I’m not going to lie, I’m extremely excited by the Chromecast dongle. Sure it does a lot of what Airplay theoretically already does, but at $35 US it does it for far less

Finally someone made easy to use device to push digital video  to my TV. I mean how many times have you seen it on NCIS: LA where someone swipes up on their device and magically their window shows up on a TV screen?  Sure you may have to tap a button instead of swiping but you get my point.

What I like about this is it’s simplicity, and it’s price.  It’s not an over thought or under thought attempt at a connected TV.  It’s merely a means to wirelessly push the content that my connected devices are already consuming.NOTE I’m still trying to figure out how much Chromecast pulls from my device vs uses my device as a discovery and control mechanism and then pulls down from the Internet/cloud.  As part of it’s elegant simplicity Chromecast doesn’t require a special app on the Chromecast device to work, maybe just some slight tweaks to the one on my laptop/phone/iPad/Kindle Fire/connected device.  From all of the reports out there it sounds like it can stream content right out of Google Chrome on my computer also. At $35 I can add it to 3 TV’s in my house for the price of an Apple TV and not have an of Apple’s content restrictions.

Also The Verge has a pretty good comparison of Chromecast vs AirPlay

http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/24/4554130/google-chromecast-vs-apple-airplay-how-do-they-compare

Let’s hope when I finally get my hands on one that it works as simply as promised. When I get some more time to look over the SDK I’ll post some more findings.