28 July 2014

Medium: “Number Games”

Chromecast

400,000,000 uses per year, if every user uses it seven days a week on average, means 1,095,890 customers globally. Whereas if each user is using it four times a week, that’s 208 uses per year. That would point to 1,923,077 customers.

(a side note: switching from Hulu to Netflix counts as two sessions. Disconnecting and having to re-connect is two sessions as well. For these numbers, I’m ignoring these situations, but they’re certainly not uncommon, and would inflate the numbers.)

Jon Bell

I saw the ‘Happy Birthday Chromecast’ post last week and I immediately thought: 400 Million uses is pretty weak. Fortunately someone already did the math for me. Unit sales in the range of 1 to 2 Million devices are weak; the number is comparable to Samsung’s yearly tablet sales or the Nook’s, and I don’t think anyone would say those are successful products (except for the companies selling them). Personally I use the app on my iPhone to stream videos on my Sony SmartTV probably 5 to 10 times a week; that’s slightly higher than the average assumed in the calculation here and it would drop the projected sales even lower (not to mention the Chromecast can stream more that just YouTube videos, which should translate to more use). I think many people originally bought the device thanks to the low price and later discovered they could do many of its tricks with their existing gear, so the Chromecast got abandoned bit by bit until many stopped using it altogether.

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