The obvious question: Why would you buy this if you already had an Apple TV (or were considering buying one)?
* Cross-platform support, not just iDevices
* For apps that integrate with the SDK (currently Youtube & Netflix, but I am sure more will be coming soon), the processing of the content can be transferred to the the Chromecast. Hence, once you "flick" your Netflix content to Chromecast, your phone is free and not processing content anymore unlike Airplay, which is a huge win for your phone's battery.
* All your phones/tablets/computers become your remote/controllers.
* The price (at $35, it's a relatively low-risk impulse buy)
* UPDATE: It automatically switches to the HDMI input channel when streamed, atleast on my LG TV. My 3rd gen Apple TV doesn't so I have to find the TV remote to switch HDMI inputs, which can sometimes be annoying.
For apps that integrate with the SDK (currently Youtube & Netflix, but I am sure more will be coming soon), the processing of the content can be transferred to the the Chromekey. Hence, once you "flick" your Netflix content to Chromekey, your phone is free and not processing content anymore unlike Airplay, which is a huge win for your phone's battery.
If that's the case, I wonder why Chromebooks (other than the Pixel) aren't compatible.
Close. It's hardware encode acceleration. The Ivy Bridge CPU in the Pixel has it, the earlier Chromebooks don't (I don't know if that's true universally; I didn't check).
It only requires CPU usage when it's streaming the contents of your screen. For Youtube/Netflix, all it does is tell the key the url of the stream and everything is done either on the key or the server.
I don't believe that's correct -- from what I can tell, when it's streaming webpages, it is actually only synchronizing two copies of Chrome -- one on the stick, one on your PC. It is not encoding/transmitting a video, as with AirPlay or Miracast.
From what do you discern that? Given that everything they showed about the the product was variations of it receiving and decoding a video stream, it would be quite a switch for it to also have a full platform running a web browser in synchronicity. It seems much more likely that it is a direct video send, making it enormously simpler to design.
> The receiver device runs a scaled-down Chrome browser with a receiver application that receives data over Internet Protocol and transmits it to the television via HDMI.
Very cool, though incredibly surprising (a browser is an intensive, complex thing, so will people have to constantly be patching their Chromestick?), especially given that once you add the cost of synchronizing all interactions, it seems so much easier to simply video grab the tab.
If anyone has this device, what is CPU usage on the source like when tab-casting?
I don't know, maybe because it needs a browser extension which older ones don't support at the moment. I would assume they'll support them later, but honestly, I don't know.
That sounds smart to me, but for Netflix at least, generally everyone would use the Netflix app on the Apple TV (which is solid) rather than airplay from their device. YouTube is another story, though, it's a disaster on the Apple TV and I'll almost always stream from my phone. Of course, if I'm streaming to my Apple TV I'm by definition at home with a charger nearby, so this isn't a key differentiator.
But that brings up what I think is the most interesting use case – portability: put it in your bag and forget it until you need to present/watch something for work/at a friends house.
With many TVs with built in youtube support and many other devices already connected to the TVs that have you tube, xbox, PCs, PS4, Wii, Roku, etc. Why would you buy it? Just so that I don't have to search what I am watching on my phone on my TV again? For the price this might still be worth enough to spend for that feature. But just trying to understand if there is anything else there is to it.
The scenario that Google presented was users doing stuff on their phones/tablets and then saying to themselves, "Hey, let's play this on the big TV screen." That's a different use case to Google TV/Xbox/PS4 etc.
They made a lot of the fact that, with Chromecast, your phone/tablet works as a TV remote.
Also, people who are already familiar with their phones/tablets don't have to learn a new UI etc.
And it doesn't have to deliver a lot of value to justify $35....
> generally everyone would use the Netflix app on the Apple TV (which is solid) rather than airplay from their device
Only people that have Apple TVs. Apple has sold a lot of them, but it's a fairly niche device that costs 3x what this one does. They also work differently so that you're not streaming from your device to the Chromecast dongle, but that you're essentially just telling it what to play (you can then use your device as normal). This is pretty neat, I for one would use it just so I would not have to deal with the terrible Apple TV remote control anymore. Typing in anything is a frustrating experience, I'd rather type from my phone or computer and then have it play where I'd like (my TV).
Yes, but the comment I was responding to was specifically about the Chromecast vs Apple TV - while we use ours a lot, it certainly has a far from perfect interface. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wasn't on the Apple ecosystem already, and would be using the Remote app on their phone/iPad to type search queries rather than up up down down left right left righting for minutes at a time.
