. from the QuickTime app or a <video> tag in the browser too which won’t just mirror your screen. In fact the cast video won’t even show on your device’s screen but only on the receiver in that case.
I use an app called Airflow on my Mac to stream local video files to Apple TV. It's $20, but lifetime license and it's been working fine through the years.
I've had 2 Chromecasts of various vintage and an Nvidia Shield, and I've consistently run into stupid bugs and obvious failure modes the entire time. It's like it was a beta product rushed into production, then forgotten about when the project lost its executive champion.
But this is standard fare for Google these days. It's just not an organization that's structured to create AND sustain customer products. I no longer buy or invest in any customer-focused Google tech, and I try to avoid it on the Biz side where I can.
My experience was the opposite: my gen1 Chromecast's unreliable streaming is what made me get a Raspberry pi 3 :) IIRC the problem likely was the lack of support for 5Ghz WiFi combined with crowded channels in my area.
You mean how do I use it for streaming? That changed over the years and I haven't been using it for streaming the last months due to circumstances. But if you are looking for suggestions, then I would point you to DietPi as OS and Kodi as media center. You can configure it to dierctly boot into Kodi, and if you use NewPipe as YouTube client on your smartphone, you also get a convenient option to play videos on Kodi. Plus you can stream any file you have on your PC or smartphone. To stream from Linux I used idok, but there could be others.
Why would they give you a 25$ device to stream video to your TV when they can sell you a shitty subscription to a shitty service for that amount every month, plus whatever they earn from plastering the whole thing with ads?
My first Chromecast was the current one, and I honestly don't get what the issue with it (except VLC streaming) and the wall wart which is kinda expected given the SoC power. I've logged in Google acc and every app acc exactly once a year ago and since then it just works autonomously. And I have all modern streaming, my local streaming from ISP and youtube in one place on any outdated TV which are present in all rentals here. That was the point of it, right? To add smart tv functionality to the old tv.
Fingers crossed Google doesn't deliberately kill support for these old devices in Android. For a very long time, I've used my gen 1 to watch local OTA sports broadcasts on my hotel room TV when I'm overseas. I accidentally bent the HDMI jack pretty badly one time, but it still works.
I think honestly the best solution really is to just use a stock PC and forget all of this crap. It's a shame there aren't any good open source setups using stock computers like Raspberry Pi that can act as a good Chromecast replacement (or if there are, I missed on it; I tried Kodi but while it is pretty cool it isn't really great for streaming services like YouTube in my opinion.) but on the other hand, it's not the end of the world.
Many modern TVs, if you can find one that isn't complete dogshit (good fucking luck), can do Miricast without connecting to the Internet or requiring an account. That's nice since it fills one role of Chromecast: the ability to easily cast your desktop.
But I'd like a full open source ecosystem implementing casting. Right now using Chromecast protocols from Firefox is a crapshoot and I just haven't bothered, but I don't think there's any reason why we can't just make our own. YouTube may be somewhat hostile, but at a certain point it's hard to stop a cast tool that just execs an official Google Chrome binary, you know? So there's always something that could be done.
That said, I keep a list of instructions for un-shittifying the Google Chromecast TV devices for myself, since I do have a few of them. Note that you already need to log in for this to really work, but I already do that, since I want to be logged into YouTube, for the time being (for Premium and age-restricted videos and subscriptions and etc.)
I'll just copy and paste them here:
## Replacing the Terrible Launcher
Google took a dump all over the TV launcher with ads. Here is a workaround:
1. Enable *Developer Mode* by tapping the TV OS Build Number in Settings -> About 7 times.
2. Enable USB debugging.
3. Prepare a device with `adb`. On NixOS, `nix shell nixpkgs#android-tools`.
4. Find the IP in About -> Status and use it to do `adb connect [IP]`.
5. Install an alternative launcher like ATV Launcher Pro.
6. Disable the default launcher entirely. `adb shell "pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.apps.tv.launcherx && pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.tungsten.setupwraith"`
### Button Mapper
Google also made their version of Android extra hostile to the launcher being replaced, so when you disable the launcher the Home and YouTube buttons will stop working. This can be fixed using a third party app called _Button Mapper_ available on Play Store.
1. Install _Button Mapper_ from Play Store.
2. Enable the Button Mapper Accessibility Service in Settings.
3. Add the Buttons
4. Map YouTube to open the YouTube app
5. Map Netflix to open the Jellyfin app
The app will warn about not working if the device sleeps, but this doesn't apply as these devices don't seem to "sleep" the way that Android phones and tablets do.
If your auth becomes stale you need to re-enable those app IDs and log back in. This will manifest as things simply not working, e.g. videos not playing. However, it only happened to me a couple of times. I think it requires session tokens to completely expire, which takes a while of inactivity.
> I think honestly the best solution really is to just use a stock PC and forget all of this crap.
