You can get it working on a phone hotspot or a pocketable Wi-Fi repeater, but only those who travel frequently are going to bother to bring all that hardware for a simple Chromecast setup. With no on-screen controls or any real interface, the Chromecast simply can’t navigate those pesky captive portals. When any Wi-Fi is bound by a captive portal (where you have to interact with a web interface to gain access to the network) there is no workaround to get your Chromecast set up on the network. In the event you’ve never attempted it, using a Chromecast in a hotel is generally impossible using hotel Wi-Fi, and this reason alone has made it a terrible travel companion. While I’ve been a bit of a casting purist for years and have long thought Google was right for leaving Android TV a bit on the sidelines, my outlook completely and utterly changed last night as I spent 10 minutes of my life simply trying to get logged into Netflix. It was excruciating.Īll I could think the entire time I was doing this was how the new Chromecast with Google TV would save me from this scenario in the future. My email address is nearly 20 characters long and my password is 15. The remote would allow me about 4 clicks before becoming unresponsive and, after counting to 5 or so, I could get a few more clicks in. I’m not kidding you when I say this took nearly 10 minutes.

Getting into the login screen was quick enough, but then it was time to start scooting my cursor across the keyboard to enter both my email address and rather long password. This app was a straight-up on-screen keyboard login scenario that is already a bit awful on smooth, fast UI. So I went right to the standby favorite: Netflix. Freezes, jumping cursors, and failed playback quickly clued me it to the fact that I needed to look elsewhere.

I used the authentication code via my phone to log into Prime Video and after attempting to navigate the UI for a couple minutes, I just gave up. I don’t love doing this because I’m always a bit dubious that my stuff will really be removed when I depart, but I did so anyway. One of the ‘features’ of this service was to allow me to sign into multiple content streaming services to use while here in the hotel.

Google chromecast setup hotel