Amid all of the glitzy new TVs, transparent OLED and MicroLED displays and claims of superior brightness, Google quietly announced some interesting new capabilities for its Chromecast devices at the Consumer Electronics Show this week.
In a blog post, Google’s Sameer Samat said the updates may be especially appealing to TikTok users. He explained that it will soon be possible to send TikTok content from any smartphone to any Chromecast device, whether it’s a dongle plugged into a television set, or a TV that has Chromecast functionality built into it.
The support for TikTok content on Chromecast, including live videos, will be arriving via an update “soon”, Samat said.
In the blog post, he also revealed that there will be many more new TVs launching this year with native Chromecast capabilities. For instance, all of LG Electronics’ new 2024 TVs will have Chromecast functionality on board, as will new TVs from brands like Hisense and TCL. Support for Chromecast is slowly but surely becoming a staple for many TV makers, so it may not be too long before the days of dedicated Chromecast devices appear numbered.
Samat also revealed that Chromecast capabilities will arrive in the LG Hospitality and Healthcare platform later this year, which means hotels and private hospitals will soon be able to offer their guests the ability to stream content from their phones directly to the TV in their room – assuming it’s an LG TV, of course.
A further update coming in 2024 is specifically for Pixel smartphones and the Google Pixel tablet, and will enable users to transfer Spotify or YouTube playback from a phone or tablet to another phone or tablet, simply by placing the devices close to one another. According to Samat, the idea is that the user can listen to something on their phone while commuting home from work, then seamlessly switch to their tablet and its associated speaker when they arrive in their house, so their listening is uninterrupted.
Today’s updates might be fairly minor, but it’s encouraging to see the continued evolution of what is now one of the most widely supported and ubiquitous ways to view smartphone or tablet content on a larger screen.
