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October 4th, 2016 · No Comments · 2160p, Connected TVs, Digital Media Receivers, HDMI, HDR, Home Automation, News, screen mirroring, search and recommendation, Second Screen, Streaming Services, UHD (4K) Media Players, UHDTV  Google used its hardware press conference in San Francisco Tuesday to unveil the latest iteration in its family of Chromecast digital media adapters.The new Chromecast Ultra, which is billed as offering the most premium Chromecast streaming video experience to date, is designed to seamlessly link (along with other Chromecast units) to the newly announced – and Amazon Echo-like – Google Home omni-directional wireless speaker with built-in Google Assist.Google...

As soon as Google unveiled Chromecast, I was lucky enough to scoop up a couple of the $35 devices to connect the two TVs in our home. After a few weeks, it’s fundamentally changed how my family watches TV. It’s also changed some of my perceptions about the evolution of the “second screen.” Most of the TV viewing in our house is dominated by our kids. Ages 3 and 5, they immediately grasped how to “cast” their Netflix shows from our phones (iPhone and Nexus 4) and iPads to either TV. After all, they were already watching Netflix on their...

Dell Initiates Shipments of Ophelia HDMI Sticks to Testers Dell, one of the largest suppliers of personal computers in the world, has begun to ship its credit-card-sized device that can turn any screen with an HDMI input into a personal computer running Google Android operating system to beta testers. The product should cost around $100 and will eventually compete with gadgets like Google’s Chromecast device.Code-named project Ophelia, the device looks like a big USB drive, but it packs much more than just NAND flash storage. Project Ophelia functions as a multipurpose Citrix or VMware thin client, a web client for...

Commentary: Easy to watch anything on the Internet on your TV*****************************************************Thinking of C-SPAN from their Archives.*********************************By Carol Kopp Here’s what all the noise was about on Monday morning. At Netflix headquarters, people were cheering. At the big cable companies , they were shaking in their boots. At Amazon , one executive might have been trying to explain what went wrong. At Google , they were just quietly smiling. It was all about a thumb-size, $35 gadget called Google Chromecast that came out last week with little fanfare, almost as an afterthought to the announcement of a new version of its...

The market for streaming media players may no longer be a two-horse race between Apple and Roku. The introduction of Google's Chromecast has given the category a jolt -- but there were always more fish in the sea than the big two. Now that Google has gotten people talking about streaming media players in earnest, we've canvassed the competition, including some models you may have missed, to gage the strengthes and weaknesses of each.