So Google announced the Chromecast this week, that little $35 HDMI dongle that turns your dumb TV into something that can pull Netflix or YouTube off your phone with basically no setup. I ordered one the day it went up, mostly out of curiosity, and I want to talk about something dumber and more interesting than the device itself: the Netflix promo that came bundled with it.
Every Chromecast ships with three months of free Netflix if you're a new or returning subscriber. Thats a $24 value on top of a $35 gadget, which on paper is a genuinely good deal. Within about a day of the announcement, people had figured out you could just buy a second Chromecast (or a third, or a fourth) to stack the promo across multiple accounts, cancel each after the free window, and effectively never pay for Netflix again as long as you kept buying $35 dongles every few months and switching logins. Someone did the math on a forum I read and worked out it was cheaper than an actual Netflix subscription if you had the patience to keep it up. Which, come on, nobody has that patience, but the fact that it was theoretically true is the fun part.
I dont think Google didnt see this coming. Promo abuse like this happens every time a company bundles a free trial with hardware — it happened with Amazon Prime trials on random gift cards a while back too. But watching it happen in real time, on Twitter, within hours of a product going on sale, was kind of amazing. People were posting screenshots of their account pages showing "your free Chromecast promo has been applied" three or four times over on different emails. I have zero interest in doing this myself, partly because Im lazy and partly because I already pay for Netflix and dont want to deal with the account juggling, but I respect the hustle.
The device itself is worth a word too, since I actually plugged mine in over the weekend. Setup took maybe four minutes, most of which was fighting with my TVs one open HDMI port that happens to be wedged behind the stand where I cant see the cable. Once its running, the whole "casting" idea is weirdly satisfying: you tap a little icon in the Netflix app on your phone and the show just appears on the TV, and your phone becomes a remote instead of the source. No new remote to lose, no separate box menu to navigate. Compare that to my Roku, which I still like fine, but which involves an actual on-screen interface and its own weird laggy Wi-Fi remote that eats batteries like nothing else in my house. I dont know why a plastic stick should go through two AAAs a month but mine does.
The thing I keep going back and forth on is whether the Chromecast is actually a product or just a delivery mechanism for getting Google apps onto more televisions. Theres no interface on the TV itself, no menu, nothing to open with a remote because there is no remote. Everything routes through your phone or your laptop Chrome tab. Thats either brilliant simplicity or a weirdly limited device depending on your mood, and I go back and forth on which one it is depending on whether the casting connection is working that day. Mine dropped once last night for no reason I could find and I had to restart casting from scratch, which is a small annoyance but the kind that adds up.
Anyway. If youre the type who already has a drawer full of streaming boxes — Roku, an old Apple TV, whatever came bundled with your cable modem that one time, this is a cheap one to add to the pile, and the Netflix trial alone almost pays for it. Just dont be the person who buys six of them. Somebody's going to close that loophole eventually and I'd rather not be the guy explaining to Netflix support why I have four accounts under my name.