Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

A week or so ago, Google announced (and started shipping) their Chromecast device, a simple $35 Dongle you plug into any HD TV, to give it Web capabilities. It can stream video and audio from the Web. Excellent. It also basically allows you to view any web content on a TV.

Interesting to see this low cost, web focussed solution in the same space that just a year ago, Google made a big song and dance about the high cost (roughly ten times more expensive ), web-free Nexus Q. Interesting too to see Chrome (i.e. Google’s ‘web’ brand rather than ‘Nexus’ Google’s Android device brand) used as the brand for the device. Is the web on the ascendence at Google at the expense of Android?

For nearly two decades, we’ve seen all sorts of strange couplings of the Web and TV. Will this be the tipping point for the Web on television? We’ve spent several years now thinking about how to optimise the web experience for smaller, high resolution, touch driven screens.Time to really start thinking about the sorts of interfaces will work best for this context.