Judging by the level of reaction in these forums, compared to say Nexus Q, Apple zealouts know this is a good product and are scared it could have huge adoption.
It's interesting trying to understand the motivation of other people. Trolls are a mystery to me. Should we feed you by responding to this? Excuse me. I have a goat to catch.
ChromeCast is not meant to store anything, it's a web browser. Local Storage is going the way of the dodo folks, the future is in streaming. Everyone, even Apple, will eventually move to an all-streaming-with-optional-offline-caching model eventually. The delay is no different than NetFlix seeking to a random position, approximately 2-3 seconds on a Google internet connection.
If pirates want to run local content without mirroring, all they need is a URL to an H264 stream. There are already people in Plex working on an integration. Since integration means simply having an HTTP server that can send back a <video> tag pointing to an H264 stream, it takes on the order of hours to produce an integration.
Judging by the level of reaction in these forums, compared to say Nexus Q, Apple zealouts know this is a good product and are scared it could have huge adoption.
I'm an Apple zealot and I hope chromecast is widely successful. Why should I be scared? I'll be streaming content from the internet to my Sony TV using my iPhone as the control. What matters most about Chromecast is that any iPhone app developer can include a chromecast button in their iPhone app to allow me to switch a streaming video from my iPhone to my TV. That means I can browse through TV or movie content on the internet using my phone, select the content and hit play and it shows up on my TV. Fantastic! I couldn't care less whether its Apple or Google that provides this functionality. Its going to be awesome.
Ironically Apple f'ed up with the Apple TV interface. They make me navigate an onscreen menu using a 1980's style dumb ass remote. It is probably the most pathetic user interface Apple has ever produced. Then some bright engineer thought to fix the problem by virtualizing the dumb ass remote in an iPhone app. Sorry, but a virtualized dumb ass remote is still a dumb ass remote.
The big question is how does Google plan to stream advertising to you on one of these things, They can not continue to give away hardware and not have some sort of revenue stream to make up the loss. Maybe this is hobby like Apple TV was for many years, But I do not believe Apple ever gave away hardware and hopes to make up the loss somewhere else.
Oh, they can, for sure. This is just a ploy to lure people into Chrome eco-system so they can suck more data from you. Nothing more.
It's great for people who's already using Chrome but it's a trap for who isn't yet.
They know it will be a failure if they give you the full capability i.e. Android TV but if they give you something for a little price people won't think much. And it seems that their ploy is working.
I'm an Apple zealot and I hope chromecast is widely successful. Why should I be scared? I'll be streaming content from the internet to my Sony TV using my iPhone as the control. What matters most about Chromecast is that any iPhone app developer can include a chromecast button in their iPhone app to allow me to switch a streaming video from my iPhone to my TV. That means I can browse through TV or movie content on the internet using my phone, select the content and hit play and it shows up on my TV. Fantastic! I couldn't care less whether its Apple or Google that provides this functionality. Its going to be awesome.
Ironically Apple f'ed up with the Apple TV interface. They make me navigate an onscreen menu using a 1980's style dumb ass remote. It is probably the most pathetic user interface Apple has ever produced. Then some bright engineer thought to fix the problem by virtualizing the dumb ass remote in an iPhone app. Sorry, but a virtualized dumb ass remote is still a dumb ass remote.
Google nailed it with this one.
So you compare Chromecast, which doesn't have an interface of its own, with Apple TV interface instead of its AirPlay capability. Nice. No wonder you're so confused.
DED even missed the point I find most unexplainable about the Chromecast device.
It has one major design flaw, which makes it very handicapped, even for its little intended purpose: only 4 GB storage! In other words: many 720p movies won't fit onto the device, so buffering is limited to available capacity and scrolling to a random position within a movie will only happen with a fairly significant delay. It is even worse for people with slow internet connections: they might have to view such a movie in two sessions, as the remaining / missing content can only be loaded once the start of the movie has been watched to that point.
It's useless for slow internet connection unlike AirPlay that use your router speed.
Content providers do not want their web media viewed on HDTV? HDCP has been cracked. Blu-Ray copy protection cracked. How long are they going to keep their head in the sand? That ship has sailed. Netflix/Amazon streaming not enough profit? Don't label chromecast as the bad guy. Apple needs to innovate instead of whining about the competition.
