For many years, Chromecast has become obsolete as a simple, seamless way to get audio and video from a small screen device to a larger screen. The basic premise is simple enough for many, but it leaves a few annoying problems for the end user to figure out on their own. With Chromecast as-is, you simply hit the cast button when it appears, select the screen as speaker on which you want the media to play, and sit back to enjoy it.
During these sessions, the Chromecast hardware (a Chromecast dongle or Chromecast-enabled TV) helps the content, not your phone / tablet / laptop, so you can play music or videos without having to worry about other personal activities that ‘ t when playing. With YouTube, for example, I can hit cast from my phone, watch it on my TV and go over what else I would do on my phone while that playback happens. Playing is initiated by my phone, but once the cast-off is done, the TV takes over and is responsible for delivering the content. It’s a great system.
However, there is one big hangup, and that is playback control. Usually, when it comes time to choose another video, forward, or play / pause, picking up your phone and going back to the app that started the casting session is enough to allow some form of on-screen controls to trigger that you can use to take care of things. Sometimes, however, these controls do not come or the cast session is forgotten by the phone and you basically have a rough video playing on your TV with no controls in sight. Sure, the distance from your TV can do some basic things, but not all TVs are wired this way and not everyone has this setup.
I’ve talked to a lot of users who choose to scrap the Chromecast for something like a Roku to have the security of a fast, simple controller in their hand to make small playback controls more accessible. With Roku, you do not have the ability to start a cast session from any device on your network, but it is a trade that I know many have made. Although I still rock a Chromecast Ultra without a remote home, I fully understand where people come from when they want that dedicated, hands-on, physical controller.
Introducing Cast Connect
Google introduced Cast Connect a few weeks ago quietly and, honestly, we miss it completely. This new service makes a ton of sense considering the new hardware we all know Google is ready to release in the form of a Chromecast / Android TV hybrid device. That new dongle will function as Chromecast as needed and still has a full-blown Android TV interface complete with a remote for the times when you just want to browse through content on the big screen.
With this new Cast Connect capability, app developers can do something pretty awesome with casting sessions, giving users a much smoother experience when consuming content. Here’s how it works. If you take out your phone to watch a YouTube or Netflix video and then choose to cast it to the TV, instead of just being a simple casting session, as we mentioned earlier, this new Cast Connect session will actually open the video via the installed application on the Android TV device instead of just relying on a standard cast session. This means that once playback starts on the Android TV device, it can be fully controlled with the distance of that device just as playback started via the user interface on the TV itself.
It’s a small change that will go a long way in making cast sessions and native app sessions feel almost identical to the user. After all, for many viewers it does not matter how the playback began, where it came from, and who is responsible. They just want it to play on the big screen and be able to control it with the distance in their hand, no matter where the video game started. Cast Connect will provide this capability for Android TV and will likely be a major differentiator for Google when it launches its new dongle this year.
Increasingly, this new device feels like it will be the absolute best of both worlds, offering the simplicity and flexibility of Chromecast with the UI and app ecosystem of Android TV. While I have claimed in the past that Google ignored it with Chromecast and got a bit lost with Android TV, I think the marriage of the two is going to create a media playback powerhouse that will be very difficult to compete with. Well, we just have to see it come out.
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