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The Google Chromecast was announced a recently and it looks like a neat little gadget, allowing you to stream movies, TV shows, music, and more from Netflix, YouTube, Google Play, and Chrome straight to your HDTV. It connects to your WIFI to do this, and is billed as the solution to huddling around monitors, tablets and smartphones. The question is do we really need another way to do this… People can already do this via their smart TV, their smart blu-ray player, sky or virgin media box, games console, laptop or media centre! With so many ways to view online content through the TV already, surely another one isn’t needed?

Now whilst this is true for a lot of people the reason the Chromecast may still succeed is it’s simplicity. Plugging straight into a spare HDMI port it’s easy to configure to a wireless network, then you’re ready to go. Sending videos to it is very straightforward so you are up and running quickly. As it’s not much bigger than a USB stick and very affordable at $35 (£23) the biggest draw could be these factors. If you are going on holiday or away for business regularly you’ll often find hotel rooms provide a TV with HDMI and free WIFI, so with this little dongle you’ll be able to use Netflix or Youtube anywhere. With this in mind it’s almost worth getting one on the off-chance! One thing to bear in mind is that it still does require power which it pulls via USB, often a TV that features a HDMI port will have a USB port to provide power though, so it can be fully confined to the back of the TV.

WIFI signal is certainly a factor for the Chromecast, most people have their large TVs in a separate room to the routers and with a poor signal streaming will suffer. Going forward perhaps an 802.11ac version of this will be released which should certainly help this issue, with better range and speeds achievable.

The Chromecast isn’t confined to just Youtube and Netflix though as a standalone device, it is extendable and future updates will no doubt bring more functionality. It’s not released in the UK at the moment and I think many people would see iPlayer compatibility as an essential for this. It will be interesting to see how this little dongle evolves in future, and how it coexists with other streaming devices like Apple TVs, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!