Tom
Try getting your head out of your blow hole and go get yourself a good education so you can contribute something intelligent to the community!
I think Google made a tactical error not going with the Android TV -- although, I don't know how well it performed and what the costs were -- so I suppose they might have had good reason.
Scraping the web to bypass the Carriers? I'm OK with that.
Scraping licensed TV streams and adding your own ads? Aren't they opening themselves up for litigation by clearly "enabling." Just scraping would have "other uses" and could be called just a feature -- but adding your own ads shows intent. And when you have an income stream, you instantly create observable financial damages. Other than being a bit overt and tacky -- are they crazy?
"choppy video and out of sync sound" -- well that killed that killer app. Nobody really wants to sit in their living room and watch compression artifacts and dubbed movies.
Seems like they are just offering Apple some lead time when they roll out their own offering. If I had money, I'd buy Apple stock -- they just cornered another market.
So you compare Chromecast, which doesn't have an interface of its own, with Apple TV interface instead of its AirPlay capability. Nice. No wonder you're so confused.
I thought the exact same thing. If you hate using the UI, just AirPlay. Not to mention airplay goes from device to device and not through the cloud (wifi)- so it's substantially more responsive and faster. But who wants that- you can save sixty bucks for a product that does the same thing worse and with only 1/10th the features!
So you compare Chromecast, which doesn't have an interface of its own, with Apple TV interface instead of its AirPlay capability. Nice. No wonder you're so confused.
I'm not confused. I understand the Apple TV interface perfectly. It's a piece of shit. To type in the password it puts up a keyboard on the screen and then makes me push a button to move from one letter to the next until I reach the desired alphanumeric character and select it. There is nothing confusing about that. It is a total piece of shit interface.
Secondly, the brilliance of Chromecast is that it uses the iPhone or Android device to provide the interface and then it streams the content from the cloud. Why is that a bad comparison. Airplay only works by streaming from the portable electronic device (e.g., iPhone) which drains the battery.
Pause for a second and maybe the clarity of my argument will sink in. I think you'll realize that Chromecast just kicked Apple's ass in a area that Apple has historically been king.....user interface and simplicity.
I thought the exact same thing. If you hate using the UI, just AirPlay. Not to mention airplay goes from device to device and not through the cloud (wifi)- so it's substantially more responsive and faster. But who wants that- you can save sixty bucks for a product that does the same thing worse and with only 1/10th the features!
Him saying "I'm an Apple zealot" almost had us all fooled thinking he was just one of us guy- you know, logical... Except its the typical banter of a troll.
LOL LOL, you think I'm a troll? Go read my other 416 posts and you'll see I'm anything but a troll. I own a Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air, 4 iPhones, Apple TV, 3 iPod touches and 2 iPod nanos, Apple Cinema display and an Apple Thunderbolt display. I've made tens of thousands of dollars in appreciated Apple stock. I haven't purchased a windows machine since 2002. I fought the IT department in my law firm for 5 years until they finally cracked a year ago and let me and another attorney connect our MBAs to the firm system (two years ago I was assured that it would NEVER happen). You think I'm a troll....hilarious.
Regarding the merits of my argument.... I do use Airplay. There are two MAJOR problems with Airplay: (i) it drains the battery, (ii) prevents me from having access to my phone while I'm streaming. Most of what I want to stream is not stored on my phone. Why should my phone be used as a server. Google figured out how to do it better for 1/3 the price. I'm no Google fan, but call a spade a spade. Google kicked Apple's ass.
Is this as stupid as a chrome book, by the way a chrome book OS feels like worse than android (tablet, smartphone?) for a lot more $$. This chrome casts sounds like it is heading there.
I did read it and your right I don't have respect for such posts, especially for a hypothetical product. This kind of thing goes on way to often here. If Apple does come out with a TV with an integrated Apple TV wouldn't they be copying Sony or Philips or one of the many other manufactures who have already integrated such services into their TV's or is Apple exempt. See, not cool is it.
Philips
Samsung
Sony
The problem with all of the existing "smart TVs" is they use the TV as the interface. That approach is totally wrong. The TV is a horrible user interface because it doesn't have a good input mechanism. Mark my words, someday everyone will realize the brilliance of Chromecast: It uses the iPhone as the interface for the TV but doesn't use the iPhone for the source of the streaming content.
