A few days ago Google let the ChromeCast out of the bag. For those who don’t know, the ChromeCast allows you to send Netflix, YouTube and other content to your TV from your laptop, phone or tablet. More applications are sure to come, but people are already snapping up this tiny dongle so fast that Google has had to discontinue including 3 months of Netflix. At $35 dollars it is a steal of a deal for what people can do with it. Some are saying that it’s a big game changing device. I am not totally convinced that it is. For example, after this initial rush how many people would buy this? At $35 it’s cheap enough. However, people like my parents wouldn’t even look at it, as they wouldn’t be quite sure why they’d want to watch the latest viral video on their TV. It is a dream device to hackers, in that it’s cheap and is fairly hack-able, but normal people wouldn’t care about that. They already have a Roku or an Apple TV that can do what they want without needing to use a phone, tablet or computer.
This device completely ignores the fact that there’s an entire generation that is just fine sitting in front of a tablet or laptop to watch content. My son is a member of that generation. I was watching some stuff on my laptop because he was using the TV, and then he decided he wanted to watch it too. I asked him if he wanted to put it up on the TV with my Roku, and he was like, “nah I’ll just watch it on your laptop with you.” Good thing that my laptop actually had two sets of headphone ports!
What do you think? Is it the future of TV or a bump on the road?