My mom cut the cord and went all YouTube when she realized there was a TON of content from Thailand available around 2010. I jerry-rigged a 1st generation Apple TV to support AirPlay and we bought her an iPod Touch just for YouTube at the time! When that solution losts its legs, we got her one of the first Google TVs made my Logitech, keyboard and all. She pretty much used the built-in web browser to find all her YouTube content. Then we got her a 2nd generation Chromecast and she still uses it to this day. It worked so well that we got another Chromecast for the living room.
Then we moved to the San Diego area and discovered major stations don’t make a point to get digital TV out to everyone if you are not smack in the city center. We fell into the hole of cable just to get local channels. Then a non-profit called ‣ went on a mission that everyone has the right to have free, local TV and started delivering local TV over the Internet. A “donation” of $5/month let you remove nag screens to donate. We were happy to dump cable, get off contracts, and even dump our home phone (in favor of Google Voice). We ended up getting a Roku Streaming Stick+ to support Locast and it felt good to support the underdog.
13 months later, the YouTube app started acting up. We cleared the cache and as a last resort, we factory reset the Roku - the YouTube app continued to have issues. We missed the warranty replacement, Roku wasn’t willing to do anything about it and the YouTube team at Google wasn’t willing to do anything about it either. This is the classic, consumer is monkey in the middle that is a direct result (in my opinion) of capitalism and the strength of corporate partnerships - consumers tend to take the fall being forced to be system integrators.
So we said whatever, we’ll evaluate a new Chromecast with Google TV for 15 days and ask ourselves if we even care about Roku anymore. The short answer, Roku is long gone!
While it did feel a bit weird to buy a Google device when our family feels Google should be responsible for fixing the YouTube they created and launched on the Roku, who knows what the real technical/political issue is and nobody from either company seems to care. At the end of the day, we are a very YouTube-heavy household and it made sense to go with a device Google is fully committed to (or so we believe)
The overall user experience and integration is far superior
half-ass multi-user support - You can tell Google has started the work and I’m guessing they rushed the launch in time for Christmas sales during the pandemic in 2020. So you get a teaser of a switcher, you can even add additional Google accounts but you can’t switch home screens (thus giving each household members their own apps, content references, watch lists, etc). Google is no stranger to this - I have a Pixel 3a that has multi-user login (while it works, it can make the Pixel dog slow so perhaps Google ran into performance issues on the new Chromecast that need to be solved)
Amazon Prime takes a minute to log in - authentication is being done through Germany (this is evidenced by an error screen that occasionally comes up asking up to get support at amazon.de - oops!). We’ve reported the issue and hopefully this will be fixed soon.
It’s not overly annoying as there are no lags once you’ve logged into Prime Video and get past the log in screen
USB ports in today’s TV don’t output enough power (amps) - thus you are required to plug the Chromecast into a power adaptor. More unsightly wires. and the included adaptor is only 7.5W so good luck connecting an external hub. I had to use my 18W adaptor to get a USB-C that works on my iPadPro just to plug in a micro SD for external storage. I got a different USB-C hub and the USB-C PD doesn’t work until you have a 33W adaptor (!)