Apple TV or Chromecast? Opt for savings or the most complete service? Are we passionate about the apple house or do we really have electronic devices (understand smartphones, tablets, computers…) of different brands? Today's article has the mission of answering these and many other questions that may be hanging around the head of any user who is thinking of hunting down one of these devices without even knowing which one to choose. We begin:

For starters, we could talk about the most obvious: Chromecast does not have a remote control, while Apple TV does. This fact that may sound like Perogrullo shows us that these two products are neither the same, nor are they intended for the same type of users. Of the Chromecast we must say that it acts as an intermediary between our Android device, and our television, to which it is connected through an HDMI port. For its part, Apple TV is not directly connected to our screen, in addition to having its own content, along with the AirPlay function (ChromeBook's alter ego).

One of the advantages that Chromecast has is that it can be used with practically any device compatible with Android or Chrome, while AirPlay has its functionality reduced to iPads, iPhones and Mac, in other words: the different members of the Apple family.

Compatibility

These two devices have been specially designed for televisions that are not Smart TVs, because if so we could find many of the functions offered by these "gadgets" already included in the television.

As an advantage on the part of Apple TV we can comment that it is enough with itself to be able to offer us a service, that is, it shows us content from its own applications, without the need for any other external device, while the Chromecast does it feeds from other terminals since, as we mentioned above, it cannot transmit content by itself but acts as a "bridge" between our television and another device such as a Smartphone or a tablet, which are the ones who have that information (or better said applications) that we see reflected on the screen. Outside of Spain, Apple TV also gains weight thanks to its agreements with Netflix and Hulu.

Streaming

Apple TV also plays with the advantage of being able to access our computer's hard drive through Setbox. By activating the “Share at home” function in iTunes we will be able to access all the music and video files of the Apple multimedia manager (even in Windows) through our television; while in the case of Chromecast the exact opposite happens: there is no way to access the library of our pc from our television, so the information must be launched from the computer to the Chromecast, which will retransmit it through the screen.

On the other hand, almost any Apple application on MacOS and iOS brings with it the possibility of sending streaming content to Apple TV, something that does not happen with Chromecast, which justifies that Google insisted so much on the SDK, which is launched at same time as the device.

Google's golden goose in this regard is the Chrome browser, which enables any multimedia content you run to be broadcast through the Chromecast, making it visually universal. Apple TV for its part not only allows iOS and MacOS users to see their navigation through the TV, but they can also do a full mirroring of what their screen shows, although not all Apple products can do this, such as the iPhone 4 or the iMac 2010.

Price

The difference is very palpable: Chromecast costs us 35 euros and we can do it with Apple TV for 112.

conclusion

We can conclude by saying that from Professional Review we think that both devices are absolved of all competition, that is, rather than having a fortuitous encounter in the market, they are going to be complementary, since they turn out to be two different products that seek to fill the gaps reciprocally we could say; and if not take a look at the table that we leave below:

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Applications	Apple tv	Chromecast
Youtube	Yes	Yes
Hulu plus	Yes	Do not
Pandora	Yes	Soon
Rdio	Yes	Do not
Netflix	Yes	Yes
HBO Go	Yes	Do not
Spotify	Yes	Do not
HD Playback	1080p	1080p
Streaming	Device to Device	Cloud
Mirroring	Yes	Chrome only
Dual Screen Gaming	Yes	Do not
Third-party API	Yes	Yes
Certified 3rd party hardware	Yes	Do not
Operating systems
Windows	Do not	Yes
OS X	Yes	Yes
Android	Do not	Yes
iOS	Yes	Yes
Chrome	Do not	Yes
Windows Phone 8	Do not	Do not
Hardware remote	Yes	Do not