Chromecast can now stream videos and music from Google Play's website
Google has been adding more and more ways to play content on a Chromecast, and today it's giving the media streamer a new trick: the ability to stream Google Play music and videos straight from the web.
Context & Ripple Effects
The move lands just two days after Chromecast's biggest app expansion yet, which added Plex, Vevo, RealPlayer and Viki — Google is clearly iterating fast on a $35 dongle it wants to keep in the news through the holidays. It also extends a pattern from Google TV's 2012 addition of Google Play movie and music purchases: the Play catalog Google built for set-top boxes now reaches the cheapest screen in the house.
For buyers, the practical change is that purchased content is no longer locked to the Android app — any browser becomes the remote. Against AirPlay, which requires Apple hardware at both ends, every web-based source Google adds widens Chromecast's reach to anyone with a laptop.
First-order effects
- Google Play customers can now stream their purchased music and videos to a TV via Chromecast directly from the web, removing the Android app as the only launch point for owned content.
- Google gains another reason for holiday shoppers to pick the $35 dongle over rival streamers during peak gift-buying season.
Second-order effects
- Competing streaming sticks and smart TVs face pressure to match browser-based casting, since Chromecast's pitch — no proprietary ecosystem required on the sending device — undercuts hardware-locked approaches like AirPlay.
- Content partners added in this month's app wave get access to a growing install base, making Chromecast a more attractive distribution target than its app-count alone suggested.
Third-order effects
- If Google keeps routing its own storefront through the dongle, Chromecast cements itself as the low-cost delivery end of the Play media business — a content-store strategy that no longer needs Google's own TV hardware to succeed.
The trend: Streaming devices are shifting from closed ecosystems toward browser-and-cloud casting, where the sender can be any device with a web page and the value accrues to whoever controls the content store.