New Google Cast competitor is open-source and backed by Amazon

Google themselves started an open source & open protocol Open Screen Protocol alternative, as promised, a bit after promising to do so to make a viable device-side way of doing Presentation API for casting. https://w3c.github.io/openscreenprotocol/explainer.html

That explainer is three years old. Their code runs. There's a meeting at every IETF with a little bit of discussion and progress. But, it mostly looks like one very dedicated very awesome engineer giving this project like 10% of his time.

I really really like Open Screen Protocol. It has so many of the best things about Chromecast, it has so much of what made Netflixcs DIAL which started this all great: it's a very capable remotely scriptable web browser, that can run in its own. It would hypothetically work fine for a Cast device with cameras or microphones attached. It supports multi-parties connecting to a cast session. There's tons of great stuff possible.

It just will not ship. There's no devices based on it. The standards group moves so slow, has so few stakeholders. No one but Google contributes, even though it seems so high value, so interesting, and even though there seems to be no opposition or major issues. Letting Matter show up & eat this really awesome protocol's cheerios is such a sad egg-to-the-face moment.

To be clear, Apple and Google (who have chromecast and airplay respectively) are also part of the consortium developing Matter. They just haven’t included Matter Cast on any device (yet?)

https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/

As bad as Google's vision and long-term strategy, from what can see today I'll bet on Chromecast rather than whatever Amazon brings to the table. Chromecast is in many hotels and easily usable from almost any video/audio Android app, and a new product is unlikely to change that any time soon. Well, if they do make it interoperable with Chromecast and AirPlay, I'll take another look.

I just want something that is compatible with every service/app and always streams reliably.

Is that too much to ask?

Even Chromecast can't pair with some apps (and can't act as a Bluetooth audio receiver leading to constant confusion from users whether they are pairing or casting). Eg. it's really hard to cast a local video/mp3 file unless you know what you're doing.