There have been a lot of sites already talking about the function of the Chromecast, I would like to focus on how it is going to be used, and the impact it is having in my living room.
I introduced Chromecast to my family on Saturday, my wife was wanting to watch a series of short YouTube videos on the Ghost Cities in China.. When I plugged in Chromecast I went over basic functionality and then handed the Nexus 7 to her and showed her how to play an queue videos up..
She went crazy and was talking about how smart this was, at the same time my kids loaded the chromcast app on their phones and got connected to the device. Once she was done we had three kids queuing up videos. It got pretty entertaining to see the 9 years old’s choices versus the 16 & 17 year old..
This continued for a couple of hours, all the time they where having a blast and everyone’s media needs where getting met something interesting happened. We all participated in down voting some clips and we just pushed the next video in the queue Google should track that.
My experience with pushing web pasges was mixed. I could push a web page to Chromecast with my Chromebook or standard laptop, but for the life of me I have not been able to push a web page to the screen with my Nexus 7.
My goal was to visit video podcasters sites, start playing their video, and push the web page to the Chromecast and full screen the video.. That worked really well from a laptop, all we need now is a queue function for that and we will be golden. Podcasters that still unwisely have flash players need to get on the HTML5 bandwagon.
I must mention how elegant Google has made browser duplication on Chromecast. They really thought this through and was one of the most surprising finds of the device.
The best part is that Chromecast is cheap $35.00 and I expect their will be rapid development of the platform and with the number of units sold so far tells me that adoption will be rapid.