Is Chromecast the One Dongle to Rule Them All?
Google Has Announced Its Next Attempt At Living Room Dominance: The Chromecast.
Forged in the fiery pits of Mordor, Google’s Chromecast has a price point of $35 and lets you stream media right from your phone, tablet or PC to your TV via wifi. Its powers are said to be all-consuming.
The Chromecast fits in an HDMI port and works over a wifi signal — according to WIRED, you need a good one — to let you broadcast content from whatever device you happen to be using at the time right to your television.
Most of the usual suspects have signed on for compatability — Netflix, YouTube (of course, since Google owns them), Flickr, any app that uses the Googlecast SDK — but the real kicker here is that you can shoot content right from your Chrome browser.
Google’s had a few less than stellar attempts to get a piece of the TV market before — if you’ve ever actually seen or tried to work GoogleTV, you know what I’m talking about — but where Chromecast is different is it lets you actually broadcast tabs from your Chrome browser right to your television.
The implications here are huge, everything from your favorite blogs to, ahem, those website you only go to in “incognito” mode can be brought right to your TV, still controlled by your computer/tablet/phone/whatever. Whatever other third parties make their apps available, be it Pandora or whoever, that alone is enough of a leap to justify shelling out $35.
Whether or not Chromecast changes the face of TV/internet interface, we’ll just have to wait and see, but at such a low pricepoint — less than dinner, less than a full tank of gas for a midsized car — it’s at least worth a shot for the potential that it might actually do what it says it does.