Why Was Google's Chromecast Line Discontinued?

Back in 2013, Google launched the original Chromecast – a gadget that grabbed a lot of eyeballs. For $35, you could have access to a tiny HDMI stick that could turn any "dumb" TV into something that could stream Netflix and YouTube. The beauty was in what it didn't try to do. Google wasn't attempting to build the ultimate entertainment hub or overthrow cable TV. It just wanted to solve one annoying problem: transferring media from your phone onto a big screen without cables or complicated setup processes. It worked pretty well for a few years. However, as time passed, people started amping up their expectations.

They wanted to surf Netflix to discover shows and movies directly on the TV and not just on their phones — a feature that Chromecast didn't have back in the day. They wanted voice commands, menus, and the ability to browse catalogs. Convenience was the name of the game. Roku figured this out early; so did Amazon with the Fire TV and Apple with its TV box. Even Google's own Android TV platform started leaning hard into the full-interface experience. The original Chromecast? It started feeling a bit... limited. Sure, Google kept the name alive and kicking with the Chromecast Ultra and later the Chromecast with Google TV, but the stripped-down "just casting" model couldn't keep pace with what users wanted. Eventually, Google discontinued the standalone Chromecast line altogether, folding it into Google TV — a move we'll unpack in more detail below.

The real death blow came from an unexpected place: TVs themselves got smart. By that, we mean actually smart — not the clunky, slow-as-molasses smart TV interfaces we all learned to hate in the early 2010s. When TV manufacturers started shipping decent Android TV setups built right into their hardware, Google had to ask itself a pretty obvious question: Why sell people a separate dongle when the TV can already do everything that the dongle does, plus more? By 2020, you could tell Google had made up its mind. The new Chromecast with Google TV showed up with a remote control and a full-blown interface. It wasn't a casting receiver anymore; it was a proper streaming device that happened to also support casting. Which — when you think about it — made the old cast-only model feel pointless.

Meanwhile, Android TV — renamed to Google TV later — was spreading everywhere. Sony, TCL, Hisense — suddenly, a large chunk of TVs out there ran Google TV. Why would someone buy a Chromecast when their new TV already has the required features built in? Internally, Google started treating this like the obvious consolidation it was. Instead of maintaining two different approaches, i.e., a casting device and an interface device, it just went all-in on the platform that could do both.

There's another angle here that's worth mentioning — Google's whole ecosystem play. As Google Assistant got smarter and Nest devices started showing up in more homes, the search giant wanted deeper control over how everything connected in your living room. The original Chromecast was essentially a passive receiver. It did what your phone told it to do, and that was it. No settings to tweak, no user profiles, no way for Google to understand how you used your TV.

The newer approach gave Google all of that data and control. Additionally, several streaming services with popular content started getting erratic about casting support to push their native apps instead. Netflix would work fine, but maybe a smaller platform would have casting issues or limited features. With a full interface device, those problems mostly disappeared. Honestly, this is very much Google's style. It has done this dance before with Nexus phones, the original Google Home, and Pixel Slate tablets. When a product's main purpose gets absorbed into a different platform, it doesn't usually keep both around. As the final nail in the coffin, Google officially ended support for the original 2013 Chromecast in April 2023, exactly 10 years after launch. By then, it had already done what it set out to do — prove that the idea worked — before quietly stepping aside for the devices that would replace it.