Casey Waldren

I might like my Chromecast with Google TV, if it would stop shouting at me

September 30, 2026 · #google #gadgets

Story time.

Sometime in 2022 during the COVID19 pandemic, I owned a Chromecast. It was during that weird rebranding to Chromecast by Google with Google TV by Google or whatever ungodly name their marketing department dreamed up.

It worked perfectly, was much faster than our Roku, and wasn’t jam packed with ads.

One day, this happened.

Me: clicks on Netflix app.

Chromecast:

OPENING NETFLIX!!!!!!!!!!

Me: clicks volume up on remote.

Chromecast:

WOOO YEA, VOLUME UP!!

Me: clicks home button on remote.

Chromecast:

!!! GOING HOME, YOU CAN HEAR ME RIGHT??!!!

Surely this was a simple misconfiguration - Voiceover, text-to-speech, or similar.

I checked everywhere in the Chromecast settings, on my phone, all the Android menus. I factory reset it a couple times (takes forever to to this, so wasted the entire night.) Nothing helped.

I contacted support. Got some random auto-response about tweaking settings I already tweaked. Escalated and shockingly got to a human who I could correspond with!

At some point they recommended factory resetting my phone because it didn’t seem to be an issue with the Chromecast.

I did this, being desperate for a solution. Didn’t work, wasted another afternoon.

Support escalated, RMA’d it and we received a new one quickly, credit to them. The shouting persisted.

Searching gmail, I found this email with particularly bad timing:

Google Store: Hey Casey, you might like Chromecast with Google TV

My reply sent into the void:

I might like my Chromecast with Google TV, if it would stop shouting at me.

Eventually, support said someone had looked into it, and they believed it was some setting in my Google account that maybe never got migrated over time and didn’t exist anymore and couldn’t be fixed.

This didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, as it had been working fine until then. Perhaps a firmware update screwed it up.

Ultimately, they had no solution.

Mine was to throw it in the trash and buy an Apple TV.

That introduced a whole new level of Apple-specific pain in an Android household, ¹ but it has never yelled at us and remains snappy to this day.