Google Cast, one of the powerful technologies which has been now announced which lets you cast your favorite apps from your phone, tablet or laptop to your television / speakers. It is more or less exactly like what AirPlay does. AirPlay is a proprietary technology of Apple which allows Apple devices like iPhone, iPad etc. to project the multimedia content to the Apple TV so that it can be mirrored/ sent to Apple TV for easy viewing. With the arrival of Google Cast and with rising number of Android apps which will be integrating with the Google cast SDKs, it’s evident that Apple will feel the heat. Going down the line, Google have to tightly integrate the Google Cast at the device level and not the app level to give a real competition to Apple.
With Casting, one can simply press a button from your favorite app. And with the help of Google Cast, your phone is your personalized remote control with which you can Play, Pause, Browse, Rewind or control the volume and also what’s more is that one can also make playlists. The main advantage is that, while watching the TV, you can also switch to another app or let your device go in the sleep mode while it continues to cast. All this makes sure that the battery isn’t drained. One can refer to the below mentioned video for more details on how Google Cast works;
How Google Cast Works?
As mentioned earlier, Google Cast is a technology which enables multi-screen experience and enables user to send and control the content like music and video from a small computing device like phone, laptop or a tablet to a larger display device. The sender may be a phone or tablet running on the android or ios or it may even be a laptop or computer running on Chrome. A Sender device makes use of the Google Cast API to communicate with the receiver application running on the receiver device. You can use the sender apis to enable the android / ios to send the content to larger displays.
The receiver device is optimized for playing music/ video with the receiver application which receives data over the Internet protocol and transmits the same to the television. Receiver API also enables one to customize the messaging between sender and receiver application for auth over other scenarios. While the content is being played on the television, one can also make use of other apps as it supports multi-tasking. For example, if user searches for the music/ video to their TV via Google cast device, user can seek, control volume using their phone and search for other videos as they check their mails or messages while Content is getting played on the TV. One can refer to the detailed Developer’s guide for building the cast application.
While there are only handful of Google Cast ready apps like Netflix, YouTube, PANDORA, hulu plus, HBO GO, ESPN etc., going down the line there will be many apps which will be google cast ready. Do let us know your thoughts about the Google Cast in the comments section below.
