RIP? Please. Peak Chromecast Was Almost a Decade Ago (Premium)

It’s the end of an era. But don’t mourn the passing of Chromecast: Google’s little dongle that could peaked several years ago and has been in a downward spiral ever since.

I will never forget how I found out about the original Chromecast. A friend of mine on the Windows team at Microsoft–we share the same birthday, co-celebrated to this day via an annual text message exchange–excitedly pointed me to a Google announcement about a new device for the living room called a Chromecast. It was unclear what this thing, a weird-looking dongle, had to do with Google’s web browser. But as my friend explained, you could plug it into an HDMI port on the back of your TV and use an app on your phone–it worked with Android phones out of the gate, of course, but also the iPhone and iPad–to control what was happening on screen.

We never agreed on this device.

My friend thought it was a great idea, primarily because it was so inexpensive–the thing cost just $35–and, I suspect, because it wasn’t an Apple TV or tied to Apple’s insular ecosystem; he was an Android guy, and like many in that early era, had lined up firmly on one side of that debate.

I wasn’t convinced. My first reaction was to wonder how this would work if you were watching TV (or some video) and the doorbell or phone rang. With an Apple TV (or cable TV, or whatever else), you would simply pick up its hardware remote, press a physical button to pause or mute the playback, and respond to the interruption. With a Chromecast, you’d … what? Pick up your phone, authenticate (back then using a PIN or a pattern), find and then launch the app if it wasn’t already loaded, and then peck at the screen to pause it? That seemed inefficient. Surely, Google could just add a remote and charge $50 for the package. That would still be inexpensive, wouldn’t require an app, it would be a lot more usable.

So I bought one. And boy, was I not impressed. The Chromecast was “small, cute, and inexpensive,” I wrote in August 2013, one month after the device’s initial release. But it was also “underwhelming” compared to Apple TV, Roku, and WD-TV, the other living room “streamers” I had at the time.

“This thing is a joke,” I wrote. “Chromecast isn’t a digital media set-top box. It’s a dumb wireless display dongle. For $15 more you can get a complete, freestanding Roku box that comes with its own remote control. No-brainer.” Worse, the device was limited to streaming content from the Google Play Store (music or video), Netflix, and YouTube. Those other devices supported many more services, like HBO GO, Vudu, Crackle, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus, MLB.TV Premium, Disney, EPIX, and SyFy. Roku, at the time, supported over 750 services.

That first Chromecast also required a USB-based power cord and, on most TVs, an HDMI extension cable. It only supported Wi-Fi. And the app-based setup was complicated and buggy. “I’m not going to review this piece of crap,” I concluded. “And you shouldn’t buy it. There are just too many viable alternatives out there. A Roku is about 100 times better than the Chromecast, and it’s not much more expensive. Don’t be dumb.”

And that was that. Except that it wasn’t: Over the next several months, Google actively improved Chromecast, adding features like Android mirroring and Chrome tab casting, both of which addressed the app/service gap, albeit in a quick and dirty fashion. It explicitly added support for many more streaming services. And it improved its Wi-Fi support so that you could quickly set up the device when away from home, making it an ideal travel solution for those stuck in a hotel room. Suddenly, the Chromecast, if still not an ideal replacement for a standalone set-top box, was at least more useful. Google had created a niche.

At CES 2015, the online giant announced Google Cast for Audio, extending the media casting capabilities of Chromecast to music, podcasts, and other audio content. It was, I wrote at the time, “a lower-cost answer to the Sonos media streaming equipment” and “a more open version of Apple’s AirPlay technology.” But unlike those solutions, Google Cast for Audio didn’t only connect to your device, it “pulled the audio from the Internet cloud,” freeing your device to do other things. This was a big advantage over Bluetooth, as well, because the other sounds on your device wouldn’t be transmitted through the speakers handling audio content playback. When you connect to a Bluetooth speaker, even today, all the sound from the device plays back–often annoyingly–through that speaker, and some sound sources interrupt or even stop the audio you’re trying to enjoy.

