14 DAY TRIAL // Two years have passed since Google debuted Chromecast as the perfect, small streaming device for TVs. To celebrate its second birthday, the company offers free movie rental and access to 90 days of Play Music.
Being Google’s main foray into the television market, the already famous Chromecast is a small HDMI dongle that mirrors content being played on a tablet, a smartphone or a computer. However, the mirrored content isnt’ beamed from your local device but streamed from the cloud directly to the dongle when you activate mirroring on a Chromecast-compatible service like YouTube or Netflix, in other words, it pulls the data from your mobile platform receiver directly into the small dongle receiver plugged into your TV.
The 2-inch device runs a simplified version of Chrome OS and it requires separate USB power and it works with your local Wi-Fi network while trying to find similarly connected devices that it can work with. Although it doesn’t support 4K, it can play 1080p quality and UHD through its HDMI connector.
Although it’s almost tradition for Google to celebrate Chromecast’s birthday each year, last year the offer was more modest as it offered just a complimentary subscription to its audio-streaming service. Fortunately, if you don’t have Chromecast yet, the deal will be available until December 31 so you may have some time to take advantage of this deal.