Google's lounge room invasion advances with Chromecast upgrade

re. tellie

Is that the Australian spelling of 'telly'? This could be an interesting cultural difference.

Works, kinda

Nexus7 2013, works kinda, seems to be dropping connection often. No lag when running though, some games, whilst connected, looked great on the big screen. Playable (though you find yourself looking down at the tablet anyway, so more a presentation thing!)

Wife's Nexus5 worked flawlessly. No lag, no dropouts. Both running standard OS, no random roms, so... not sure what's happening there.

Very impressive that the lag is... I'd guess, half a second, if that. Gaming is going to be possible on this casting. Gets strange when you go to watch a youtube clip, it'd make sense to ask if you want to keep doing it this way or use the standard chromecasting youtube method that's smoother.

For a beta, it's impressive. Hopefully the issues on the N7 get smoothed out, but early days yet.

Also wondering if/how it'll do it as a second screen, as shown under the dev settings, so you can 'throw' a game/something to the screen and still use the tablet perhaps.

Just lay off with the adverts. I don't watch live TV due to not wanting to waste my valuable time with adverts.

Funny. In the last few years, I've gone out of my way to entirely and completely expunge all ads(*) and their form from my media centre, as well as how things are handled to minimise ad exposure on media that comes from more regular sources (TV and such).

And Google thinks their ads are an acceptable tradeoff for the crappy material?(**) Considering no-one else has managed to get this right, I'm going to remain sceptical to the point of ignoring them.

(*) This is not entirely true, I do in fact have a several saved ads (13 according to my movie database) that are "funnies", and have significant humour, shock or historic value. They're mostly obsolete or fictional, but they're great as "you gotta see this" when we have people over for parties...

(**) Of course not having seen any sample, I don't know the material is crappy, however, as per my statement, since no-one has been able to get the mix right to make it acceptable, I'm remaining sceptical.(***)

(***) Having visited family in Cyprus a couple of years ago, they mostly pack their TV ads between program wholes, not intermix them every ~10 minutes like they do here. As well as, no TV network watermarks and self-promotion ads pasted over program material. I found that significantly less intrusive, and oddly enough (for me) I was at least a little less likely to shun the ads when they were showing.

Do Google get your Tv viewing habits as well?

Is it possible that Google uses Chromecast to phone home your TV viewing habits to the mother ship and then aggregates them with your online browsing habits, your email correspondence and your YouTubing?

So maybe watching TV was no longer anonymous if you use the cheap and cheerful Chromecast thing-a-me-bob?

What a perfect consumer profile they'd have of your whole family if they can do that! What do you reckon - could they actually make money selling that kind of info? Surely Google wouldn't do that sort of thing without telling us . . . would they?