Google Cast is missing two important features and their absence frustrates the listening experience

I love Google Cast, but it’s far from perfect. I listen to Youtube videos on my living room TV, songs from Youtube Music on my Nest Mini while I shower (too much information, I know), and more. The technology is immensely popular nowadays, and it’s developed quite a bit, but what I can’t seem to wrap my brain around is why it’s missing two very core features. The absence of these two things keeps me from fully enjoying my listening experience in my home, and I wanted to take some time to discuss them today.

Casting videos to speakers…hear me out

First and foremost, while you can cast Youtube Music songs to speakers because, well, duh, it’s music, you can’t cast videos. Before you go to the comments section and tell me that my speaker doesn’t have a screen, because I promise that I know, keep in mind that Youtube and Youtube Music are intrinsically connected to one another.

Any music artists you subscribe to on one will appear in the other (annoyingly), and any liked songs will too. As someone who has all but moved away from Google Podcasts for long-form discussion content that I listen to and have no intention of watching, I attempted this past week to cast a Youtuber’s podcast to my smart speaker only to realize that it was impossible!

In my humble opinion, Google ought to let users cast any form of content that has audio – even if it is accompanied by video – knowing that the individual has half a brain in their head to realize they will be listening and not watching. I know the company is trying to dummy-proof things here, but in doing so, it’s restricting millions of pieces of content from several areas of my home and robbing us of the convenience we could have.

Setting songs you cast to repeat

The second main issue I have is that while casting a song to a speaker (since that’s all you can cast), the repeat button completely greys out, making it a one-and-done endeavor! What reason on earth would Google have for disabling repeat playback on speakers? Are they afraid someone will leave something playing for hours on end? A simple solution could be to add an automatic sleep mode for music or a timer in the same way that Google Podcasts has so that if you fall asleep, it will automatically stop playing at a certain time constraint.

Granted, this issue – or rather, this choice by Google could very well be intentional and handled through the Youtube Music app and not directly via Google Cast, but I’m not certain. Either way, it’s extremely frustrating, and I encounter the desire to repeat a song I cast more often than you’d think.

At the end of the day, it is what it is, and Google is unlikely to change either of these things, but my hope is that they try to cast an interesting podcast to their Nest audio while they’re doing…whatever it is they do with music and attempt to place it on repeat to see that neither thing was checked at the quality assurance gate.