Today, we introduced a new Chromecast and its partner-in-crime, Chromecast Audio. Chromecast has faster performance, a new design and is available in three colors. Chromecast Audio is a small device that plugs into your existing speakers, so you can stream your favorite tunes from your phone, similar to Chromecast.


It’s fall premiere season-- catch up on your favorites. Chromecast can help you burn through the last season of Homeland on Showtime before the next season premieres in October. Or choose from over 200,000 TV shows and movies from favorites like Netflix, Google Play Movies, HBO Now, Hulu, CW Seed, WatchABC and WatchDisney, with SlingTV coming soon.

Never miss your favorite sports game. With recently-launched NFL Sunday Ticket by DirecTV, you can cast live games (even those that aren’t nationally televised) to the TV. Check the scores and stats from the mobile app while watching the action live on TV. Chromecast works with WatchESPN, MLB At Bat, CBS Sports and many others. NBA, NHL and BTN2Go are coming soon.

Score a last-minute party playlist. You’re throwing a party and forgot to make a playlist. With Chromecast Audio, anyone in your house (and on your WiFi) can DJ using their phone to cast to the speakers—no additional pairing or set up necessary. Choose from over 35 million songs on Spotify, Google Play Music, Pandora iHeartRadio and more.

Give game night a twist. Turn your TV screen into a race track, golf course or dance floor. Chromecast takes popular mobile games and brings them to the big screen. Anyone can join in, using their Android phone or iPhone® as a game controller. Soon, we’ll be adding Angry Birds Go!, WGT Golf, and Driver Speedboat Paradise. Available now are classics like Just Dance Now, Catch Phrase Blitz, and Scrabble Blitz.

Relive the weekend. Before you completely dive back into the real world on Monday morning, share your weekend memories. With Google Photos, cast any picture from your albums to the TV for a bigger picture, while using your phone to swipe to the next one.

You can also turn your TV screen into a picture frame filled with photos from Facebook, Google Photos, Flickr, Getty Images, 500px and more. Visit chromecast.com/backdrop to find out more.

Cast the morning news. With Chromecast Audio, cast talk shows like NPR One to your bedroom speakers while you're getting ready for work.

Enjoy some sweet offers. Once you’ve purchased and set up a Chromecast, you’ll find a few special offers waiting for you:

• 90 days of free music from Google Play
• free 1 month trial of CBS All Access
• free movie rental from Google Play
• three-month free trial of Rhapsody
• 30 days of access to Crunchyroll Premium.

Visit chromecast.com/offers* to learn more.

Your phone is bursting with entertainment. With Chromecast and Chromecast Audio, you can enjoy your content on the biggest screen and best speakers in the home.

Post by Shanna Preve, Director Global Content, Chromecast

* Terms apply. For more information, visit chromecast.com/offers.
Please note that some of the apps referenced above require subscriptions.

Speed is one of the founding principles of Chrome. As the web evolves and sites take advantage of increasing capabilities, Chrome’s performance—how fast pages load, how smooth scrolling is, how much memory is consumed, and how long your battery lasts—becomes even more important. So in the latest release of Chrome we’ve included a ton of improvements to make your browsing use less memory and power.

Chrome has long had the option to “continue where you left off” by restoring tabs when you relaunch Chrome. Now, Chrome is smarter about restoring your tabs more efficiently. Tabs are restored from most to least recently viewed, so you get to see the most important tabs faster. And Chrome will now detect if your computer is running low on resources and stop restoring the rest of your tabs to save you precious memory. You can always click to restore them if you'd like to access them later.

We’ve also introduced another memory-saving technique. Chrome can now detect when a webpage isn't busy with some other task, and use the free time to aggressively clean up old, unused memory. In practice we found that this reduced website memory usage by 10% on average, but the effect is even more dramatic on complex web apps. With Gmail, for example, we can free up nearly a quarter of the memory used by the tab.



We’ve also made changes to Chrome to improve power usage. A new setting introduced in June will auto-pause Flash content that's not central to a website. Our testing has shown that turning on this setting makes your battery last up to 15% longer depending on your operating system, so over the next few weeks we'll begin turning on this feature by default for all users. 

This latest version of Chrome includes the most recent wave of performance updates, but there's much more in the works for upcoming versions of Chrome. So get ready for faster, even more powerful browsing!

Posted by Ryan Schoen, Product Manager and Performance Promoter