Opinions Wanted - Chromecast or Apple TV for Mixed OS household?

[Ozrockrat]

I have Amazon Fire, Chrome Cast and Apple TV. The Chrome Cast is a POS and is forever buffering and losing connection (15' from the router). To replace it on one of the main TV's we got the Amazon Fire (already had the Apple TV for years). While it does check the box for being able to get access to the Amazon prime movies I find it is such a PITA to find something using that interface I just give up. One advantage it the Fire is app based access to the BBC world news for those times you actually want to see what is happening in the world.

The Apple TV on the other hand has been absolutely hassle free and seamless in it interaction with our mainly Apple household. Probably the only criticism I get from the others in the household is the streaming of all the photos of receipts from my iPhone.

Also we have no cable TV. We do have Hulu Plus and Netflix plus a high speed internet connection and stream all content. This saves us about $150 a month compared to our old package.

 

[nwoods]

TV arrived today, but I have to go to holiday event all night. The unboxing will have to wait until tomorrow :-(

As for trying to obtain new/more media content.....not really. I admit it might be likely that we will watch more TV now that we have this beastie in the house, but our general behavior is that we just don't watch a lot of TV. We rent movies on occasion, and I have Amazon Prime and Redbox, so we should be covered, plus the rental options through AT&T U-verse and iTunes. I really think our primary use of a "connected" TV will be screencast/airplay what's on our handheld devices to the main screen to share. I ordered an Apple TV (refurb, nice tip Ryan!), and a Chromecast key, so with all that, plus its own built-in features, we should be good!

 

[rayra]

Get Apple TV refurbished through the apple refurbished site, you can usually save $20.

That's what we did, about a year ago. It's working great, and I'm playing 400-some movies I digitized from our own disc collection via iTunes to our TV. Didn't need to build an HTPC. And the airplay functions are great too. There's a decent smattering of free content via the AppleTV, too. News, movie trailers, some other stuff.