How Chromecast Fits Right Into Google’s Plan to Win TV

The latest innovation seducing future-of-TV enthusiasts is Chromecast, Google’s dongle that beams content from your smartphone, tablet, or laptop to your television screen, for 35 bucks.

Google unveiled the product this afternoon, and it almost immediately sold out and was promptly hyped to high heavens. So what’s the big deal? Is this gadget porn or did Google just make a major play for the living room?

First, in case you missed it, the gist of Chromecast. The device plugs into an HDMI port and streams web content over the cloud to your TV screen. While it streams, you can use your device as normal, so you can pull up Netflix on your iPad, start watching Orange Is the New Black, and go back to the iPad and check your email. And yes I said “iPad,” as the gadget works with any operating system across all devices. For $35, you want one, right?

So that’s the hardware. (Which, note, is still in beta and is will probably have some kinks to work out.) What’s getting people really amped are the potential implications—how this fits into Google’s looming TV coup.

If there’s a key to living room domination, it’s content. And Google has some. And it’s trying to get more. Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal reported that the tech giant has been pitching channel owners, who license their content to cable companies, to strike a similar channel-bundle deal for Google to stream over the internet—a move that could challenge the cable industry’s 20-year stranglehold on the industry.

Chromecast is another selling point for would-be cord-cutters, because it brings all this content seamlessly to the considerably larger screen on your television, on the cheap, and without locking you into a specific device or ecosystem.

If Google can strike a deal, it could conceivably stream regular pay-for-TV programming, online movies, Netflix’s now-award-winning original content, YouTube subscription channels, streaming music, and the collection of media and apps on Google Play to your TV, cord-free, with a super-fast connection brought to you by Google Fiber.

Chromecast isn’t another version of a “smart” web-connected TV, it connects the TV to your internet-centric life.

As myriad headlines have put it, the future of TV is the internet. Chromecast isn’t another version of a “smart” web-connected TV, it connects your TV to your internet-centric life. This is big, because Google practically is the internet—a recent report found that the company serves up to 25 percent of online traffic in the US. Think about the data the search giant already has on us. It could offer recommendations a la Pandora or Netflix, say, the latest YouTube series you might like, and bring in targeted advertising. A total web/TV merge could re-define everything from the TV guide (now a search query) to the remote control (now your smartphone).

If Apple TV has been described as a “hobby,” Google is going after the mainstream. Hence the price point. Chromecast after all is essentially Apple TV only cheaper, and open to everyone, not just iOS users. That appeals to the folks who still have the top-notch flat screen with subwoofers entertainment system, but wind up consuming most of their entertainment on a laptop or iPhone anyway.

Are we ready for that much Google in our lives? I for one would welcome some healthy competition. Apple, too, has a “grand vision” to change TV watching as we know it, Tim Cook promised back in May. It’s dropped some hints at what this might be, for instance, trying to eke out a deal with media companies to let users skip commercials, provided Apple reimburse the networks for the lost revenue. Not having to sit through ads is awesome, but you know what else makes it pretty easy to avoid commercials? The internet.