Google's Chromecast with Google TV won't support Stadia, its game streaming service, or Apple TV+ at launch; Stadia support will arrive in first half of 2021
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's new Chromecast with Google TV is the company's flagship living-room device, arriving a year after Stadia's November 2019 launch for Founder's Edition buyers — yet it ships without Stadia, its own game streaming service, and without Apple TV+, promising Stadia only for the first half of 2021.
The follow-up coverage shows the gap was real and long: Stadia finally arrived on the device on June 23, more than eight months after launch, while the Apple TV app was committed to early 2021. Meanwhile LG moved to put Stadia and Nvidia's GeForce Now on its own TVs, turning cloud gaming support into a differentiator among TV platforms.
First-order effects
- Early Chromecast with Google TV buyers get a device missing its two marquee services — Google's own Stadia and Apple TV+ — leaving launch-day owners with a streaming dongle that can't stream Google's flagship game service.
Second-order effects
- LG's pledge to bring Stadia and GeForce Now to its TVs means Google's cloud gaming service reaches third-party hardware before Google's own device, undercutting the case for buying Google hardware to access Google services.
Third-order effects
- If TV makers keep courting cloud gaming apps while Google's own devices ship them late, distribution power shifts toward TV platforms — and a service's availability on a given screen becomes a competitive battleground rather than a given.
The trend: Cloud gaming is becoming a distribution battleground across TV platforms, with even Google's own hardware lagging third-party TVs in carrying its services.