Is this as stupid as a chrome book, by the way a chrome book OS feels like worse than android (tablet, smartphone?) for a lot more $$. This chrome casts sounds like it is heading there.
No, Chrome Book is a laptop that relies on a server for computing power. Google was totally wrong about the market for light clients. This is quite different. TVs are usually stationary and near an internet connection. More importantly, there is a lot of video content that is being streamed over the internet. I think Netflix is the largest user of internet bandwidth in the U.S. Chromecast is a simple and economical way for every TV with an HDMI port to receive that content while using your phone as the remote control. I think Chromecast is going to kill it in the marketplace for streaming video. Hopefully this will spur Apple to open up the Apple TV to 3rd party developers and add the cloud streaming feature.
Is this as stupid as a chrome book, by the way a chrome book OS feels like worse than android (tablet, smartphone?) for a lot more $$. This chrome casts sounds like it is heading there.
An Acer Chromebook starts at 200, how is that expensive?
No, Chrome Book is a laptop that relies on a server for computing power.
No it doesn't, the Chromebook has a CPU, memory, SSD storage just like a normal laptop, it relies on a internet connection however, which is what I think you meant to say.
Regarding the merits of my argument.... I do use Airplay. There are two MAJOR problems with Airplay: (i) it drains the battery, (ii) prevents me from having access to my phone while I'm streaming. Most of what I want to stream is not stored on my phone. Why should my phone be used as a server. Google figured out how to do it better for 1/3 the price. I'm no Google fan, but call a spade a spade. Google kicked Apple's ass.
I posted elsewhere that Google's approach for streaming Netflix content is superior, IMO. The approach of having the iPhone tell the Apple TV what it wants to play, but letting the ATV actually go out and fetch the content and do the "heavy lifting" makes perfect sense, and I've posted about this over a year ago. The big issue for me is the number of network hops that have to happen. If I want to play a Netflix show and want to use my iPhone/iPad to find the show I want, I then hit play and send it over AirPlay to my TV. If I'm lucky, my ATV is hard-wired via ethernet to my router. Even then, my iPhone is doing a wireless hop to the router which then goes across the internet to get the content from Netflix. OK, no way around that...no big deal so far. But then my iPhone has to re-transmit the content it's getting wirelessly again back to my router, which then transmits it to my ATV. If I'm not so lucky, the router-to-ATV connection is wireless as well. The Google approach would be superior for any internet-based content (iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon VOD, etc.). The battery savings is a definite plus as well, but I do think that's being blown a bit out of proportion. Someone would need to do some measuring to see just how much battery drain the Netflix streaming plus Airplaying causes in the course of an hour or two.
But that's where the Chromecast advantages end. The superiority of using your iPhone as the UI for Netflix is not an advantage, because you can already choose to use the approach described above. The ATV has the advantage that, in addition to using the iPhone as the Netflix UI, you can *also* use a traditional remote and your TV to navigate the Netflix UI. I do agree that *most* people nowadays have a smartphone of their own, but even when you do,: a) You don't always want to use it (I may be in the midst of using my normal remote and don't want to have to put it down, fire up my phone, fire up the Netflix app on my phone, etc., when all I wanted to do on my TV is pick back up on the most recent Arrested Development episode I left off on); b) You may have a guest over who wants to surf through some Netflix options and you don't want to go through the hassle of getting their phone set up to access your WiFi).
And let's not forget that there are real advantages to the Apple AirPlay mirroring functionality. You can put your iPhone/iPad screen up on the TV, send photos there, videos you've shot, etc. And there are games that are coded to use the ATV as a 2nd output, showing gaming controls on the iPhone but the "action" on the TV. The Chromecast approach won't work for that. The best they can do is casting a web browser tab, and I believe that only works from a laptop.
Lastly, you should know better than to repeat the false claim that you can't use your iPhone for other things when you're AirPlaying. That's only true of AirPlay *Mirroring*. I can AirPlay my Pandora station over to my ATV, leave that app on my iPhone and do other things, and Pandora keeps playing on my ATV. The same is true with AirPlaying a movie using Plex, and I'd imagine any other use case that doesn't involve AirPlay Mirroring.
