It is quite evident that in recent months the interest of the big names in world technology has extended, beyond smartphones, tablets and the ecosystem that surrounds them, to the living room intended as the room in which the user spends his time to relax in front of a TV screen, an appliance that appears to be increasingly smart and increasingly connected.
The use and sharing on the big screen of the contents available online or through the app has seen Apple move ahead of other companies, up to the latest proposals from Microsoft (expanding the capabilities of its Xbox console), Samsung, the Home Sync set-top box and the purchase of Boxee and outsiders such as Xiaomi, with their MiBox and MiTV.
Google, for its part, began experimenting with the possibility of bring the web to your home TV screen thanks to support from Sony and Logitech, but the Google TV experiment never managed to explode and evaporated as interest from hardware manufacturers waned. Just before summer 2013, Google seems to have found the right recipe to challenge the competitor AirPlay Apple by extracting from the cylinder a small stick just over seven centimeters he's able to communicate with Android devices to project videos of Youtube, or even with the home Chrome browser on a PC or Mac to view the pages we are visiting on the web.
chromecast, the magic stick, has the particularity of completely replace our smartphone or tablet when sharing a video, by connecting independently to the Internet to receive it.
The Android software that makes it work is designed to allow the development of apps that can communicate with it: there are already video on demand platforms, such as Netflix and Hulu Plus, while many others are expected in the near future.
It will also be interesting to follow the development that Google intends to dedicate to Youtube as a complete platform for the use of free and paid video content. Chromecast, in any case, it also allows the projection on the big screen of videos and music from Google Play but it is an operation that I have not been able, alas, to test.
