It's a Festivus miracle. Both models of Google's Chromecast — the brilliant little dongle that makes it super easy (and pretty darn inexpensive) to stream just about anything from a phone to a television — are once again listed at Amazon. This follows many months in online retail purgatory as Amazon and Google have continued their little feud, as competitors sometimes are wont to do.
If for some reason you've missed what all the fuss is about, it's this: The Chromecast protocol lets you take a video from, say, YouTube or Chrome or any supported app on Android or iOS or in a desktop instance of Chrome and stream it to your TV. The dongle actually does all the work — your phone just points it in the right direction.
And it's a pretty low-cost endeavor, too. The latest model of Chromecast is just $35 and tops out at 1080p resolution. (Though it can now handle 60 frames per second, so that's a thing.) The $69 Chromecast Ultra takes things up to 4K resolution and is the one we recommend you buy if you want to be a little more future-proofed.
Does this all mean that Google and Amazon have kissed and made up? We'll see. Amazon Fire TV still doesn't have native support for YouTube, which in addition to being more than a little ridiculous is still a pretty big black mark on it as a streaming platform. And you still can't Chromecast Amazon Prime Video, which is damned annoying. So there's still a little daylight between the two companies' bodies as this dance continues.