HDMI has a feature called CEC which can control inputs, volume, channels, basically everything a normal remote can, but over the existing cable and connection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#CEC
My Toshiba TV and my Onkyo receiver both support it. It's not a cost/licensing issue since it's built into HDMI and Pulse-Eight makes a USB CEC HDMI passthrough adapter and provides a libCEC library: http://www.pulse-eight.com/store/products/104-usb-hdmi-cec-a...
PS3 supports it. Although not when the youtube app is running for some reason. When I turn my TV on, the PS3 starts automatically and I can use the remote to navigate menus and Netflix.
It's worth noting that each consumer electronic manufacturer has its own name for CEC, rather than using the generic term. This, despite good compatibility between manufacturers' implementations.
From the Wikipedia page linked by the parent:
Trade names for CEC are Anynet+ (Samsung), Aquos Link (Sharp), BRAVIA Link and BRAVIA Sync (Sony), HDMI-CEC (Hitachi), E-link (AOC), Kuro Link (Pioneer), CE-Link and Regza Link (Toshiba), RIHD (Remote Interactive over HDMI) (Onkyo), RuncoLink (Runco International), SimpLink (LG), T-Link (ITT), HDAVI Control, EZ-Sync, VIERA Link (Panasonic), EasyLink (Philips), and NetCommand for HDMI (Mitsubishi).
Seems exactly like the evolution of the Nexus Q. It interfaces the exact same way with the Youtube/Play Movies apps, minus the need for a special app to set it up.
IIRC, the early beta version AirPlay displayed a mirror button for every <video> tag in MobileSafari. Apple got a lot of pushback from content providers, and had to make AirPlay an opt-in for content providers [1] (though with iOS 5 they later changed it to an opt-out feature).
Not sure how the content providers will respond this time.
If you use 3rd party plugins (I use ClickToPlugin in Safari) you can get that option back for HTML5 video. You can also use display mirroring or window mirroring for flash stuff (part of Mountain Lion for recent Macs, older Macs can use AirParrot).
I just added the "Google Cast" extension on both my mac and Linux Chrome installs and it appears to work on both(as far as I can determine them to work without actually having a chromecast yet, anyway.)
Haven't tried it, but with the Chromecast extension, it presumably should. The only potential problem I see is if there are any licensing issues with video codecs.
It wouldn't be killer. A very small subset of users would want it. Any time I've seen browsers on TV's trying to read the text from a couch has been difficult, interfacing with it's difficult, and like most people I'm sure I don't like browsing in full view of everyone. e.g. type in a password and everyone can see it. If this had a full browser I seriously doubt that could release it this cheap and I think anything over $50 and it wouldn't sell.
No reason it wouldn't work on a projector right? I was going to use a Raspberry Pi to do the same thing, but this is much simpler. Do you know when is it coming to Canada? I'd prefer not to go through the hassle of getting a reshipper to mail it to me.
They said other markets would be coming as soon as they can. Not sure what that means but for the Nexus 7 launch Canada is only a few weeks behind the US. With the Chromecast they probably have now idea how demand will be and once they know they can fulfil it will open up to Canada and others.
for the Nexus 7 launch Canada is only a few weeks behind the US
"Only"? In comparison, Apple ships to a large number of nations simultaneously. I got my iPad shipped (from China, which is also where those Nexus 7s are coming from) the same day that US buyers got theirs shipped.
Such is how international companies usually operate.
I like Google the company, but they are incredibly provincial and out of step when it comes to these things. If they lack manpower to do international releases, perhaps they should hire the appropriate people instead of constantly treating the rest of the world as an afterthought.
Apple has delayed shipping to other countries many times. e.g. I got the first iPad the day it became available in the UK (I pre-ordered). That was about 6 weeks after the US launch. As far as I recall it was actually two weeks later than they originally scheduled for the UK launch.
Demand for these products is very high and producing them in large quantities while trying to keep them a surprise is difficult. If Apple, a company that is a hardware business has trouble with this it's hardly surprising Google a web software and advertising company would have problems.
Google doesn't make or design the Nexus 7, but rather Asus does (or at least Asus is the brand behind it, though they likely offload actual manufacturing to Foxconn or similes). Nor does Google manufacture, warehouse, or ship these products (which one experiences when they try to do any sort of service requests on Nexus devices, to instead be direct to HTC or Samsung or Asus).
