With Chromecast, you can easily enjoy your favorite online entertainment on your HDTV—movies, TV shows, music, and more from Netflix, YouTube, Google Play, and Chrome. No more huddling around small screens and tiny speakers. Chromecast automatically updates to work with a growing number of apps.
If you subscribe to netflix yourself (and don’t leech off someone else) this is an incredibly good deal. It’s even better if your TV supports HDMI-CEC.
Depends on the services you want. Roku won’t do Google Play Music (which is wonderful) or Youtube, which this will. Roku won’t let you mirror arbitrary web video, which this will (in “beta”).
Damn. One of the last remaining “cool” features that iOS has over Android (AirPlay) has been effectively removed.
That said, I’m not a huge fan of using a phone or tablet as a “remote control” (give me a Harmony remote any day), so I’ll probably stick with my Roku and Apple TV. But at $35, I’m buying a Chromecast for sure. I’ll probably get the new N7 as well.
What a neat gadget, gotta get one. I wonder if there will be “countermeasures” used by media providers to disable Chrome tab mirroring. Otherwise, evading app restrictions and throwing “web only” content from Hulu or HBO Go onto a TV will be damn easy.
It’s not mirroring at all. It is just a control channel from your device to the screen. Video goes from the source directly to your TV. So it requires explicit support from the app/service provider, unlike airplay. But it is more flexible and network efficient.
Does the free 3 months work with existing accounts or do you have to be a new netflix customer?
update: doh it now says on amazon works on new or existing accounts. Dang this really is $11 for people who already pay for netflix! Basically it’s a no brainer for existing netflix customers or people who want to sign up for netflix. I mean my lunch cost more than this thing.
Heh it now shows:
“In stock but may require an extra 1-2 days to process.”
I wonder if it will sell out before ccz comes back and checks on this thread.
I thought that Google was fully invested in Miracast as the future of mirroring / sending video from a portable device to a TV? I guess Miracast’s slow adoption led them to consider alternatives, and this Chromecast dongle looks great. Of course people are already commenting that the videos don’t show the fact that you have to plug in the dongle into a USB port, too. Apparently that’s in the fine print. Still, most TVs have both an empty HDMI port and USB port, so it’s a neat solution. And yeah, HDMI-CEC means that it can even turn on your TV for you and switch inputs. Slick!
Miracast only works over wifi direct. It doesn’t allow you to stream from any arbitrary source to any arbitrary destination.
It does have the advantage of actually mirroring your screen, so you can push anything you want. The chromestick actually runs its own copy of the application and gets the data itself, so you get perfect quality and don’t have to reencode it on your phone, which is nice, but it means that each application needs to be individually supported.
I dunno how well it’ll work out in the end, but if you pay for netflix, it is really cheap, so what the hell?
I’m really curious if they have any DRM issues and how they get around them. The various streaming companies out there (Hulu, Netflix,etc), have a slightly different selection based upon the device being used to watch their services.
Also, it’s a bit funny because in many ways this reminds me of Xbox SmartGlass.