Circling back to the one advantage of the Chromecast...if anyone here bought one, I'm curious to know what happens if you start up a video on Netflix, cast it to your Chromecast, then go on to watch a different Netflix video on your smartphone. I'm assuming that works fine, but here's what I'm wondering about: The video playing on your TV is now "on its own". How do you pause it? Can you regain control of that first video on your smartphone or has it been cast loose into the wild? I know that if you *didn't* start looking for and playing a different video on your smartphone that you'd be able to use your smartphone for pause/playback controls.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by rjc999
ChromeCast is not meant to store anything, it's a web browser. Local Storage is going the way of the dodo folks, the future is in streaming. Everyone, even Apple, will eventually move to an all-streaming-with-optional-offline-caching model eventually. The delay is no different than NetFlix seeking to a random position, approximately 2-3 seconds on a Google internet connection.
If pirates want to run local content without mirroring, all they need is a URL to an H264 stream. There are already people in Plex working on an integration. Since integration means simply having an HTTP server that can send back a <video> tag pointing to an H264 stream, it takes on the order of hours to produce an integration.
Judging by the level of reaction in these forums, compared to say Nexus Q, Apple zealouts know this is a good product and are scared it could have huge adoption.
I'm an Apple zealot and I hope chromecast is widely successful. Why should I be scared? I'll be streaming content from the internet to my Sony TV using my iPhone as the control. What matters most about Chromecast is that any iPhone app developer can include a chromecast button in their iPhone app to allow me to switch a streaming video from my iPhone to my TV. That means I can browse through TV or movie content on the internet using my phone, select the content and hit play and it shows up on my TV. Fantastic! I couldn't care less whether its Apple or Google that provides this functionality. Its going to be awesome.
Ironically Apple f'ed up with the Apple TV interface. They make me navigate an onscreen menu using a 1980's style dumb ass remote. It is probably the most pathetic user interface Apple has ever produced. Then some bright engineer thought to fix the problem by virtualizing the dumb ass remote in an iPhone app. Sorry, but a virtualized dumb ass remote is still a dumb ass remote.
Google nailed it with this one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ash471
Can't wait for the Aereo TV service to be available with Chromecast....
Quote:
Originally Posted by Maestro64
The big question is how does Google plan to stream advertising to you on one of these things, They can not continue to give away hardware and not have some sort of revenue stream to make up the loss. Maybe this is hobby like Apple TV was for many years, But I do not believe Apple ever gave away hardware and hopes to make up the loss somewhere else.
Oh, they can, for sure. This is just a ploy to lure people into Chrome eco-system so they can suck more data from you. Nothing more.
It's great for people who's already using Chrome but it's a trap for who isn't yet.
They know it will be a failure if they give you the full capability i.e. Android TV but if they give you something for a little price people won't think much. And it seems that their ploy is working.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ash471
I'm an Apple zealot and I hope chromecast is widely successful. Why should I be scared? I'll be streaming content from the internet to my Sony TV using my iPhone as the control. What matters most about Chromecast is that any iPhone app developer can include a chromecast button in their iPhone app to allow me to switch a streaming video from my iPhone to my TV. That means I can browse through TV or movie content on the internet using my phone, select the content and hit play and it shows up on my TV. Fantastic! I couldn't care less whether its Apple or Google that provides this functionality. Its going to be awesome.
Ironically Apple f'ed up with the Apple TV interface. They make me navigate an onscreen menu using a 1980's style dumb ass remote. It is probably the most pathetic user interface Apple has ever produced. Then some bright engineer thought to fix the problem by virtualizing the dumb ass remote in an iPhone app. Sorry, but a virtualized dumb ass remote is still a dumb ass remote.
Google nailed it with this one.
So you compare Chromecast, which doesn't have an interface of its own, with Apple TV interface instead of its AirPlay capability. Nice. No wonder you're so confused.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dreyfus2
DED even missed the point I find most unexplainable about the Chromecast device.
It has one major design flaw, which makes it very handicapped, even for its little intended purpose: only 4 GB storage! In other words: many 720p movies won't fit onto the device, so buffering is limited to available capacity and scrolling to a random position within a movie will only happen with a fairly significant delay. It is even worse for people with slow internet connections: they might have to view such a movie in two sessions, as the remaining / missing content can only be loaded once the start of the movie has been watched to that point.
It's useless for slow internet connection unlike AirPlay that use your router speed.
Try getting your head out of your blow hole and go get yourself a good education so you can contribute something intelligent to the community!