Google constantly and egregiously fails to see a world beyond the US as being important to their initiatives. It took a ridiculously long time for customers outside of the US to buy apps on the Android Market (it remains seriously limited), and was significantly worse for those who want to sell on the market. With each of these hardware releases, it's the US and then, maybe some day, the rest of the world. That's Google's prerogative, and they're based on the US, but every time they do that they incrementally offend the rest of the world.
Well that only adds androids devices to the list, Windows phones are out right now.
> "* For apps that integrate with the SDK (currently Youtube & Netflix, but I am sure more will be coming soon), the processing of the content can be transferred to the the Chromecast. Hence, once you "flick" your Netflix content to Chromecast, your phone is free and not processing content anymore unlike Airplay, which is a huge win for your phone's battery"
AppleTv does this by it owns, not need to stream Netflix from your devices.
> "* All your phones/tablets/computers become your remote/controllers."
Only if they are iDevices or android devices.
> "* The price (at $35, it's a relatively low-risk impulse buy)"
Only attractive I see, still if you already own an AppleTV, why should I buy this one too?
Chrome browser supports it. There's an SDK, so theoretically any device can support it.
I own both an AppleTV and a ChromeCast. For Netflix, I use both depending on whether my phone or the Apple TV remote was closer to me. For Youtube, no question, Chromecast is far better. Other content, I don't want to comment about since I am not sure what's released to the public yet.
I also strongly dislike that AppleTV has a fixed set of channels/apps and no SDK (though it's likely they will have one soon). I can't even remove the multiple channels that I never watch and don't care about.
Funny thing when people down-vote posts that criticize(?) Google and don't give a good reason why...
Exactly which part of what I said deserves to be downvoted? I don't care about the karma but it makes me wonder what are the things that are not acceptable in HN
It uses a mini/micro? USB (one of those small USB ports for power). My device came with an adapter that I could attach to my TV's USB port, so there are no dangling wires. If your TV doesn't have a USB port, you can just connect it to a normal power outlet (it's the same adapter as for many other Android devices)
How long does it take to boot? ie from power being applied through to it showing up as a target in other devices/apps.
(The reason for asking is whether you need to connect it to a full time powered port, or one that only comes on once the TV etc are on. If it takes 5 minutes before becoming visible that would be problematic but 5 seconds would be fine.)
> Note: You may not publicly distribute or ship your Google Cast application without written permission from Google, per the terms of service described below.
> YOU MAY NOT PUBLICLY DISTRIBUTE CODE CONTAINING THIS SDK OR REFERENCING THESE APIs WITHOUT A WRITTEN AGREEMENT WITH GOOGLE ALLOWING YOU TO DO SO.
> By accessing the download links below, you indicate that you have read and accept Google's API Terms and further agree not to publicly distribute code containing the SDK and APIs accessed through the links below unless and until you enter a written agreement with Google providing such permission.
> If you wish to discuss shipping your apps, please write us at chromecast-updates@google.com
Awesome. This will nicely round out my HTPC setup. I have an R-Pi running XBMC along with an MK802ii on which I've built a system which lets me trigger music playback from XBMC using RFID cards.
I had been working on a way to get youtube vids to playback in XBMC by firing a json call at it, but with out spending time hacking together my own chrome extension I was never going to be able to make it easy enough for my wife to do.
I had already made the purchase before I headed here to the comments and noticed that it also came with 3 months of netflix. Nice bonus.
Absolutely blown away by this. This might just lead us one step closer to the grand unification of devices in the living room that has long been dreamed of.
I'm more excited about this than the xbox one announcement that's for sure.
The price is unbelievable ($35)...an impulse buy.
edit (come to think of it I'd bet we'll start seeing "chromecast ready TVs" by Christmas.
I know. I had already typed a tweet about what a killer device it would be at $99 when they said $35. I went from thinking I would probably get one to now I'll get one for each screen.
It seems like existing Netflix customers have a strong incentive to "buy" the Chromecast since it is essentially free as long as your Netflix plan is $12/month or more:
Once your Chromecast ships, you will recieve an email with a promotional code for 3 months of Netflix. Offer valid for previous, new and existing Netflix members, one per Netflix account.
From reading the fine print, it appears that it's only the $7.99-per-month plan that's covered, but you can apply that discount against a more expensive plan.
