Google’s Chromecast is a small dongle that plugs into an HDMI port on your television to stream media from the internet to the living room screen using your smartphone, tablet or computer as a remote.

The tiny stick requires a connection to your home Wi-Fi network and is powered by USB like most smartphones and tablet computers. It promises to stream content like Netflix and You Tube straight from the internet using your Android, iPhone, iPad or computer as a remote.

Chromecast is discreet and is designed to be plugged into the back of a television and forgotten about. It comes with a USB power adapter, but can be powered directly by USB ports on most televisions, saving the need for yet another power plug.

Setting up the Chromecast is straightforward. An app called Chromecast is available for iOS or Android that connects to the streaming stick via Wi-Fi and allows you to configure the settings for your home Wi-Fi network.

Unlike other set top boxes or streaming devices, such as the Apple TV or Roku, Chromecast acts like a window through which you broadcast media. It is purely a receiver and has no real interface of its own to navigate around, solely reliant on the commands from your computer, smartphone or tablet.

That lack of buttons or menus makes it dead simple to use. Find the content you want to watch, be it a Netflix, iPlayer or You Tube video, or some music from Google Play Music and hit the broadcast to Chromecast button. Chromecast then connects directly to the source and starts streaming.

What you can do with Chromecast is quite limited at the moment. Beyond Netflix, You Tube and a small handful of apps like Real Player Cloud, your options are currently limited. It lacks a lot of the streaming services that competitors offer, but it promises to do a lot more in the future with rapid automatic updates in the background.

The Chromecast is capable of mirroring a Chrome browser window from a computer – this makes it possible to display video from unsupported services or anything else that can be viewed in Chrome on television. In practice, the video quality is low and the display can lag and skip frames, so it’s not a real alternative to a dedicated streaming app.

The Chromecast is currently one of the cheapest streaming options. It significantly undercuts the competition from the likes of Roku’s Streaming Stick or Apple TV.

Its appeal is what it could do in the future, not what it can do right now.

Jesmond Darmanin is a technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.

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