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In place of the Chromecast, the company will offer the newly announced $99.99 Google TV Streamer,
They’re replacing it with a very similar product. Nothing to see here.
Similar product that costs 4 times as much and has AI features…
The low-power streaming box is dying. It’s not completely without reason, 4k playback is actually a bit demanding.
We are in a place where the 2017 nVidia Shield is beginning to show its age and that leaves the AppleTV as the only powerful and capable consumer set top box on the market. This new option from Google will at least provide some competition and an option outside of Apple’s ecosystem.
I cannot believe NVIDIA has essentially abandoned its SHIELD micro console line. My Shield Pro has been an amazing sideloading fiend.
I absolutely love mine, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t stutter sometimes when asked to perform more demanding tasks. The chip is also going to start having issues with formats in the coming years. I’d love for nVidia to put out something that used a rival to the A15 in Apple’s box. Native AV1 decoding and just raw speed is really needed to catch up to use cases in 2024 compared to 7 years earlier.
We’ll have to see if the processor is better than the shield. Google’s spec page shows it has 1 GB of RAM more than the shield but conveniently does not say what processor is in it
This $100 box from Google runs on the same SoC as the $50 streaming box from Onn (Walmart). The only major differences are the Google box as 4GB of RAM vs 3GB, a 1Gb Ethernet port instead of 100Mb (both have WiFi 6), and the Google box has a USB Type C port for power/data and would need an OTG adapter/hub while the Onn box has a Type A and a barrel plug for power.
TBH, the biggest issue there is the 100Mb port on the cheaper box. That is actually too low to stream a quality high-bitrate video file.
They’re replacing it with a very similar product. Nothing to see here.
Like they do with messengers every couple of years.
Or music streaming apps.
Seemed monthly at one point 🤣
and before that they already replaced it with google tv with chromecast
Swallowed the clickbait, hook, line and sinker.
I feel the original Chromecast was probably the last truly great original Google product, it was simple, it was inexpensive and it worked - you just plugged it in, joined your network and you were off, there really wasn’t anything like it at the time.
I really hate what they’ve become.
What’s funny is that was actually the start of them becoming who they are now. There’s a litany of evidence they stole the Chromecast technology
The remote playback control over network patents? I can’t see why those patents should be valid, everything there has prior art done in the 80’s
What I’m more pissed about is how Google killed Miracast (it’s technically still around but Google removed it from default Android and OEMs have to choose to enable it) and how they fought against 3rd party implementations to keep the Chromecast protocol closed.
I see there’s ongoing work for a Matter based standard for casting, I really hope that ends up getting broad support. We need something better than DLNA (and Miracast is technically DLNA over WiFi Direct). We need an open casting standard supporting Chromecast-like remote interactive content (the device is essentially a remote controlled web browser)
What changed? I thought that is still what they did.
I feels like they either badly copy (see Gemini) or don’t think about what they’re offering (see Stadia’s busted business model) they’re content to milk the existing services they’ve already got and make them worse by cramming in more ads (see YouTube, Google’s search result pages) and they cut out or dictate the web through their monopolies (see AMP and Chrome) rather than working with other parties to make good products.
They feel like Hooli in Silicon Valley, basically the definition of a fat tech giant who doesn’t do any innovation of their own.
Badly copy (see Gemini)
Tf are you smoking dude, Google has been working on AI long before ChatGPT was a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye. They didn’t release any public models because they wanted to go about it safely and not just dump the world’s best misinformation creator on the open market for anyone to use with little safeguards. All that went out the window when ChatGPT got all the press and google decided they wanted a piece of the hype, but pretending they “didn’t do any innovation of their own” in regards to AI is ludicrous. They have been at the forefront of AI development for the last decade, and the fact you think otherwise shows your only knowledge about AI is from after ChatGPT headlines started coming out.
That’s what they did until OpenAI started making noise and management pushed out everybody working on safety and quality to cut corners and rush something out to compete (poorly)
I still have and use one. Will it stop working now?
“Yes I know the customer learned that product name and has a good connotation with it, but how about we change the name to something completely different?”
