The original Chromecast.
Rest now, little Chromecast. Google has announced that the decade-old Chromecast 1 is finally reaching its end of life. A post on Google’s Chromecast firmware support page (first seen by 9to5Google) announced the end of support, saying “Support for Chromecast (Gen 1) has ended, meaning these devices will not have any software or receive more security updates, and Google does not provide technical support for them. Users may notice a performance degradation.” The first-generation Chromecast launched in 2013 for $35.
The original Chromecast was hugely successful, selling 10 million units in 2014 alone. For years, the device was cited in Google earnings calls as the pinnacle of the company’s hardware effort, and was essentially the company’s first successful piece of hardware. The Chromecast made it easy to send internet videos to your TV at a time when doing so was otherwise quite complicated.
Google doesn’t really make “Chromecasts” anymore, or at least it doesn’t make products that use the original Chromecast technology stack. The original 2013 Chromecast, the 2015 second generation version, the 2016 Chromecast Ultra, and the 2018 third generation versions are all dead simple streaming sticks. They use the Cast OS, an ultra-light operating system composed of bits of Chrome OS and Android. They don’t have a standard interface, they can’t run apps, and they don’t have their own control mechanism. Old-school Chromecasts exist solely as media receivers for the cast button in various apps like YouTube. You hit the cast button in an app, choose a TV, and the screen turns on and starts playing media. That is it.
In 2020, Google released the “Chromecast with Google TV,” a product that keeps the Chromecast brand alive but deviates from the idea of a simple streaming stick. The new “Chromecasts” may still be media receivers, but they are now much more complicated Android TV boxes. They run on a full Android operating system, have their own interface, and come with a physical remote control to navigate the user interface. You can log in to the stick, launch the Play Store and download updates and install apps. New Chromecasts are simply set-top boxes in a dongle form factor.
The pivot from Chromecast to Android TV means there are currently no products using the Cast OS. Google even worked to remove the misfit operating system from all over Google, while its other Cast OS product, the Google Nest Hub, switched to Fuchsia. The only work on the operating system these days is to support the legacy Chromecasts, with the latest being the 5-year-old third-generation Chromecast. There’s no word on how much time the other Cast OS sticks have left.
