I refuse to stop using my 8-year-old Chromecast for one simple reason

News that the original Chromecast has just received an unexpected update is music to my ears. I’m a big fan of the simplicity of those early HDMI dongles, far more than I am of the overly verbose and often laggy Google TV. I suppose I’m still just attached to my earliest smart TV experience, flinging content at my TV from my phone rather than running the gauntlet of advertisements just to find my favorite show.

If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it, as they say, and my Chromecast (3rd gen) still sees occasional use. In fact, I’ve been using it a lot more in the past couple of years to placate two impatient youngsters.

It’s currently plugged into the back of my Android TV, which has built-in Chromecast capabilities of its own. That might seem incredibly redundant at first glance. The problem is, this affordable TCL TV isn’t the fastest set on the market, and its casting capabilities leave a lot to be desired. Sending video from my laptop or tablet browser results in audio sink issues and poor image quality, which soon makes the stream unwatchable.

Likewise, casting across from an Android app like Jellyfin or YouTube takes an age to load up the compatible TV app/service. My seemingly lower-end TV hardware has been over-encumbered by UI updates to the point where I yearn for a simpler, faster, and less bloated experience. I returned my more advanced and expensive Chromecast with Google TV for that very reason; it was just far too slow to actually get into watching anything. Unfortunately, I was unable to escape that accursed UI on my TV forever.

Thankfully, my Chromecast still gets on with the job without delay. Granted, the aging hardware occasionally suffers from heavy compression and buffering when streaming from a nearby laptop. I’ve never quite been able to figure out whether it’s a network or a casting issue, but I struggle to think it’s the former, given a solid 100 Mbps Wi-Fi connection in my living room. In any case, the phone-casting experience remains as good as ever, though some apps don’t pay as much attention to casting features as they used to. Still, where casting is supported, it’s often better than the TV app experience for booting up what you actually want to watch as quickly as possible.

There’s still something satisfyingly efficient about picking content from any number of apps on my phone and simply and quickly casting it across to my old Chromecast. No UI hangs, clunky TV remote search bars, or sluggish updates to worry about. Casting has always felt like a supremely natural extension of the smart home media experience, and for that reason alone, I doubt I’ll ever stop using it.

To borrow a phrase from Apple, it just works. In fact, it might be one of the few Google products to outlast its initial mission statement and still be more useful than its successors. So I salute you, original Chromecasts. May you have many more years of streaming left in you.