Google’s Chromecast gives your TV super powers, for the cost of a pizza.

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My bf and I recently got a TV, our very first modern flatscreen TV ever.

We bought it from a non-tech-worker friend who’s been driven out of the Bay Area by the cost of living, but that’s another story. On the advice of a friend who works at Google X, we got a WD-TV device to connect the TV to The World. He said it was the most platform-agnostic, hackable solution. And since I hate Apple and Apple products, I was happy not to get an AppleTV thing. It was small and affordable and easy for my techie guy to install, and gives us what seems to this child of the ’60s to be mad powers- hard drive to TV! YouTube on TV! Netflix on TV!

It kind of reminded me of the year- maybe it was ’83?- when my mom got a VCR from work and also went down to Canal St. and got a “black box” that stole HBO and Cinemax for us.

Suddenly we had SO MUCH MEDIA!

But crazily, there’s now an even easier, cheaper, smaller solution than a streaming media box like Roku or WD-TV.

Google has just released Chromecast, this bitty thing you plug into your tv that basically takes entertainment into the future.

You can use it to stream video to your tv from your phone or computer, and it costs $35, but about $11 after the rebate of three free months you get from Netflix.

It’s a dongle that connects your TV to the cloud. That’s insane, right?
You control what appears on the TV either through your phone, tablet or computer. Now you may be thinking this is very similar to Apple�s AirPlay but Chromecast actually has one very different but crucial element � the content isn�t taken from your phone, tablet or computer, the content comes straight from the cloud. So you can tell Chromecast to play a movie on Netflix through your phone, then you can just carry on using your phone as normal � you aren�t made to stay in the app.

This is a truly futuristic notion- the idea that your media consumption is all-powerful and frictionless. Of course, it’s the future of a world that made Kim Kardashian a “celebrity”. We get the technology we deserve, and we’re not earning a future of universal vaccines and water for the people in the Sudan with our current consumer choices.


project any browser tab to your TV. From sharing your family photos to enjoying a video clip from your favorite news site, it�s as simple as pressing a button.

Since I’m a devoted media firehose drinker, I got pretty excited by this. Think about how pretty galleries of Flickr photos would look on a giant tv. And cat videos. You know you want to run the Cat Pattycake video on a big screen. Or– oooh, what about Pinterest?!?!


You can project your Flickr photos, your web-based presentations, really just about anything that runs in the browser. (Like, say, porn. As one WIRED staffer put it, �this is the pornslinger.�)

Well, this is a family blog, so we won’t discuss that.

this post originally appeared on the T324 Blog.

This entry was posted in Tech news of the weird on by .

About Suzanne Forbes

Suzanne Forbes is a traditionally trained figurative artist who makes documentary art of queer culture and Berlin life. She also works in mixed media. She is a former New Yorker who immigrated to Berlin with her third husband and their two cats. Her work is crowdfunded by the support of her Patrons on Patreon; you could help! In previous lives Suzanne was a graffiti artist in downtown NY, a courtroom artist for CBS and CNN, a penciller for DC Comics on Star Trek, and a live-drawing chronicler of Bay Area alternative culture.

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