Just I time for Chrismahanukwanzakah shopping I saw an amazing ad for the Google Chromecast. The size of a USB stick, you seemingly plug it into your TV and you immediately have streaming media. Since it’s from Google, who’s products just work and don’t get in your face about it, it must be amazing. After you use it, you are taller and thinner too. Isn’t advertising wonderful?
Well, it’s almost that good. My main gripe is the the ads never show that the unit has a pretty hefty power cord with a medium sized voltage converter built into the plug. So, a substantial wire protrudes right out of the unit. Apparently some TVs have a USB (not a service port) you can plug into instead, which is better, but still leaves the cord sticking out of the end. It spoils the appearance of the unit and it seems like there ought to be a better engineering solution.
Now the good to great stuff. It’s $35 dollars. That’s the price of a business lunch for one person in my part of Manhattan, it’s amazingly cheap, and one third the price of an Apple TV. That puts it in range of students who want to bring it to their friends dorm where they can plug in and cast Breaking Bad from Netflix onto their friends TV.
That’s how it works – you ‘cast’ from your smartphone or tablet or Chrome browser to the TV. It works pretty damn well. Using my iPhone and iPad there is little noticeable video lag and the sound is good. When I got it Thanksgiving weekend there was just Netflix and YouTube available, but by the end of the weekend there was HBOGo and Pandora, so more content is coming quickly. You can easily cast a single tab from a Chrome browser to the TV, for example, making an NFL viewing package (supposedly only for a laptop) now available on the big screen. Very cool.
The verdict is that this is a pretty nice little piece of hardware at an amazing price. If you have a couple of TVs and a Netflix or Hulu subscription, get one. I notice that the store displays do show the power cable, so you don’t get the surprise of the power cable I got when I got it from Amazon.
I’m not even a TV watcher, but I have a Mac Mini, an Apple TV, and a Sony Media streamer on different TVs. All have different purposes. Without going into some compulsive review of the pros and cons of each, I’d say the toss-up is between the Chromecast, which is amazingly cheap and very portable, and the Apple TV. For the extra $64 bucks the Apple TV is self contained – so you don’t meet to use your phone or tablet to run it. It also pretty much fits in a jacket pocket except for the bulky power cord. The other beauty of the Apple TV is Airplay and the integration with other iOS devices – so you can send your photos or videos to the screen easily through the Apple TV.
It looks like a big season for streaming devices and smart TVs. Happy Chrismahanukwanzakah!
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