Google’s Shocking Decision: The Beloved Streaming Device You’ll Never See Again!

The Google TV Streamer is a very big deal indeed, because it seems like Google has finally put a punctuation mark on its media streaming ambitions. and has essentially phased out the Chromecast brand after a glorious 11-year run with the sale of at least 100 million Chromecast devices. We don’t want to get too heavy on the tech weeds here, because we’ve covered the Chromecast legacy so definitively in the past that we would only be repeating ourselves.

But the short version is this: for many of us, especially among those of us who spent years writing about the TV, and those of us who had lived through the frustrating cables and remotes of HDMI switches and set-top boxes, the Chromecast was the first step down something closer to the future of TV streaming. In a world of laptops and mobile devices, suddenly, many of us could suddenly put our shows, movies and even a few games onto our TV, casting the experience up there from our phones like unfurled sails on a ship.

And thus, I was so immediately shocked to hear that Google was discontinuing the Chromecast branding with its latest new streaming device. Yet the Chromecast brand had also lost its way somewhat, and so some part of me also felt that a rebranding made sense even if I hated its new name for obvious reasons. Google TV Streamer makes sense (it’s an accurate descriptor) but also manages to be both generic and…

Is killing off the Chromecast branding a bad idea?I believed when I wrote this introduction that killing off this brand was an extremely bad idea, but after I wrote it, I started to feel a little torn about it.

This is one of those things I mentioned momentarily back above – for a whole slew of us, Chromecast was the first streaming dongle we ever owned. That includes a lot of Apple users, too. Although for some time Apple had had so-called ‘settop boxes’ – the Apple TV box – it couldn’t touch the impulse-pricing of that $35 Google offering. Google Cast was OS-agnostic, and so many apps on Android and iOS were Google Cast-enabled. That meant suddenly, all mobile users had a cheap smart TV band-aid.

And in the years since, many have outgrown the Chromecast – be it to move to a personal streaming device that comes with a smart TV on that anticipated shiny new holiday, or just to abandon your Google TV for another streaming box. After all, the world had moved beyond a simple casting experience – which is likely why, to begin with, Google eventually added a full complement of Google TV to their formerly simple streamer. The Chromecast isn’t forgotten though.

I checked in with several of the friends and family members I mentioned above to find out if they were still using their old Chromecasts or if they’d bought new hardware in the intervening time. The 11 people I spoke with consisted of six Apple users. All five of the Android users I spoke to had a Chromecast with Google TV or a TV with Google’s OS baked in, but the Apple users were more diverse: four said they were still using a classic Chromecast at least in a spare room on occasion but had an Apple TV in the living room, and the other two had moved up to the Chromecast with Google TV because they liked casting but wanted an actual UI.

Okay, this is small sample size anecdata, but I also spent some time digging around the Chromecast subreddit, where there was healthy recent chatter by iPhone and Android users all still in the fold. Why? Well, it’s clear that Chromecast certainly still has fans out there. And not just Apple buyers. There are many users of that other little hardware ecosystem that some still call Apple who it doesn’t appear foolish to cast a Chromecast as an alternative to Apple’s own in-house box, and at least some of those people are still running older Chromecasts that don’t even have the ‘new’ Google TV UI.

Dropping the Chromecast brand and raising the price by $50, the Google TV Streamer, in a way, seems to be starting from scratch with a different audience in mind. Will it succeed?

Will all these users move to the next iteration of a ‘Google TV Streamer’ (OK, there’s no guarantee that the protocol won’t just end up there)? I think that’s less likely, but what is clear is that the current cast protocol still seems to be quite popular, with a passionate core of users even if it is still imperfect. Also, unlike Google TV, you can use a Chromecast without feeling like you’re enjoying a Google-heavy experience… I’ll bet there’s a bit less Apple snobbery here.

Apart from Apple users, I’d argue it still feels like this for a lot of us: a Chromecast is an emblem for the wider world, and for Google’s streaming hardware in particular, not to mention the ideal of simple, functional tech at a low price. While the Chromecast line today has a remote and proper UI, Google has never strayed too far from this dream, with current prices starting at $30 for HD and topping out at the $50 premium 4K variant.