[Edit: note that that still leaves it very cheap.]
I love this. Last year I was super-excited about the Nexus Q (I have my I/O freebie in a box somewhere) but was disappointed by a) the price and b) the lack of an SDK.
A year later, we get ChromeCast. It's a tenth of the size, a tenth of the price, and supports every device in my home. I'm glad Google decided not to run with the Q and had the balls to pull it out of production while they (I assume) worked on ChromeCast.
It's not clear to me what this means for Google TV, which, it seems, has long been a bastard stepchild in the Google consumer product family. If I both wanted to play games and take advantage of Chromecast apps on my other devices, I guess I would need both? Or maybe there will be a Chromecast receiver app for Google TV?
More broadly, this seems symptomatic of the continued tension between the Chrome and Android platforms within Google, since this is yet another space where they're stepping on each other's toes without obvious rhyme or reason from a consumer perspective.
Third-party manufacturers are still making devices (both set-top boxes and TVs) on top of it, and new features were announced for it at this past Google IO. But it's barely alive, I think.
I agree, being one of the maybe 12 people in the world that actually uses a Google TV and likes it, I hoped they would have at least mentioned something about it, even that they were killing it. That being said, I still bought a chromecast because it looks friggin sweet.
I just ordered one. Impulse buy on my part - but with a SDK + support for multiple devices, I have high hopes for it. Looks really awesome, and it'll probably land up being pretty hackable. :D
I guess I am the only who is not particularly excited about this. Other than the price it is a "me too" response to AppleTV.
One of the most annoying thing about these devices is that because the lack of storage, they need to be streaming all the time (which is a problem with connections with a cap like in Canada) which is very inconvenient if you want to buy movies on iTunes/Google Play.
AppleTV enables game devs to use the TV as a separate common screen for multi users games but that feature seems to be missing with the Chromecast (or at least I couldn't find any reference to it)
So as an AppleTV owner I just can't help but to think this as a "meh"
At my house we have a full Windows 7 PC or laptop attached to every TV and a wireless combo keyboard/trackpad. It's been that way for over 5 years and there's nothing we can't do with them.
We didn't spend much to do this either - these are all old or leftover computers except for the one in my wife's room because she wanted a quad-digital-tuner Windows media center (so I built her a tiny shuttle box with a Ceton tuner).
As a longtime AirPlay user, I find this less exciting since AirPlay works with pretty much anything that's on your iDevice. That said, cross platform is interesting.
And Google Cast, with its lovely "You may not publicly distribute or ship your Google Cast application without written permission from Google" warning, isn't?
I hope the protocol used is less buggy than AirPlay. AirPlay is very shaky with many apps. I am not sure though if it's the protocol's problem or the app's.
I continue to be impressed by the uses Google has found for Chrome. Building new features into Chrome gives Google the capabilities of a full desktop application without the need to convince users to install new software. Google can just issue an update to Chrome to instantly ship new projects to ~20% of web users.
I'm extremely surprised that Google actually added this to Google TV. I figured, at this point, that my 3-year-old Revue box was long-forgotten by Google.
The "play on Google TV" button showed up on both my desktop (in Chrome) and phone (in the YouTube app) some weeks or months ago, I'm not sure. It works just like this Chromecast thing was described -- whatever I was watching on the other device shows up on the TV and playback can be controlled from either side.
So you can use the tab casting feature in Chrome to cast to your Revue? I dusted my Revue off, forced it to update, and now I can control it from the Youtube app on my Android phone, but in Chrome it says "No cast devices found"
No, there's no tab casting. Just YouTube sharing. I think it's the Chromemote app that added the button to YouTube. In Android, the native YouTube app can cast to Google TV and remotely control the playback on the TV.
I'm pretty excited about this. At Google, we use Hangouts to share our laptop's screen with TVs in the conference rooms (for meetings, presentations, that sort of thing), and I've always wanted a way to do this easily at home. I'm much too lazy to plug my laptop into the TV, after all :)
Too bad it doesn't work with Chromebooks (other than the pixel). I understand that we're lucky that the ARM-based models can even handle hi-res video at all, but I'd think the Intel-based Acer could handle this too.
I don't think the "remote" device is doing any of the work. Once the Chromecast stick gets the feed, it will be doing all the streaming, or a combination of serverside work.
I think the older Chromebooks might not have the Chrome extensions yet. I can't imagine them not being supported sometime soon.