“Our current product offering is less than $50. We were thinking the next iteration should be $300”
It’s also built with the same SoC as Walmart’s Google TV box that sells for $50.
Me and my partner have already agreed the Onn. Dongle is what we’re getting when google inevitably “accidentally” bricks the Chromecast we got last year
Really, rebranding from Chromecast to Google TV Streamer? Who the fuck was the genius that greenlighted this?
Hi, I’m the project lead on Chromecast and I’m here to talk about what my team’s been up to maintaining this popular product
The board: yawn
Hi, I’m the project lead on the new Google TV Streamer that we’ve just launched, let’s look at these exciting new adoption numbers and talk about how we plan to keep this incredible momentum going
The board: Wow! Amazing stuff plz take this large bonus
I knew someone who worked at a really well loved local restaurant. One day a new manager came in and IMMEDIATELY wanted to change the name. According to him, you should change a restaurant’s name every 2 years
Why would you ruin the recognition you already have? He was also planning on changing the name to be the exact same as a business down the street. I think he was an idiot
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Because the dude comes from a corporate world where everybody’s known for stagnation, not quality, so changing the name gets rid of an association with stagnation BUT also gets rid of an association with quality if that’s the reputation you’ve built up and these types can not understand that because they’ve never worked in a place putting quality first
Probably the same guy that greenlights unwanted UI changes in all their products.
they make 6.1 million dollars per day for their executive savvy
Yep. Someone thinks the Google name has some crazy value.
Me - Ok Google, give me a open source way to turn my raspberry pi into a 4k streaming box.
Google - Got it. Playing Tyler Swift on living room tv
Me - wtf?
KDE Plasma Big screen looks promising. Combine it with TV friendly apps like Jellyfin and plasma tube, and it should be pretty competitive and actually receive updates.
Thanks for mentioning KDE Plasma Big Screen it’s an interesting attempt. It’s written in Qt, like many of the TV UIs today anyway. I need to check it out.
Yeah, I’m thinking of trying it out once my fan less N100 box arrives from china. Should have much better AV1 performance and subtitle rendering performance than my Google TV.
I had a “fun” experience the other month with my Google TV where it was refusing to connect to my Jellyfin server. Turns out Google hasn’t updated the HTTPS CAs in over 2 years, and it was no longer compatible with the latest Let’s Encrypt X2 certificates which was announced back in 2020. Android TV has some good apps, but it is a software, ads, and security nightmare.
HardKernel makesa a few ODROID models that come with available Android TV builds. Some have the same chipset as the AMLogic on the CCwGTV 4K and they aren’t terribly expensive. If I wanted an open source Chromecast replacement I’d go for that.
Add it to the pile of dead google projects
Dead successful projects.
Killedbygoogle com
Nope, though the clickbait title would make you believe so. Nothing is discontinued.
(They are just changing the name)
The Chromecast is a small $35 dongle that goes behind your TV. This new thing is a whole $99 set-top box with an AI integration. They’re not really the same product.
That’s fair
They are literally no going to make the dongles any more
Did y’all even click the article?
It will be rebranded, basically, to become the Google TV streamer. The tech is not going anywhere.
“In place of the Chromecast, the company will offer the newly announced $99.99 Google TV Streamer, which launches on September 24th.”
$100 though … a Chromecast used to be like $35.
Rebrand to increase price by an ungodly amount to circumvent massive backlash ✅
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It’s a different device. Already, the existing google tv workflow is different than the chromecast, which was phone control first. Now, it brings up an app which favors navigation with the remote. If I want a set top box, I’ll put a kodi box in…I wanted a dumb dongle which could be controlled from a phone. It’s fundamentally a different product.
My hope is that casting decouples as a concept from being a google protocol. Even though Amazon is backing it now, I hope MatterCast can become an open casting standard. My vision is having MatterCast be an installable add-on to Kodi, and then an ultra-light image can be made for super low-end devices supporting audio and video (or both).
RIP to a real one.
Back in the day when streaming was cheap as hell and made sense as all things were on Netflix, having a Home Mini with and a Chromecast was bliss.