To a certain extent, it is also (arguably) respawning here: while it is true that mainstream Google fans appreciate the difference between the old Chromecast and the Chromecast with Google TV, after all these years, I still call the newer ones in my household Chromecasts.

It now just says ‘Google TV’, ditto the Streamer – but it’s not just the name that’s got bigger here; it’s the price tag, too. The Google TV Streamer is $100. How many Apple arefonauts are going to spend $100 on a lovingly branded Google box, when for $30 more than Google gets, Apple TV 4K will get them more RAM and better integration with their iPhone? Not many. Those who just want a cheap streamer will likely pass, too, buying an old Chromecast on sale somewhere or a $40 Onn 4K Pro or some other device or platform entirely – perhaps one of the cheap streaming sticks from Roku or Amazon.

Whether the new vision is worth the extra cost is what the Google TV Streamer has to demonstrate – and a significant boost in speed, storage and the optional Thread router will go a long way. It remains to be seen whether Google can make its new television-streaming brand as well-known as the previous Chromecast, but although there may be as many reasons why this is a flawed move, it is also possible that Google needed to take a position of strength for the future also.

As much as this feeling of missing the Chromecast proper will be, I also know that, remember, a lot has changed in the last decade. Chromecast was a great start, but they require a more full-fledged experience.

Chromecast with Google TV was designed to deliver a more sophisticated experience, but it only further muddied the waters; Google has launched so many terms around media streaming over the years – Android TV, Chromecast, and most recently Google TV – that they’ve often been left to the smart people on help forum threads trying to differentiate and explain what Google hardware and software can and cannot do. I was recently struggling to explain what the differences were between the older Chromecasts and the more recent Chromecast with Google TV to a friend who has never updated, and he had no idea that newer Chromecasts had a UI or remote. I don’t doubt that Google has recorded a similar script for this scenario for itself.

Besides confusing casting, it seems like Google wants to change its vision about the future of the streaming business – from Trickle Down Streaming on cheaper Chromecasts it’s famous for, to a more Premium version of Google TV Streamers. I would suspect that a $100 Chromecast sounds worse than $100 Google TV Streamer because of the baggage associated with previous versions of Chromecasts. Decoupling from Chromecast also helps Google focus its efforts on building a hardware that competes with Apple TV and other more premium streamers.

Nor does it have to mean that Google has to abandon Chromecast owners – for all we know, a second-generation Google TV Streamer HD with the same price could come along any time soon. And the existing Chromecast hardware won’t magically vanish overnight either – while its stock will probably run out in months, as with the older Chromecast stock that remained in many stores even after sales of the Chromecast with Google TV officially began, it’ll probably be maintained in that form for a few more years. The same stores that sold out of older Chromecast stock could remain through Christmas 2023 and even 2024, but maintain stock of the third-gen dongle.

The long shadow of Chromecast wishcasting brings with it some assumptions about what functions a Chromecast-type thing should bring to your TV screen, how much it should cost and so on. But perhaps it really is time to move on.

To Google’s credit, I didn’t like the Google Home rebrand that much myself and, while the Covid-19 pandemic has caused a retrenchment in the new products and presentations Google needs to fuel its consumer nostalgia, the Google Nest brand hasn’t been discontinued. In fact, it lives on, regardless of how much of a fan I might be, nor how much I’m not now, versus my fandom in those halcyon early days of Google Home. (My excuse is that, however much I grumped about the rebrand, I was already using mine far less, well before.) The same reasoning might just be behind the Chromecast. The rebrand won’t make consumers happy, but this Google cathode-ray tube isn’t doing much for the company’s streaming platform, either; it’s just keeping the brand sitting in the status quo. Google is wagering that the Google TV stack gives it a fighting chance to reframe itself as something more than the obvious, bottom-option, bread-and-butter fix to bring the streaming consumer experience home.

Oh, I haven’t answered the question yet? I know. Okay, for what it’s worth, as much as it is making me nostalgic about the times and as hard as it has been to get used to this change, my gut tells me this is for the better. There are reasons to move on. The big question is, will the Google TV Streamer one day carve out a niche the way the Chromecast did for at least a decade? One can never tell.