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Comment by rogerchucker | Hacker News Reader

What makes it inferior to Apple TV? I own an Apple TV and beyond Netflix and Youtube I really have no use for it.

I was sold on the price point for one. Secondly, the nice thing about this is that you aren't stuck on the Apple platform. I can push content from my iPhone, my windows machine or my mac directly to the television. If you are just using it for netflix / youtube and you already have an Apple TV, you definitely won't need this.

Forgot to mention that they'll open up their SDK so you can probably expect some cool hacks in the near future.

Actually, if you're a heavy YouTube user, the AppleTV interface is terrible and out of date. It's hard to search, hard to access your playlists, etc compared to using the web site or the apps. (I have an AppleTV and it's a constant point of frustration for me.)

Making a remote-based, d-pad interface as convenient as a touch screen is very, very difficult.

I like being able to play movies without fiddling with a laptop. It's awkward because you'll want to immediately point the laptop away from you to avoid light spillage and unless you're on a Haswell laptop, you should probably worry about keeping it powered. Plus, selecting movies on the TV interface makes even choosing the movie a bit more social.

Once the Chromecast starts playing a stream, you don't need to keep the controlling device turned on (or even in the house.)

Only for Netflix and Youtube. If you stream a Chrome tab, it still runs from your computer. Also, this still leaves open how one might download a movie and stream it to one's TV - I guess you'd have to upload the whole thing to Google Drive/Dropbox?

Well, for any service supporting the SDK, which presumably will continue to grow. (Play movies/TV as well, btw.)

I don't think "downloading a movie" is a use that they've shown or discussed. It seems primarily like a device for showing streams of video content from the cloud, with a secondary capability of mirroring a Chrome tab. It's not a miracast device; it's more like an AppleTV that you control from your phone or computer.

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