Google Cast for Audio was, in other words, dramatically superior. And in sharp contrast to the OG Chromecast, I immediately saw its value. But it did arrive with two big limitations. Google didn’t announce a standalone Chromecast Audio, and it instead partnered with Denon, LG, and Sony to bring this technology into the world. And while it supported several streaming services at launch, like Google Play Music, iHeartRadio, and Pandora, it didn’t support Spotify (or, more problematic for me at the time, Xbox Music).

That changed in October 2015, when Google announced its second-generation Chromecast and its first Chromecast Audio alongside the Nexus 6P and 5X smartphones and the Pixel C tablet. The two dongles were nearly identical looking, with an even cuter and smaller design than the OG Chromecast that resembled a vinyl record with a Google “G” logo in the middle. The new Chromecast had an HDMI connection as before, but extended out from the dongle’s body with a flat and flexible connector that eliminated the need for an HDMI extender. And the Chromecast Audio came with a short but removable/replaceable audio cable so you could connect it to anything. It would turn any dumb speaker into a smart speaker, I wrote. And I immediately ordered both of them.

They were both great devices, incredible values at just $35 apiece, and each shipped with the required USB power cable and adapter. But Chromecast Audio, in particular, was a revelation. Setup was much improved, and the device worked with all the major services out of the box. The one limitation was that you could connect to only a single set of connected speakers at a time: Sonos, I explained, supported whole-house audio, where you could connect to multiple speakers and sets of speakers when desired.

“Chromecast and Chromecast Audio are tremendous values,” I wrote. “If you’re using Android—where there is so much third-party app support—or using iOS with Google’s media apps, these are must-have and affordable solutions … Google says they will offer even better performance and better wireless connectivity too.”

Google eventually added multiroom audio support to Chromecast Audio, of course, and it quickly became the center of our in-home music experiences. We had three of them, in the living room, my home office, and the sun room. But the dongle in our sun room got the most use: It was connected to a pair of terrific Edifier R1280 bookshelf speakers, and my wife and I enjoyed this setup weekly on what we call music night.

“Instead of spending several hundred dollars on a Sonos speaker system, we use a cobbled-together and very inexpensive system to listen to music,” I wrote in 2018. “And as my wife knows very well, it sounds incredible. There is almost no reason to spend more than what we did if the goal is crisp, clear, room-filling sound … To get the equivalent sound quality from Sonos, you’d need two Play:5s at a cost of over $1000 … I am, perhaps, a bit too proud of this purchase.”

In 2016, Google introduced Chromecast Ultra at $69.99, an update to the second-generation Chromecast with a similar design that supported 4K, HDR, and Dolby Vision. (It also revved the base Chromecast with 1080p support and improved performance.) Oddly, Chromecast Ultra and the third-generation Chromecast didn’t get multiroom audio support until 2018, years after Chromecast Audio.

Unfortunately, by that point, Google was already looking past Chromecast Audio. It had flirted with a Sonos partnership that would bring that company’s in-home streaming capabilities to less expensive Google speakers, but that fell apart, leading to Google stealing some of Sonos’s work, a lawsuit, and a major falling out between the two companies in which neither came out looking good. Google shipped a few generations of smart speakers under the Google Home brand, including a lackluster first-generation speaker, a cuter second-gen Google Home Mini version, and the one-shot Google Home Max. And then a single generation of Google Nest-branded speakers–with Nest Mini and Nest Audio variants–that is still desperately in need of an upgrade.

In 2019, Google announced what fans like me had long feared: It discontinued Chromecast Audio after just a single generation and sold off the remaining inventory for just $15 each. This triggered some rethinking on my part, obviously, and after a lot of experimentation with all kinds of solutions, I ended up in the lap of Sonos, which was expensive but also high quality. I’ve written about that history elsewhere, but thanks to this past year’s drama, I’m now plotting my exit.

