VLC 3.0 will come with Chromecast support across multiple devices
Rik Henderson / Pocket-lint :
Context & Ripple Effects
When Pocket-lint reported that VLC 3.0 would ship with Chromecast support, the player was already mid-expansion beyond its desktop roots: a VLC port for Chrome OS built on Android Runtime arrived late in 2015, and by late 2016 the team was previewing 360° video for its apps. The Chromecast promise sat alongside those moves as part of one strategy — put VLC everywhere, then let it reach the TV.
It took until February 2018 for that promise to land, when [[a:926532|VLC 3.0 launched across Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Android TV, Apple TV and Chrome OS]] with hardware decoding for 4K and 8K content. The three-year gap matters because the relationships in our corpus show Chromecast climbing to second place among US streaming devices behind Apple TV at an 18% share — a stick Google positioned as a Trojan Horse into the living room.
First-order effects
- Users of the free VLC player gain the ability to push their own local media files — including formats most streaming apps don't handle — to any Chromecast-connected TV from phones, tablets and desktops.
- Google's Chromecast ecosystem gains a marquee casting partner at no licensing cost, reinforcing its app-driven model where third-party software does the work the stick itself can't.
Second-order effects
- VLC joining the cast target list extends the pattern set by premium services — HBO Now added Chromecast support to its iOS and Android apps in August 2015 — making non-support the outlier position for media apps rather than the norm.
- Apple TV, which the corpus shows losing second place in US streaming-device popularity to Chromecast, faces pressure from a $35 stick that now handles locally stored libraries its closed box never aimed to serve.
Third-order effects
- If casting becomes table stakes for every serious media player and service, the TV itself recedes into a dumb display and competition shifts to whichever phone or PC controls playback — weakening device-ecosystem lock-in.
- A free, cross-platform player spanning every OS plus the two leading TV targets points toward local-media playback consolidating around one open-source default rather than per-platform apps.
The trend: Cheap HDMI sticks plus universal media apps are shifting home-video control from dedicated boxes to whatever device the viewer already owns, with Chromecast's cast protocol becoming the common denominator.