This is only useful to me if it also is supported by a major Windows media player like VLC. What I like about AirPlay is that I can flick something from my phone to the TV, but also from iTunes (blech) to the TV. I would love to have a solution that did not involve iTunes. I love that the price is 1/3 of the Apple TV.
Can I push a chrome tab to this thing and then shut off my laptop and have the tab still displayed on the chrome key? I'm thinking of using this for all of the dashboards in our office, at $35 each, that would be awesome.
I wonder what the SoC is on this, and if it runs Android. I assume it has some UI for connecting to WiFi, so conceivably it could be like those cheap Android HDMI dongles inside.
NSA, US government, tyrants everywhere, watch Google carefully for how it's done. For a fickle crowd like Hacker News, you can seize their liberty and human rights easily - just distract them with shiny new things.
For shiny new toys, some people will rationalize anything ;-)
It's an interesting design problem for sure. Do they make it a USB dongle and have an HDMI cable going out? Or an HDMI dongle with a USB cable going out?
Function-wise two cables would be the better design. On my TV this dongle would probably interfere with cables in the ports next to it. In this picture you can imagine the problem if there was another HDMI port right above the one it's plugged into, https://lh6.ggpht.com/jbhD_qpdQkLDEk4Y6PV9E2vBWM7__xjVzE18_J...
Ah, now I see. The marketing pics make it look a lot cleaner than it really is. There will be a cable coming out of the thing, probably going into your power strip.
I was sold on the price point for one. Secondly, the nice thing about this is that you aren't stuck on the Apple platform. I can push content from my iPhone, my windows machine or my mac directly to the television. If you are just using it for netflix / youtube and you already have an Apple TV, you definitely won't need this.
Forgot to mention that they'll open up their SDK so you can probably expect some cool hacks in the near future.
Actually, if you're a heavy YouTube user, the AppleTV interface is terrible and out of date. It's hard to search, hard to access your playlists, etc compared to using the web site or the apps. (I have an AppleTV and it's a constant point of frustration for me.)
Making a remote-based, d-pad interface as convenient as a touch screen is very, very difficult.
I like being able to play movies without fiddling with a laptop. It's awkward because you'll want to immediately point the laptop away from you to avoid light spillage and unless you're on a Haswell laptop, you should probably worry about keeping it powered. Plus, selecting movies on the TV interface makes even choosing the movie a bit more social.
Only for Netflix and Youtube. If you stream a Chrome tab, it still runs from your computer. Also, this still leaves open how one might download a movie and stream it to one's TV - I guess you'd have to upload the whole thing to Google Drive/Dropbox?
Well, for any service supporting the SDK, which presumably will continue to grow. (Play movies/TV as well, btw.)
I don't think "downloading a movie" is a use that they've shown or discussed. It seems primarily like a device for showing streams of video content from the cloud, with a secondary capability of mirroring a Chrome tab. It's not a miracast device; it's more like an AppleTV that you control from your phone or computer.
This happens to Apple too. It's the way the market works. It's based on speculation. Rumours are usually much more exciting than what's actually announced, people buy based on the rumours, and when the actual products are announced (even when they are good) they fail to meet crazy expectations and the market corrects - people sell.
But does that Apple analogy apply here? Apple's rumors are at a crazier scale than Google's and Chromecast in particular was barely a whisper on the street, especially with more reports pointing to Nexus 7 in the days leading up to this event.
True, I'm sure it still probably applies just to a lesser extent. I just checked and it looks like after the fall it's started to rise again. Edit: Looked again and the fall/rise is pretty much mirroring the Dow and NASDAQ today.
I was thinking maybe as an investor I'd see this move as an example of "potentially" good execution and a possibility of Google playing well with media giants.
* Cross-platform support, not just iDevices
* For apps that integrate with the SDK (currently Youtube & Netflix, but I am sure more will be coming soon), the processing of the content can be transferred to the the Chromecast. Hence, once you "flick" your Netflix content to Chromecast, your phone is free and not processing content anymore unlike Airplay, which is a huge win for your phone's battery.
* All your phones/tablets/computers become your remote/controllers.
* The price (at $35, it's a relatively low-risk impulse buy)
* UPDATE: It automatically switches to the HDMI input channel when streamed, atleast on my LG TV. My 3rd gen Apple TV doesn't so I have to find the TV remote to switch HDMI inputs, which can sometimes be annoying.