Amazon's Prime Video casting to Chromecast and Cast-ready smart TVs

Good to see these devices play nice with each other again!

It finally happened! Google and Amazon have finally ended their long-running feud of non-interoperability between their Fire Stick (and similar family of hardware) and Chromecast devices. It was especially frustrating for me in the past when I have just started my subscription for Amazon's Prime Video. Although viewing via the Prime Video website is not exactly difficult, sometimes I would rather watch shows in a much larger screen such as my Android-powered smart-TV or a TV equipped with a streaming box/dongle such as a Chromecast whenever I am in a hotel.

Why is this news such a big deal for me? Ideally, of course, the best way to watch Prime Video content is to use the native app on your device. Unfortunately, even with the recent release of Prime Video for Android TV, both that app and the android phone version of Amazon Prime remains to be incompatible/uninstallable on my Sharp Android TV (and also on my Asus Chromebook Flip C302).

I was actually fortunate enough to play around with my brother's Amazon 4K Fire Stick and I have used it primarily as a receiver to cast Prime Video content from my phone to the bigger screen. Wonderful as this setup sounds, the fact remains that this piece of hardware is only on loan from my brother and he will want to have it back at some point and I am unable to justify the purchase of the fire stick just for this purpose (I will talk about the usefulness of the device in the Philippines-setting in a separate blog post).

Hello there floating cast icon old friend, fancy meeting you here...

The last time the Prime Video app had an update on my phone, I was pleasantly greeted with a brief intro on the new cast feature and the familiar floating cast icon greeted me on the home screen. I tried it out and my TV happily informed me that that it is ready to cast Amazon Prime Video content and it assured me "that it's going to be awesome."

Yup, it sure is!