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Moments in Chromecast's history

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Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#401

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

raydev wrote: post #350
healsdata wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but they're not just rebranding. They also doubled the price, ostensibly because they changed the form factor and added "AI". I don't need a visible device or AI just to stream YouTube or other video apps.

They explicitly call it "premium" in the launch page. Time to move upmarket in the hopes of actually making a profit.

Roku sells dongles at the same price point, without many other services with which to subsidize the hardware. I am sure Roku monetizes the users in the same ways as Google can, so I do not understand how Google cannot make a profit from them.

Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#402

Post by cubefox »

paxys wrote: post #206
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own the 4K Chromecast and it's pretty good. But in my opinion "Chromecast" was always a bad brand name. I guess it originated in the browser, but it's so far removed from that now; "Chrome" no longer makes sense.

Probably true, but it's not like "Google TV Streamer" is any better.

"Google TV Streamer" pretty exactly describes what this thing does. It's from Google, and it streams things to your TV.

"Chromecast" was more puzzling. What's "Chrome"? Isn't that a browser? What does this have to do with anything? And what is "cast"? Does it broadcast something? Etc.

Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#403

Post by jauntywundrkind »

crazygringo wrote: post #291
mbreese wrote: post #23

How much of this is an "end" to Chromecast and a rebranding of Chromecast to "Google TV Streamer"? It seems like the bare-bones experience of a Chromecast being tied to a phone (or browser) is getting replaced with an Apple TV like experience. If this is the case, it might be a (rare) example of a good branding shift from Google. I have had two Chromecasts (the original and an Ultra) and I feel like both were hampere…

Exactly -- it's not an end at all, just a rebranding. And it's about time. "Chromecast" was always a terrible brand IMHO, because it had utterly nothing whatsoever to do with Chrome, except that there happened to be a "Cast..." menu item in Chrome. But you can cast from lots of apps that aren't Chrome. It would have made just as much sense to call it "Gmailcast" -- that is to say, no sense at all. "Google TV Streamer…

From a user perspective you're right but from a technical sense, Chromecast got its roots as little more than a remote-controlled Chrome session. Alike the Netflix DIAL protocol that it evolved from, Chromecast was for many years merely a hdmi-out stick device that ran Chrome!

It's not at all clear to users though, isn't a meaningful name. And now as well as web there are also Android Custom Receivers from Chromecast. https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/web_receiver/basic https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/android_tv_receiver/...

It would have been interesting if there was an alternate path where Chromecast really did expose its underlying browser-ness better. If I could just tell my phone to cast hacker news and then scroll on my phone's screen. I wonder if that was ever considered.

Also note that ChromeOS was also a web-centered thing at the time, so there was some symbiosis with that. Both web powered tech platforms. But given the recent announcement that Google is killing ChromeOS & Android is the way forward for everyone, well, extra sensible that Chromecast has to go: finalizing/cementing the (imo unfortunate for all) cultural victory of Android-over-all at Google.

Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#404

Post by popcalc »

hocuspocus wrote: post #322
TehShrike wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll echo what other people are saying, that you should just not connect the smart tv to your wifi, but I am nervous about smart TVs that ship with cell chips to connect to the manufacturer's servers when people don't hook the device up to wifi. I'm not sure how to determine which models do or don't ship with cell chips.

That's not a thing. Do you seriously believe OEMs would ship a 4G/5G modem and bundle an unlimited data plan with low margin consumer electronics, just to earn a few dollars per year from ads?

I agree, since 90%+ of people connect to WiFi, it's not economically sane. With cars it's a different story though.

Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#405

Post by paradox460 »

petepete wrote: post #79
Waterluvian wrote: post #18

I’m incredibly anxious about this. Chromecast is core to how my family’s television usage works. I got a free Chromecast recently and it’s a much worse UX than the ones I got many years ago. What I wish for is for the ubiquitous Cast button found everywhere to be open and neutral and for there to be a whole market of devices that’ll work. It feels frustrating and kind of ugly that there’s an Apple version and a Googl…

> What I wish for is for the ubiquitous Cast button found everywhere to be open and neutral and for there to be a whole market of devices that’ll work Sonos, take note.

Why, so they can patent it and sue everyone?

Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#409

Post by pseudoscienc3 »

jlarocco wrote: post #325
jerf wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea why they think that "full summaries, reviews and season-by-season breakdowns of content" is even a feature worth mentioning. The going value of that on the current market is $0. Heck, at times it's negative, you have to go out of your way to avoid the info if you don't want it. And there is no way whatsoever that this is happening locally. A $100 device is not spontaneously ingesting video, running spe…

IMO that's the big question AI companies need to answer. If I can get a movie summary from a real intelligence for free online, why would I bother with an AI generated summary?

Yeah -- I built a quick movie/show summarizer (easy to do with the latest models with larger than >50k token context window), I got literally 1 customer for $5 haha, but it was a fun little project to learn the various leading LLM APIs.

It's here: recapflix.com (and it's not at all perfect, due to a number of reasons...).

It was actually useful in the rare case that you wana skip an episode or get caught up on some obscure anime/show, but otherwise, meh.

Re: Moments in Chromecast's history

#410

Post by Kon-Peki »

jchw wrote: post #336
ravenstine wrote: post #251

Chromecast used to be a great product. I had my gen 1 Chromecast for the last 10 years until recently when it got fried by this piece of crap TV I plugged it into. It was exactly what I want in a device: Do one thing and do it well. I decided to replace it with a new "Chromecast" device to find out that it bears next to no resemblance to the original. Today's Chromecasts are just wannabe Roku devices with actual cast…

I think honestly the best solution really is to just use a stock PC and forget all of this crap. It's a shame there aren't any good open source setups using stock computers like Raspberry Pi that can act as a good Chromecast replacement (or if there are, I missed on it; I tried Kodi but while it is pretty cool it isn't really great for streaming services like YouTube in my opinion.) but on the other hand, it's not th…

> I think honestly the best solution really is to just use a stock PC and forget all of this crap.

I used to do that, with a Linux HTPC and Plex. I eventually switched to the physical AppleTV device, with all the content on a surplus Mac mini connected to the home network. It's just less work to maintain. On the old setup, it always worked perfectly whenever I was around and had plenty of time to tinker with things. It only ever had problems when I was at the office, very busy, and the kids wanted to watch some show I had digitized from our DVD collection. Granted, the problems were always small and easily fixed, but they were disruptive because of the circumstance.

I've never had that happen to me with the Apple setup. Yeah, you've got to at least partially buy into their ecosystem. But they don't force you to go all in if you don't want to.

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