I used to do that, with a Linux HTPC and Plex. I eventually switched to the physical AppleTV device, with all the content on a surplus Mac mini connected to the home network. It's just less work to maintain. On the old setup, it always worked perfectly whenever I was around and had plenty of time to tinker with things. It only ever had problems when I was at the office, very busy, and the kids wanted to watch some show I had digitized from our DVD collection. Granted, the problems were always small and easily fixed, but they were disruptive because of the circumstance.
I've never had that happen to me with the Apple setup. Yeah, you've got to at least partially buy into their ecosystem. But they don't force you to go all in if you don't want to.
I'm currently using Jellyfin to manage my media. With very few exceptions, it's been as turnkey as it gets. Anything with a web browser is good enough to use it, making nearly any kind of setup sufficient. Almost any OS can just browse the web very well. I run it with Docker on Synology DSM. Early on in Jellyfin's life, some Jellyfin server updates required manual intervention, but for a long time now, I just update periodically (every few months) and haven't run into a problem.
With that in mind, if I wanted a Linux HTPC setup for minimal tinkering, for the purposes of accessing YouTube and Jellyfin, I'd probably go with an immutable system; I like the look of Bazzite for this. Then, I'd probably disable automatic updates, and manually update things periodically when I have time. If it breaks, you can always roll it back, but manual updates will take the minimal potential disruptions to probably just zero. You could run this on a cheap mini/NUC PC. For TVs that are not mounted to the wall, you could probably even mount it to the back using a VESA mount adapter.
That said, I don't currently have plans to replace all of my Chromecast setups, so I haven't actually done this. That's because they've been working very well for years and there's really no reason to mess with something that works. They were cheap, they run Android apps, and I've cut out all of the unwanted advertising.
So they are ending Chromecast, and also just launched the "Google TV Streamer" which seems to do the same thing, but "faster, more premium" whatever that means.
Seems to be a reason to charge people more for the same thing but slap the AI label all over it. But that's just first impressions.
Edit: and apparently the TV Streamer thing is twice the price of the Chromecast.
If Apple were run like Google, the iPhone would have been cancelled half a dozen times only to be resurrected as Apple Phone++ and Pocket AI, repeatedly investing in and torching brand awareness while distracting resources from product development to internal promotion and marketing the newest brand at the top of the escalator.
> many reviewers praised the Amazon devices for having good performance, so the new Google TV Streamer likely won’t be a slouch when it comes to loading apps or scrolling through the homescreen.
In 2021 they praised the device as having good performance at a price point that is ~$30-40 less than what Google is launching their device at. The second gen of that Fire stick is selling for $40 right now on sale with Wi-Fi 6E. I saw some benchmarks posted of this chip and some others (with a Pixel 6 thrown in arguing that using a bunch of older Tensor chips might have also been a good idea.) And also a Shield TV which is 5 years old at this point.
I think this can actually compete with, and might be better than, the nvidia shield pro. Since 2019, I don't think we've had such a device (last I checked).
The "best devices" lineup has been the nvidia shield pro, Roku ultra, and Apple tv 4k, with Roku being the cheapest at $99.
If you don't care about decoding support for all the different video formats, HDR10, dolby xy and z, etc., then these sorts of devices might not be for you.
The oen thing no device currently has that the shield does that I'd need to see to replace mine is support for HD audio codecs. I play blu-ray rips on my shield through my Jellyfin server and it supports bitstreaming DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD without any decoding on the streaming device.
The Shield is literally the only streaming device on the market that I'm aware of that does this. Without it, I wouldn't get the Atmos/DTS:X information passed on to my receiver when watching blu-ray rips.
Dolby Atmos support without Dolby TrueHD means TrueHD tracks with Atmos will play without it. If those are the codecs it supports that means it'll only stream Atmos when it's Atmos encoded over Dolby Digital Plus, which to be fair is what e.g. Prime, Netflix, and Disney will stream to you anyhow, but it doesn't help with watching my rips.
For clarity: the discussion here is about the Chromecast hardware product, the little HDMI stick. Chromecast the protocol remains supported pervasively via Google and third party products (many/most TVs take it natively, for instance). It just didn't have a home, no one wants to buy something that's already pre-installed. Ours comes out once every few months on vacation, for example.
This seems like an unnecessarily cynical take. As a Chromecast user, both the price increase and the name change make sense to me.
The current generation Chromecast (Chromecast with Google TV (4K)) was fast and responsive when it launched, but software updates have made it almost unusually laggy over time. Obviously the best solution here would be “just make the software fast again”, but not all the relevant software is written by Google, and the third party apps need to be fast even if they are not well-optimized. The previous hardware wasn’t up to the task, and the dongle form factor makes thermals a challenge regardless of what chip you put in. A set top box format + more capable chip + the general trend in higher component costs = a higher BOM cost. I think Google has correctly judged that many consumers are willing to pay a higher cost for a more responsive device.
The name change just makes sense, because the previous name was terrible. “Google Chromecast with Google TV (4K)” is… a mouthful. The “Google Chromecast” branding is also associated with the “casting” UX flow that was the only way to interact with the first 3 generations of Chromecast devices. The majority of interaction with the current generation devices is probably through the remote (including the voice search feature on the remote). “Google TV Streamer” conveys the use case much more clearly.
