Last week Google announced Chromecast, a new $35 HDMI dongle that lets users “cast” content from their mobile devices and computers to a TV over Wi-Fi. Now if you travel a lot, you might have though about carrying Chromecast with you, because hotel TV can sometimes be very boring, particularly if you’re travelling in a country with little or no channels in your language. John Affaki, the engineering manager for Chromecast developer experience, has confirmed that Chromecast unfortunately will not be supporting public Wi-Fi networks.
He describes a number of problems that users will face when trying to use Chromecast with public networks. Most hotels disable peer-to-peer communication on their networks, so users won’t be able to control the dongle. Moreover, Chromecast doesn’t have support for captive wireless networks right now. Captive networks are those which require you to log in through a browser prior to letting you access the internet, most hotels have these as well. One could set up a personal hotspot through their laptop or smartphone, but the data costs alone would make anyone shudder with the thought of streaming a high definition video over the network.
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