Why Google's £25 Chromecast could change TV forever

Six billion hours of video are watched every month on YouTube. Google must be the biggest television company in history, at least in terms of eyeball hours.

Google’s Chromecast web-TV dongle could be a genuinely revolutionary device - a way for YouTube and the internet to hurdle direct into your TV, along with film-rental services such as Netflix.

It’s £25 - and keyring-sized, plugging directly into the back of your TV, and communicating with the web via Wi-Fi. 

The gadget doesn’t have a release date in the UK - but it instantly makes Apple’s TV box look like what it is, a crude black box designed mainly to sell  iTunes content.

Chromecast could be the gadget that finally makes “web TV” work - it’s cheap, tiny, and you can control it directly from Android phones, iPhones, iPads or laptops rather than fishing around for a remote.


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Many of today’s flatscreen TVs have “smart TV” functions built in - but the services have remained uneven, and in some cases downright odd.

Crucially, Chromecast will bring the web to your TV without upgrading your set.

Google, of course, doesn’t need to make money from selling you TV episodes, or making you sign up for horrifyingly expensive monthly subscriptions. It makes plenty just from ads.

The fact that Chromecast will have the Chrome web browser built in could make the gadget even bigger.

Google has been showing off prototype browsers and apps built for TVs for years at tech shows - but has never quite got the hardware right.



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Google’s first attempt at a ‘Google TV’ box never showed up in the UK. We were lucky. It was terrible.

But the search giant didn’t give up - as one wouldn’t, with a budget that could buy a significant chunk of mainland Europe.

The second try, in partnership with Sony, was £200, twice the price of Apple TV, and sank without trace.

Chromecast is a much more mature device - made by a company that's getting increasingly adept at hardware, with its forays into "glamour computing" with its Chromebook Pixel and Google Glass.

Can it upset the Apple cart, though? Persistent rumour has it, of course, that Apple will soon unleash an actual television.

Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs who died in October 2011, told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he had 'cracked' the problem of television, although Isaacson did not reveal the plans he had hatched.

Tthis time, it seems, Google has forged into new territory first.