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Winners and Losers: Google upgrades Chromecast as Disney Plus announces a price hike
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It’s the weekend, meaning it’s once again time for us to name our winner and loser of the week.
This week saw Samsungall but confirm the existence of the Galaxy S24 FEwith a live support page appearing on its official French website, while Sonos announced that it would bedelaying the launch of two new products to prioritise fixing its broken app.
Google, meanwhile, found itself in hot water when a US courtruled Google Search an anti-competitive monopolyin a major anti-trust ruling – a decision Google reportedly plans to appeal.
Keep reading to learn who we named our winner and loser this week.
Winner: Google
Despite the court ruling regarding Google Search, Google remains our winner this week after the company announced a major refresh to its Chromecast line of streaming devices.
In fact, a refresh might be an understatement as Google is dropping the “Chromecast” name entirely, beginning with the launch of the newGoogle TV Streamer 4K.
Compared to the outgoingChromecast with Google TV, the TV Streamer 4K packs a 22% faster processor, twice the memory and twice the storage. The device takes advantage of Google’s Gemini GenAI tools baked through, allowing you to make complex requests and receive summaries and recommendations from the AI assistant.
The Streamer 4K also features an all-new design, voice remote and it supports the Matter smart home standard with a Thread border router, enabling smart home devices to work together faster and more reliably. Meanwhile, the Google Home panel lets users check cameras, adjust lights and tweak the temperature from the remote without closing what they’re watching.
While this is exciting news for new users, it might leave current Chromecast owners worried about losing support for their devices in the near future. Thankfully, Google has assured those users thatnothing will change in regard to their Chromecast devicesand that they will continue to receive software and security updates.
Loser: Disney Plus
This week’s loser is Disney Plus, as the streaming service announcedyet another price hike in the US.
From October 17, the price of Disney Plus with ads will increase from $7.99/month to $9.99/month, while the ad-free tier will rise from $13.99/month to $15.99/month.
This will be Disney’s fifth annual price hike since the service launched in 2019, with the ad-free plan originally costing just $6.99/month at launch. This means that the cost of using Disney Plus has more than doubled since the service launched less than five years ago.
While this price hike has only been announced in the US so far, we don’t expect it to be long before Disney confirms the change in other markets. Typically, the UK and Europe receive the same treatment from Disney Plus a little further down the line.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, Disney CEO Bob Iger recently promised investors thatthe company’s crackdown on password sharing would hit full speed in September.
“We started our password sharing initiative in June”, said Iger in an earnings call on Tuesday (via Seeking Alpha). “That kicks in, in earnest in September. By the way, we’ve had no backlash at all to the notifications that have gone out and to the work that we’ve already been doing”.
This means that anyone sharing an account can expect an even more substantial price increase if Disney catches on and forces them to pay their own subscription fee to keep streaming.
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Hannah joined Trusted Reviews as a staff writer in 2019 after graduating with a degree in English from Royal Holloway, University of London. She’s also worked and studied in the US, holding positions …
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Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.
Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
