The first Chromecast app for the rest of the Web
An overnight success: 20k views in the first 10 days for a 4 hour project built on the Chromecast SDK.
Last month, just hours after Google released the SDK (Software Development Kit) for Chromecast, I launched VidCast — a simple app that picks up video all over the web and allows you to play them on your Chromecast. It has a bookmarklet that works on 700+ video sites such as Vimeo, TED, FunnyOrDie, and a host of others. It also works as a Chromecast URL player in that you can put in any URL of an MP4/WebM video file (or image) and cast it to your television.
Update — VIDEO LOOPING now available: VidCast Looper is the first app that has video looping for the Chromecast. Perfect for looping presentations in lobbies, or photo slideshows at events (I‘ll be using it at my wedding in 2 months).
How it hit 20k visits in the first 10 days
On the evening that Google released their SDK for Chromecast I jumped in to see how hard it would be to put a basic app together. Within 2 hours I had a working prototype of casting Vimeo to my TV, and something I was comfortable publishing within 4 hours. Just as I was about to share that I was the first to add Chromecast support to Vimeo on the same day the SDK was released it hit me: this thing is going to work for almost any video on the Web!
I made a few more tweaks to better support a number of sites and then posted it on ProductHunt and HackerNews.
A writer at Mashable stumbled across the HN post I threw up and wrote up a story that was published the next day:
Arterburn, who is the co-founder of the startup Brandfolder.com, put the extension together in about four hours and showed off the results on Hacker News. The bookmarklet works with sites such as Vimeo, TED, FunnyOrDie, and lots of other websites that serve video.
- Christina Warren on the Mashable story on VidCast
From there it blossomed into a trending topic, and within 48 hours of being live this thing had almost hit 5,000 daily visits — and a 60% usage rate (visits that casted something). I definitely felt the affects of “product is marketing”. I built it to scratch my own itch, and it didn’t have an obvious revenue stream (I also had a full-time+ job of being a founder in my own startup) so I didn’t spend any extra time marketing it. Yet, it was pretty awesome to see my little project take off.
It had a lot of folks talking in all sorts of Reddit discussion, blog posts, and even recording their own how-to videos like the one below.
Why Dabble.me/cast?
It’s called VidCast—a name I spent 4 seconds thinking of, but now realize is way too popular already. Some folks simply know it as Dabble.me/cast (the URL). I had Dabble.me laying around as a domain I’m trying to sell, so I thought I’d try to kill two birds with one stone!
If you’re a happy user of VidCast and want to give back to the developer in some way, the best thing I could ask for is a quick tweet to plug my startup, Brandfolder. If the idea of having a single, standardized place for organizing & sharing your brand assets is something up your alley, give it a try as well — it’s free to build one!