In 2020, Google started walking away from the Chromecast brand. It announced the awkwardly named Chromecast with Google TV. This was in some ways a big improvement, as it was the first Chromecast to ship with the remote I had called for seven years earlier, cost just $49.99, $20 less than its predecessor, and even offered optional storage expansion and Ethernet connection capabilities. And I was onboard, briefly, though its lackluster performance and lack of a full-featured Apple TV+ app (with iTunes extras and so on) scuttled that, leading me back to Apple TV.

The writing was on the wall.

Google’s inability to commit to anything is legendary. It has always been skittish about branding, and in this case, we’ve seen it rename its Cast, Home, and Nest lines several times (just as we’ve seen with Nexus/Pixel, Bard/Gemini, Android TV/Google TV, and more). It has always let products and services sit in the market for years without updates (Nest Audio). It has always canceled useful products and services with no warning or explanation (Chromecast Audio).

But at a higher level, this central weirdness is really about commitment. Or a lack of commitment, I guess. For the past three-plus years, the only solution that Google’s offered in the living room is an underpowered, lackluster dongle with a terrible remote, and the only addition it ever made to that product was an even cheaper and more lackluster 1080p model whose only saving grace was its low $30 price tag. Apple, meanwhile, sells better-performing Apple TV set-top boxes (which, yes, are overdue for an upgrade too). But most of its competitors, like Amazon with Fire TV and Roku, sell multiple set-top boxes and Chromecast-like “sticks” that can be hidden behind a TV. What Google needed all this time was a real set-top box, a higher-end Apple TV alternative that it could sell to those who needed more.

But this is Google. And that’s not what happened.

Instead, Google is replacing the Chromecast with Google TV with a higher-end, Apple TV-like product called Google TV Streamer. As with Chromecast Audio, it will simply sell off the remaining inventory of the old product.

Google TV Streamer–a terrible name–costs $99.99, and like Apple TV, it’s a set-top box and not a dongle or stick. It has a remote that resembles the horrible Chromecast with Google TV remote but is slightly bigger. It can function as a Google Home and Matter smart hub, for the 16 people who need such things. It has some vague Gemini-based AI features because it’s 2024, so of course it does. And it promises better performance and more storage, which is just about the lowest bar imaginable, plus built-in Ethernet.

Apple fans may believe that this shift somehow “validates” Apple’s strategy with Apple TV, but that’s nonsense. All this validates is Google’s lack of strategy. It’s the culmination of over a decade of dicking around, taking its audience in different directions only to suddenly change focus and do something different again and again and again. What Apple got right is AirPlay, a technology Google could have (and sort of did) duplicated with whatever we’re calling Chromecast/Google Cast now. But the market leaders in living room streamers, as noted, all offer a range of options that include both set-top boxes and dongle/sticks. Only Apple doesn’t offer both, because Apple is a luxury brand that doesn’t do cheap. (Note that cheap and inexpensive are not synonyms. I wrote cheap there for a reason.)

Google is not a luxury brand. And its indecisiveness, lack of strategy, and cat-like ability to stay focused is what made Chromecast a non-starter from the beginning. And it’s too bad, because there was a brief moment in late 2015 when the company was hitting on all cylinders and announced the Chromecast Audio and second-generation Chromecast alongside a suddenly impressive set of portable devices that included two Nexus handsets and a Pixel tablet.

That was peak Chromecast.

But that was also almost 10 years ago. And Chromecast, like much of Google’s other disjointed products and services, has been on a downward spiral ever since. Just revisiting this history was painful: Google’s ridiculous machinations led directly to me adopting Sonos and now, years later, to yet another rethinking of how I spend my time, money, and efforts. I was discussing this with my wife this morning, briefly–she doesn’t care about the technology or business aspects of this story, but she enjoys music night as much as I do–and the frustration is easily summarized.

I just want to listen to music. For f#$k’s sake, Google. How hard is this?