I think Google made a tactical error not going with the Android TV -- although, I don't know how well it performed and what the costs were -- so I suppose they might have had good reason.
Scraping the web to bypass the Carriers? I'm OK with that.
Scraping licensed TV streams and adding your own ads? Aren't they opening themselves up for litigation by clearly "enabling." Just scraping would have "other uses" and could be called just a feature -- but adding your own ads shows intent. And when you have an income stream, you instantly create observable financial damages. Other than being a bit overt and tacky -- are they crazy?
"choppy video and out of sync sound" -- well that killed that killer app. Nobody really wants to sit in their living room and watch compression artifacts and dubbed movies.
Seems like they are just offering Apple some lead time when they roll out their own offering. If I had money, I'd buy Apple stock -- they just cornered another market.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OllieWallieWhiskers
doesn't a power cord defeat the purpose of a dongle?
Well, it does save the cost of an HDMI cable.
I thought the exact same thing. If you hate using the UI, just AirPlay. Not to mention airplay goes from device to device and not through the cloud (wifi)- so it's substantially more responsive and faster. But who wants that- you can save sixty bucks for a product that does the same thing worse and with only 1/10th the features!
My MBP cost $4000, as if I'd "give it away".
Quote:
Originally Posted by matrix07
So you compare Chromecast, which doesn't have an interface of its own, with Apple TV interface instead of its AirPlay capability. Nice. No wonder you're so confused.
I'm not confused. I understand the Apple TV interface perfectly. It's a piece of shit. To type in the password it puts up a keyboard on the screen and then makes me push a button to move from one letter to the next until I reach the desired alphanumeric character and select it. There is nothing confusing about that. It is a total piece of shit interface.
Secondly, the brilliance of Chromecast is that it uses the iPhone or Android device to provide the interface and then it streams the content from the cloud. Why is that a bad comparison. Airplay only works by streaming from the portable electronic device (e.g., iPhone) which drains the battery.
Pause for a second and maybe the clarity of my argument will sink in. I think you'll realize that Chromecast just kicked Apple's ass in a area that Apple has historically been king.....user interface and simplicity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Andysol
I thought the exact same thing. If you hate using the UI, just AirPlay. Not to mention airplay goes from device to device and not through the cloud (wifi)- so it's substantially more responsive and faster. But who wants that- you can save sixty bucks for a product that does the same thing worse and with only 1/10th the features!
Him saying "I'm an Apple zealot" almost had us all fooled thinking he was just one of us guy- you know, logical... Except its the typical banter of a troll.
LOL LOL, you think I'm a troll? Go read my other 416 posts and you'll see I'm anything but a troll. I own a Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air, 4 iPhones, Apple TV, 3 iPod touches and 2 iPod nanos, Apple Cinema display and an Apple Thunderbolt display. I've made tens of thousands of dollars in appreciated Apple stock. I haven't purchased a windows machine since 2002. I fought the IT department in my law firm for 5 years until they finally cracked a year ago and let me and another attorney connect our MBAs to the firm system (two years ago I was assured that it would NEVER happen). You think I'm a troll....hilarious.
Regarding the merits of my argument.... I do use Airplay. There are two MAJOR problems with Airplay: (i) it drains the battery, (ii) prevents me from having access to my phone while I'm streaming. Most of what I want to stream is not stored on my phone. Why should my phone be used as a server. Google figured out how to do it better for 1/3 the price. I'm no Google fan, but call a spade a spade. Google kicked Apple's ass.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Relic
I did read it and your right I don't have respect for such posts, especially for a hypothetical product. This kind of thing goes on way to often here. If Apple does come out with a TV with an integrated Apple TV wouldn't they be copying Sony or Philips or one of the many other manufactures who have already integrated such services into their TV's or is Apple exempt. See, not cool is it.
Philips
Samsung
Sony
The problem with all of the existing "smart TVs" is they use the TV as the interface. That approach is totally wrong. The TV is a horrible user interface because it doesn't have a good input mechanism. Mark my words, someday everyone will realize the brilliance of Chromecast: It uses the iPhone as the interface for the TV but doesn't use the iPhone for the source of the streaming content.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Curtis Hannah
Is this as stupid as a chrome book, by the way a chrome book OS feels like worse than android (tablet, smartphone?) for a lot more $$. This chrome casts sounds like it is heading there.
