Put simply Chromecast lets you solve the problem of, “I want this thing on my device to show up on my TV.” There are a few complexities and limitations but that’s basically it, you see a thing on your phone/tablet/browser and you want to put it on your TV with one or two taps.
What makes it even more attractive is that it has a list price of $35 and can often be found for less than that. Currently running $29.99 on Amazon
The setup requires four things:
- One free HDMI port
- A power source
- WiFi
- A device to run the Chromecast app
Once you have those things you’re set.
Plug the device into a free HDMI port, which can be on your TV or receiver, but preferably your receiver. Connect the USB port on the Chromecast device to either an active USB port or use the provided 110v power adapter. I plugged mine into a USB port on my TiVo but you could just as easily use a port on a receiver or TV. Then fire up the Chromecast app on your mobile device and tell it what you want to name the Chromecast (i.e. Living Room) and how to connect to the WiFi.
Then when you see something you want to put on the TV you hit the cast button on the app. There are a set of supported apps that is increasing at a pretty fast rate. The biggest one is YouTube. You get a link to a funny video but instead of watching Seth Rogen and James Franco perform Bound 2 on your tiny phone with bad sound you cast it to your TV to watch them work their magic on the big screen with big speakers.
But it also serves as an alternative to other streaming media devices and will do more of that job as more apps become enabled on the Chromecast device. HBO Go was a recent big win for Chromecast, though the video quality is decent the sound is only stereo. The HBO Go video buffering was minimal with a small time of starting in SD and then transitioning smoothly to HD. Watching a 1.5 hour documentary produced no audio or video problems at all.
Listening to music I own and had imported into Google Play Music was easy and worked without any problems. Pandora is also an option but I haven’t had time to try it yet.
When any song or video is playing you can cause it to pause, stop, rewind, fastforward, play, etc. from your phone (or other device). Though the content doesn’t actually stream from your phone, the Chromecast grabs the content on its own and only uses your phone to tell it what to do. No matter what your TV is doing, when you tell it to cast something it automatically switches HDMI inputs to the Chromecast and starts streaming.
With a Plex media server you can also serve up videos that you have stored on a device on your network.
You could also take the Chromecast with you when you travel if you know there will be WiFi and you want to bring the ability to watch big screen content on the road.
The biggest hurdle for Chromecast is getting people to use it. In a research study conducted on my couch I asked my wife if she wanted me to setup her phone to work with Chromecast. She seems content just watching things on her phone even though the screen is hopelessly small. I’ll probably force her to load it in the future and then she’ll continue to not use it.
I also have a GoogleTV device and Chromecast is seen as the natural successor to GoogleTV. The things that were wrong with GoogleTV have all been rectified here, It’s small, easy to setup, and the user interface is clean. GoogleTV’s interface is something like a strange locked down phone that only connects to your TV. You still have to launch the Google Play Store to load apps, get update notifications and sometimes need to reboot it. Though the app support on GoogleTV is better, at this point it’s not much better.
Apps currently supported are:
- Google Play Music, Movies, TV
- HBO Go
- Pandora
- Hulu Plus
- Netflix
- YouTube
- Vevo
- Red Bull TV
- Songza
- Plex
- Viki:Global TV
- Real Player Cloud
- aVia
- Revision3
- BeyondPod