I get as frustrated as anyone else when Google kills products I use, but this clearly isn’t a case of that. They’re just releasing a new generation with some changes that plausibly meet consumer demand a bit better than the old version.
I wouldn't expect much performance difference here:
> Although the specifications for the MT8696 haven’t been published by MediaTek anywhere online, Amazon [which also used it in the past] says that the MT8696(T) variant of the chipset in the 2nd Gen model features a quad-core CPU clocked at up to 2.0GHz. The core design is ARM’s Cortex-A55
> The 2020 Chromecast with Google TV (4K) utilized Amlogic’s S905X3 SoC with four ARM Cortex-A55 cores clocked at up to 1.9GHz
So both use 4 x Cortex-A55. The alleged "22% faster CPU performance" does sound strange, as the maximum clock speed is merely ~5% higher. Though it does have more RAM (4 GB instead of 2 GB).
They could have used a more recent SoC instead of the Mediatek from 2021, which would have been more efficient, but also more expensive. Making it a box instead of a dongle could also be motivated by better audio recording ability (for AI assistants), perhaps.
I would expect thermals to be significantly better in a set top box form factor compared to a dongle. My Chromecast with Google TV is often hot to the touch, so I would expect that it spends a lot of time thermally-limited, and not operating at peak frequency. A larger heat sink could make a big difference there.
At the same time, the current generation Apple TV will absolutely smoke this thing in performance, even though the Apple TV is at the end of its refresh cycle.
And that can run games on par with last-gen consoles (below PS4, but significantly above Switch level in terms of raw GFLOPs)!
At their original price point, Chromecasts were pretty great, but why on earth would I pay the same as an Apple TV for something containing an SoC from 2021? I wasn't able to find reliable numbers, but performance seems to be lower by 1-2 orders of magnitude.
Does the Apple TV work well without an iPhone? I worry it'll be missing half the features. With the Chromecast I can use my phone as a remote, whether that's iOS or Android, for example.
The Apple TV comes with a great remote, and an iPhone not only isn't necessary, the backup "if you lost your remote" interface on the iPhone is kind of bad.
Though if you lose your remote in the cushions or whatever note that your iPhone can be used as a "hotter hotter colder colder" method to find the remote. Was surprised to find this feature. https://support.apple.com/en-ca/108371
The only feature I can think of that you would miss is using the phone to type passwords on the Apple TV (instead of using the keyboard-less remote). Set that up once, and you should otherwise not know the difference. Otherwise, my iPhone needs no interaction with the ATV.
Especially when everyone’s tv now does all this pretty much? I cannot imagine successfully getting my gf to switch to this from the Roku integrated in her tv.
That premium gets you a pretty beefy processor at least, the same one found on the iPhone 13. I doubt the SoC Google is using will be even close to that.
My 2019 Philips android tv got incredibly slow after years of updates. I didn’t notice it because it was so incremental but after some years the chromecast functionality started failing consistently. I did a factory reset, disconnected from the internet and added a Google TV dongle. TV is super fast again. Point of the story: it’s very nice to be able to buy a $ 50-100 dongle every 5 years and keep your old tv.
This is exactly the approach I've taken. Current TV is 14 years old and survived numerous house moves. Still as good as new.
Most usage is via a Chromecast Ultra. I have a Chromecast 4K with TV (i.e. newer device) but it was a backwards step from an experience perspective (covered by others elsewhere).
Dont forget Allo. Goes to show how much role luck plays in these companies' success and it is so strange that others still copy what Google, Amazon and these companies are doing thinking that they have some sort of management hack or routine which makes them successful but in fact they become successful despite of their bad practices not because of it.
Still wondering how Zoom managed to pull that off - granted, they have a single offering, but describing it as "stable" is a stretch. And the UI is such a mess, don't get me started...
Just this morning, I was chatting with a colleague about how much I love Chromecast and how relieved I am that it hasn't been discontinued. Then, an 3 hours later, I read this news, and it really bummed me out.
Honestly, I'm not sure which company frustrates me more right now. Updating apps on Google Play has become a nightmare compared to Apple, where review times can stretch to two weeks (sic). Plus, the google search is practically useless.
> Updating apps on Google Play has become a nightmare compared to Apple, where review times can stretch to two weeks (sic).
What do you mean by "(sic)" here? I'm used to seeing that in quotes to make it clear the quote is being reproduced exactly, but I've never seen it outside a quote.
I chose React Native recently over Flutter for a new bunch of apps that I'm making. Go seems to be the only one which survives the terrible management of Google.
I have had two Chromecasts (the original and an Ultra) and I feel like both were hampered by the phone requirement. Part of this is my house having kids without phone who would have liked to have access to Netflix, and part is due to my Apple TV use, which I use far more often.
I'm sure there will be some loss of functionality here, but hopefully it's with the benefit of a much better user experience.