After Google announced a new streaming device called Chromecast this week, I found myself wondering what the future holds for the product.
In case you haven't read about Chromecast, it is a relatively inexpensive dongle device that you hook up to your tv. You can tell it what to stream from almost any phone, tablet, or computer through the chrome browser (or android app), and it streams the content straight from the cloud on its own.
As it stands right now, this doesn't appear to be much of a game-changer. It is a little cheaper than a Roku box, but is less functional at the moment (except for Roku's suprising lack of YouTube). And for iOS fans who have Apple TV with streaming plus mirroring, this is almost useless.
So why did Google build this device? First of all, once this technology makes its way into TVs, this may finally convince people to buy the smart TVs Google has been trying to push for a couple years. But I think the more important feature is that this technology is platform-independent, and makes it easy for people to stream from any source - Netflix, YouTube, Google Play, and probably Amazon and Hulu eventually. This gives Google Play some hope of competing with iTunes and Amazon, and also makes YouTube a more viable source for living room entertainment.
And if it convinces more people to use Chrome as their browser, that doesn't hurt either.
In case you haven't read about Chromecast, it is a relatively inexpensive dongle device that you hook up to your tv. You can tell it what to stream from almost any phone, tablet, or computer through the chrome browser (or android app), and it streams the content straight from the cloud on its own.
As it stands right now, this doesn't appear to be much of a game-changer. It is a little cheaper than a Roku box, but is less functional at the moment (except for Roku's suprising lack of YouTube). And for iOS fans who have Apple TV with streaming plus mirroring, this is almost useless.
So why did Google build this device? First of all, once this technology makes its way into TVs, this may finally convince people to buy the smart TVs Google has been trying to push for a couple years. But I think the more important feature is that this technology is platform-independent, and makes it easy for people to stream from any source - Netflix, YouTube, Google Play, and probably Amazon and Hulu eventually. This gives Google Play some hope of competing with iTunes and Amazon, and also makes YouTube a more viable source for living room entertainment.
And if it convinces more people to use Chrome as their browser, that doesn't hurt either.
No comments:
Post a Comment