The Chromecast is probably the best buying choice you’ve made in the past 6-12 months. The Chromecast is a pretty small HDMI dongle which allows you to stream content to your TV over your WiFi network. And it only costs $35 right now, and you can often find it on sale for around $30 or less. The Chromecast SDK was just opened up for any developer to add Chromecast support to their apps. Now Google has released a new Google Cast Chrome extension, which is the beta version. As Google notes in the description in the Chrome Web Store, this is intended for developers and advanced users who are looking for early access to upcoming APIs and features in advance of public release. They also urge most people to install the stable extension instead of the Beta version. Which makes perfect sense.
So far there doesn’t seem to be any new features in the beta version of Google Cast so far, but we are sure Google will be beta testing some new features pretty soon. Currently, all the extension really does is cast your tab in Chrome to your TV. So hopefully we’ll see some more great features in Chromecast very shortly.
If you are looking for the extension, you can find it here, and if you don’t want to pick up the beta version, you can also grab the stable version. That way if the beta is acting up, or super buggy, you won’t have to worry about what’s going on. But beta testing is always fun. For those that are interested, the new release notes for the new Cast beta are found here.
How many of you are going to go ahead and install the Google Cast Beta extension on your laptop or desktop? It’ll be interesting to see what Google builds into the extension next.