If you are one of these people:
- Who love creating videos OR
- Who love watching your personal videos on your TV OR
- Who love to hate HDMI cables OR
- Who love RealPlayer Cloud OR
- Who love Chromecast – Google’s $35 TV dongle OR
- All of the Above
… then we have hot news for you. We just announced that the RealPlayer Cloud apps on iPhone, iPad, Android and Web will all have integrated Chromecast support starting today. In a nutshell, you can now take all your videos on your PC, iPad, iPhone or Android and start watching them on your TV.
Each of the RealPlayer Cloud apps will come with a little button on the top-right corner that will allow you to cast videos from the device to your TV. You can even control the playback of your videos from the device, so your device in essence becomes a remote control.
Chromecast has been around since July of this year. RealPlayer Cloud becomes just one of a handful of apps that are available for the popular device. While Chromecast has had apps like Netflix and HBO Go to allow you to watch premium content, there hasn’t been an app yet that allows you to take your local on-device videos (that you have presumably shot yourself) and watch it on your TV. Today’s announcement changes all that. Now, you can also cast your personal on-device videos in addition to the ones that you have downloaded or subscribed to.
Whenever we announce support for a new device, we make sure that there is some SurePlayTM magic. What that means is that we want to make sure your videos will actually play on the device. Without getting too technical, let’s just say that the videos that you record on your smartphone or tablet can be large. And getting those videos over to Chromecast over your WiFi connection presents a huge technical challenge. So, our engineers worked around those challenges and created a solution that would allow you to watch those videos without pausing or buffering (heh). We have planned further optimizations along these lines.
Speaking of SurePlay, we are also announcing new SurePlay levels that deliver higher quality playback and experience for those who buy one of the paid versions of RealPlayer Cloud. These will come in 3 varieties namely SurePlay HD, SurePlay HD+ and SurePlay Pro. These will be available with the Silver, Gold and Pro versions of RealPlayer Cloud respectively.
Happy Casting!!
