De-Googling my life #4: Chromecast alternatives
Google has already announced its intentions to kill off the Chromecast, so it's time to find a suitable replacement.
Google as a company is synonymous with the Internet. But the company that once declared a motto of “Don’t be evil” is now very much drawing on the power of the dark side to maximise its profits and limit competition.
Now that a US court has found that Google illegally monopolised Internet search, I feel it is time to de-Google my life.
Across a series of guides, I’ll be sharing my journey to remove my reliance on Google. I’ll compare alternatives, test them out and try to find the best alternatives for my needs.
So, Google decided to kill off the Chromecast in favour of a more expensive streaming box. I am not surprised in the slightest. Google has a long, long, long history of killing off popular products on a whim. There’s even a website called “Killed by Google”, dedicated to all the products the company has “retired”.
I have a bunch of older Chromecasts floating around the place, but my years away from tech reviewing meant that I didn’t get hands on time with the newer models that featured a remote control. Given some of the frustrations I remember of trying to control videos mid-cast from my phone, that would have been a welcome inclusion.
There are two main areas I want to consider when moving away from Google’s Chromecast. The first is the hardware – the little pucks with an HDMI cable that you plug into your TV.
The good news here is that streaming hardware devices are really easy to come across. None of them offer quite the same experience as the Chromecast did, though. I don’t think any other device currently comes close to being as useful in a travel situation, for example.
The second aspect of replacing a Chromecast is the casting technology itself. Google Cast is a proprietary protocol that lets you play local or internet-based entertainment on a compatible device, which is typically the Chromecast dongle.
This technology has fewer alternatives. The most obvious one is AirPlay, which is obviously tightly connected to Apple. Miracast and DLNA are alternatives, but don’t offer anywhere near the same level of adoption in streaming services, making them far less useful.
So for this guide, I’m mostly looking at the hardware alternatives.
