ALEX DANILO: Hi.
I'm Alex Danilo from the Google Developer Platform team.
As a developer, I want more people to use my apps,
and to spend more time using them,
so I get more bang for my buck, especially if it means more
in-app purchases, or ad viewing time that
turns into real money in my pocket.
The average TV viewer spends up to three hours a day
in front of their TV set.
If only there was a way to get my apps onto that big screen
to take advantage of all that time, I could be rich.
Well, there is a way.
It's called Google Cast.
Google cast is a technology that lets you, as a developer,
extend your existing app onto the big screen in people's
living room.
It's so simple easy to add casting capability
to your apps, that soon enough, you'll
be reeling in more and more users to enjoy your creations.
And I'm going to take you through a quick tour
of how easy it is to do so.
Google Cast is a way to connect different devices and screens
together.
You can think of it as a way to extend your app's functionality
out from where you ship your app today,
onto another big screen that lots of people can share.
The app you already have is the place where the magic starts.
We call that the sender.
Sender apps can be on a phone, both iOS or Android,
or a tablet, or even a laptop running a web application.
Senders start the action, and they send or cast stuff
from the app onto the big screen.
When you cast something from your app-- the sender--
it needs to get caught by something.
That's what the receiver is for.
Google Cast runs on receiving devices, like the Chrome Cast.
At the start casting, a small application
we call the receiver gets downloaded
onto the receiving device.
Your sender application controls which receiver application
gets loaded onto the cast device.
The cast-enabled sender, like your existing app,
just needs to integrate the cast SDK
to enable discovery of existing cast
devices on the local network.
Once it finds devices nearby, the Google Cast icon
becomes visible to users within your app.
Clicking on that icon turns the sender into a remote control,
and we have a ton of UI guidelines
about how to make everything that
follows a magical and intuitive experience.
Things like selecting your cast device,
pausing and scrubbing, or just making it look really nice.
So with the small amount of code inside your existing
application, you can trigger a receiver application
on a cast-enabled device to extend the reach of your app
onto the big screen to let lots of people
enjoy the capabilities you have to offer.
When you kick off a receiver application from your app,
the cast device just pulls that in from the URL
hosted on a server somewhere.
Pretty simple, really.
But that's where the magic happens.
Since the cast device runs by itself,
you can tell it to load things like media streams,
which load directly from the cloud, onto the cast device,
and your sender app does no work at all,
apart from setting it all up.
You can also send messages from your app
to the receiver application, so you can control things
like playing, and pausing, and volume, et cetera.
The receiver application itself, which shows your content,
is built with web technology, and is in fact
an HTML5 application, written in HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript,
which makes it super simple to develop.
We've also provided a bunch of sample receiver apps,
so you can get started without having
to write any receiver code at all.
What you make the receiver do is totally up to you.
You can send pictures across, make it
a game score display, or almost anything
that's up to your imagination.
Getting started couldn't be easier.
If you develop Android, iOS, or even web apps,
we've got you all covered with an SDK for each platform.
We have full source code examples
of a bunch of different sender applications,
with all sorts of functionality that you
can take a look at, cut and paste code out
of, and integrate into your existing applications in almost
no time.
We also have a bunch of different receiver applications
that can run on your cast device right out of box.
We also have an example of a fully customizable receiver
application.
It delves into more complex receiver capabilities,
such as licensed content serving, different video
formats, adaptive streaming, and all that other tricky stuff.
To get started, you should jump onto our developer console,
and register as a developer, so that you
can begin making your app cast enabled.
So get to it.
Cast enable your app now, and watch the magic happen
as your app becomes the main focus
in living rooms everywhere.