I used to have a shortcut for the phrase “I’m so tired”, it would start playing Star Trek TNG from Netflix on the Chromecast monitor and it just werked. Saved me from a bad trip once too, I was really uncomfortable on 135ug so in a desperate attempt to hold onto reality I said “alexa…uhmm…uh…hey google play RoboCop” and it just worked.
Only thing is it played the wrong RoboCop (2014) but that only distracted me from spiraling further, like “hold up Samuel L Jackson was in this?”
It feels weird to say but I was a genuinely happy customer. Then the home mini stopped working as well, started triggering by itself, didn’t hear words right, then the Chromecast had trouble updating firmware and rebooting. Then Netflix platformed that douchebag chapelle.
Now all that’s left of it is the pihole I used to block ads for it.
I pretty much exclusively used my chrome cast to bypass smart TV bullshit and stream my movies and TV shows stored on my pc and phone to my TV.
The Chromecast was one of the few things I really liked made by Google. I always have one in my travel bag and it’s basically like bringing your own home theater to the hotel with you. I had a time where I lived in hotels and AirBnB’s for almost a year and this thing was god send.
They have some other device which they want to sell which will replace it, but that one is big and clunky, not meant for traveling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSSI_Ht6Mis
Dammit. I like it for the same reason. Why does Google keep doing this?
Because they worship incompetence.
well, it’s just in their DNA. institutional inertia is a helluva drug!
$
Connecting a classic (non-Google TV) Chromecast to a new WiFi (or heaven forbid a hotel WiFi with a capture portal) was always such a pain. And casting over networks without mDNS is flaky at best and otherwise downright impossible.
By contrast, I’ve loved taking along my Chromecast with Google TV to hotels, along with:
- A VPN client installed it already,
- An Android phone that can create a WiFi AP while connected to the hotel WiFi,
- A Bluetooth speaker and my Bluetooth headphones paired to it so I get great audio as well.
This has been a complete gamechanger and a genuine upgrade over yesteryear’s Chromecasts.
I take my raspberry pi 400 and a mouse with me ($70). I don’t like to travel with expensive things. Once connected to a hotel tv, i have a full pc. I watch movies in 720p to have more fps. In case I have something important to do but no TV, I vnc to my phone.
Literally all my friends know the name “Chromecast”, why would you rename it
Why does Google do any of the dumb shit they do?
To justify the salaries of their product managers
Discontinuing products seems more like it would be to justify laying them off?
and then add TV to it, is this now advertised to seniors?
It seems so, some people in the thread complained their parents don’t use ChromeCast because it needed the phone to use. Apparently seniors are also better if you want to sell an expensive subscription when the opportunity arises.
Chromecast naming scheme did get weird - it’s difficult for someone who doesn’t follow these things to know if they want the chromecast ultra or chromecast with google tv. I agree though they should have just called the new product something like “Chromecast Box 2025”.
Not surprised. Like chromecast audio, chromecast couldn’t really serve an adequate amount of ads. Basically it’s only value was it forced you to use stock youtube app to stream preventing any adblocking, but if you cast your screen, then it can’t stop adblocks, so it makes sense to discontinue this product. There’s some open source projects out there that might be worth looking into, NymphCast is one I saw, uses a rasberry pi.
You can just install bubbleUpnp on any android device and cast every app or website to your TV, including non-stock youtube (using it with Tubular, previously known as Newpipe).
“okay, what successful product are we going to kill next?”
Another one for the graveyard
Don’t know anything about newer Chromecast but I really love my older one. Its just a dumb stick with no apps built in that I can cast stuff from my phone to. The only recent annoying thing with it is that the YouTube app changed the behaviour when you’re connected, so now instead of tapping on a video to bring up a menu asking whether to play it now or add it to the queue it now just defaults playing it now when you tap on it. Makes setting up a queue of videos really annoying now cause you have to tap on the three dots to add it to the queue now.
Noticed this too and it’s annoying as ferk. It’s messed up many a queue between my wife and i
I’m waiting for Gmail, it has to be soon :)
No the NSA, CIA, FBI and all the other alphabet agencies would never allow it.
Alphabet agencies and Alphabet companies.
Name a more iconic duo
Name a more iconic duo
Microsoft and Sobbing.
Why Google Duo of course
