Thrift Week 2024, Day 4: Chromecast

When streaming video first became a thing, sometime in the late 2000s, Brian and I used to watch it by hooking up his laptop to our TV set. When that laptop died in 2010, he built a dedicated media computer with around $325 worth of parts. That served us well for several years, but eventually it started to struggle. We'd have pauses of a few minutes each in the middle of a tense moment on Critical Role as the machine struggled to keep up.

Sometime in 2017, we decided to give one of the nifty new set-top streaming boxes a try. We started out by hazarding $5 on a secondhand Roku at the townwide yard sales, but it turned out to be incapable of streaming from Twitch or YouTube, the two sites we relied on most. This experience made us more cautious about which model to choose as an alternative. We realized that products made by certain companies, such as Apple or Amazon, would probably give us easy access to their own content and make it difficult, if not impossible, to watch anyone else's. So we eventually settled on a Google Chromecast, which was capable of streaming anything that a computer could display. (True, it required a computer or other device to stream from, rather than being a self-contained unit, but that wasn't a problem for us.)

In the six years since, our Chromecast has certainly saved us more than the $30 or so we spent on it. But exactly how much depends on what you compare it to. If you consider it to be the thing that allows us to live without TV service, then it's saving us around $40 a month, the price of Optimum's cheapest plan. Even if you deduct from that the $5 to $15 a month we pay for streaming services (depending on which ones we're using at any given time), that's still a savings of roughly $30 per month—over $2,000 for the approximately six years we've been using it.

But it's probably a bit of a cheat to calculate this way, because it's unlikely we'd be willing to pay for TV service under any circumstances. If we couldn't use Chromecast to watch our various shows, we'd have spent $400 or so on a new media computer instead. That's a much more modest savings, but still a pretty good return on a $30 investment.

It's only fair to point out that just like its predecessor, our Chromecast now occasionally runs up against a problem it can't handle. For instance, it can no longer cast episodes of Critical Role on Twitch from Brian's laptop to our TV—quite possibly because Twitch has now been acquired by Amazon, which doesn't like to play nicely with its competitors. This is, of course, exactly the problem we were hoping to avoid by choosing the Chromecast, which was supposed to be able to cast from any browser window, but perhaps Amazon has found a way to block this capability. (Brian can manage to get the "cast" button to appear by opening up YouTube in a separate tab, but when he tries to cast the screen showing Twitch, it simply quits.) 

However, if the behemoth is hoping to force us into buying a new Amazon Fire Stick to stream "its" content, it's going to be disappointed. We've found not one but two work-arounds: we can either cast from the Twitch app on Brian's phone, or we can skip casting entirely and watch Critical Role on the tiny screen of Brian's laptop instead. It's not ideal, but we'd rather sit on the couch and peer at a tiny screen than give even $30 of our hard-earned cash to Amazon.