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With its new Chromecast, Google now tries to lure two new categories of consumers – the non-geeky average Americans and gamers.
Gaming industry gets increasingly crowded every passing day as tech giants fiercely compete against each other to grab the largest share of the market they can. Apple recently announced that its latest version of Apple TV can download and display video games.
People have been talking whether Apple TV could represent a threat to conventional game consoles such as PS 4, X Box One, or Wii U. And now Google enters the scene.
Yet, Google’s Chromecast has the edge on Apple TV when it comes to games since Google’s device allows users to run and control games directly from their smartphones, thus lending Chromecast the phone’s processing power.
Mario Queiroz of Google explained that games need computing power which streaming boxes alone cannot provide them with. But smartphones are two to three times more advanced than Chromecast and the likes when it comes to processing power.
Queiroz also said that there is a big difference between running a game on a phone than just plainly download and play it directly on a streaming device. Google boasts that the new version of Chromecast can display higher quality graphics that its competitors can.
Furthermore, game makers are now focused more on producing games that can run on smartphones including multiplayer games. Google hopes that the new Chromecast would become especially popular because of multiplayer games.
Since its launch in the mid-summer of 2013, about 17 million Chromecasts were sold worldwide. The thumb-sized gadget allows a user to stream online media to the TV through a Windows laptop, tablet, iPhone, Mac, or any Android device.
Google also offers thousands of iOS and Android apps that can enhance Chromecast and improve user experience. But now the company plans to expand even more with the new Chromecast and Chromecast audio, which allows users to stream music to their hi-fi systems.
Nevertheless, Google’s device is not the first of its kind. Sonos and Gramofon are some of the company’s main competitors in the casting technology market.
Google now hopes that Chromecast’s relatively affordable price ($35 per unit) would make it more popular among regular U.S. customers who see it as a device for geeks. According to the company, less than five percent of US households have Wi-fi systems that cannot connect to speakers. Some tech experts also believe that the price may soon help the device become mainstream, at least in the U.S.
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