No, Chrome Book is a laptop that relies on a server for computing power. Google was totally wrong about the market for light clients. This is quite different. TVs are usually stationary and near an internet connection. More importantly, there is a lot of video content that is being streamed over the internet. I think Netflix is the largest user of internet bandwidth in the U.S. Chromecast is a simple and economical way for every TV with an HDMI port to receive that content while using your phone as the remote control. I think Chromecast is going to kill it in the marketplace for streaming video. Hopefully this will spur Apple to open up the Apple TV to 3rd party developers and add the cloud streaming feature.
An Acer Chromebook starts at 200, how is that expensive?
No it doesn't, the Chromebook has a CPU, memory, SSD storage just like a normal laptop, it relies on a internet connection however, which is what I think you meant to say.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ash471
Regarding the merits of my argument.... I do use Airplay. There are two MAJOR problems with Airplay: (i) it drains the battery, (ii) prevents me from having access to my phone while I'm streaming. Most of what I want to stream is not stored on my phone. Why should my phone be used as a server. Google figured out how to do it better for 1/3 the price. I'm no Google fan, but call a spade a spade. Google kicked Apple's ass.
I posted elsewhere that Google's approach for streaming Netflix content is superior, IMO. The approach of having the iPhone tell the Apple TV what it wants to play, but letting the ATV actually go out and fetch the content and do the "heavy lifting" makes perfect sense, and I've posted about this over a year ago. The big issue for me is the number of network hops that have to happen. If I want to play a Netflix show and want to use my iPhone/iPad to find the show I want, I then hit play and send it over AirPlay to my TV. If I'm lucky, my ATV is hard-wired via ethernet to my router. Even then, my iPhone is doing a wireless hop to the router which then goes across the internet to get the content from Netflix. OK, no way around that...no big deal so far. But then my iPhone has to re-transmit the content it's getting wirelessly again back to my router, which then transmits it to my ATV. If I'm not so lucky, the router-to-ATV connection is wireless as well. The Google approach would be superior for any internet-based content (iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon VOD, etc.). The battery savings is a definite plus as well, but I do think that's being blown a bit out of proportion. Someone would need to do some measuring to see just how much battery drain the Netflix streaming plus Airplaying causes in the course of an hour or two.
But that's where the Chromecast advantages end. The superiority of using your iPhone as the UI for Netflix is not an advantage, because you can already choose to use the approach described above. The ATV has the advantage that, in addition to using the iPhone as the Netflix UI, you can *also* use a traditional remote and your TV to navigate the Netflix UI. I do agree that *most* people nowadays have a smartphone of their own, but even when you do,: a) You don't always want to use it (I may be in the midst of using my normal remote and don't want to have to put it down, fire up my phone, fire up the Netflix app on my phone, etc., when all I wanted to do on my TV is pick back up on the most recent Arrested Development episode I left off on); b) You may have a guest over who wants to surf through some Netflix options and you don't want to go through the hassle of getting their phone set up to access your WiFi).
And let's not forget that there are real advantages to the Apple AirPlay mirroring functionality. You can put your iPhone/iPad screen up on the TV, send photos there, videos you've shot, etc. And there are games that are coded to use the ATV as a 2nd output, showing gaming controls on the iPhone but the "action" on the TV. The Chromecast approach won't work for that. The best they can do is casting a web browser tab, and I believe that only works from a laptop.
Lastly, you should know better than to repeat the false claim that you can't use your iPhone for other things when you're AirPlaying. That's only true of AirPlay *Mirroring*. I can AirPlay my Pandora station over to my ATV, leave that app on my iPhone and do other things, and Pandora keeps playing on my ATV. The same is true with AirPlaying a movie using Plex, and I'd imagine any other use case that doesn't involve AirPlay Mirroring.
Circling back to the one advantage of the Chromecast...if anyone here bought one, I'm curious to know what happens if you start up a video on Netflix, cast it to your Chromecast, then go on to watch a different Netflix video on your smartphone. I'm assuming that works fine, but here's what I'm wondering about: The video playing on your TV is now "on its own". How do you pause it? Can you regain control of that first video on your smartphone or has it been cast loose into the wild? I know that if you *didn't* start looking for and playing a different video on your smartphone that you'd be able to use your smartphone for pause/playback controls.