TechnologyStreamingMedia Studies

Casting Is Dead. The Second-Screen’s Long Arc from Invention to Abandonment

hhistorical

2026-01-22 12:00:00

9 min read

Netflix’s 2026 removal of casting exposes a systemic pattern: second‑screen features rise, fracture, and vanish. Learn why and how to preserve them.

Why you should care that casting is disappearing — and what to do about it

If you’ve ever opened your phone to “cast” a show and found the option gone, you’re not alone. In January 2026 Netflix quietly removed its broad support for mobile-to-TV casting, leaving many users and institutions wondering why a once‑ubiquitous feature evaporated overnight. For students, teachers, and researchers who rely on networked playback as part of evidence-gathering or classroom demos, the loss is more than an annoyance: it is a lesson in the fragility of networked features and the work needed to preserve digital practices.

The inverted-pyramid summary

Most important first: casting and second‑screen playback followed a predictable technology lifecycle — invention, rapid adoption, platform consolidation, and attrition. By late 2025 and into January 2026 a mix of technical, business, and cultural pressures produced a wave of feature removals, best exemplified by Netflix’s decision to end casting support for most modern smart TVs and devices. This is not an isolated bug: it is a case study showing why features vanish and what both consumers and historians must do to preserve media experiences.

Quick takeaways

Casting’s fall is systemic: fragmentation, DRM complexity, and product priorities drive removal.
Workarounds exist: HDMI, local playback, and targeted devices keep playback control alive.
Preservation is possible but deliberate: archive SDKs, firmware, network traces, and UX recordings.

From invention to ubiquity: A brief lifecycle of casting and second‑screen

The technical genealogy matters when you want to understand what disappeared. Second‑screen and casting are umbrella terms for a set of related inventions: discovery-and-launch protocols (early 2010s DIAL), vendor-specific stacks (AirPlay, Miracast), and the Google Cast ecosystem that popularized the “remote‑less dongle” model. The smartphone became a convenient remote; devices became receivers; and whole UI paradigms grew around the idea that the phone should shepherd media to a TV.

Key inflection points included the DIAL effort (a collaboration by Netflix and YouTube to let phones discover and launch apps on TVs), Google’s Chromecast hardware and Cast SDK that lowered the bar for developers, and the steady migration of apps into smart TVs themselves. By the mid‑2010s many streaming services embraced casting as a user‑friendly escape hatch from inconsistent TV platforms.

Chromecast’s role

Chromecast simplified the pattern: rather than mirroring phone video, apps handed playback to the networked dongle, where the receiver pulled content directly from the cloud. That model improved battery life, allowed better quality, and separated UI from transport — and it became a template for other players.

“Fifteen years after laying the groundwork for casting, Netflix has pulled the plug on the technology.” — reporting on the Netflix change (The Verge, Jan 2026)

Why features vanish: a taxonomy of causes

When a company removes a feature like casting, it’s rarely a single technical failure. Instead, several forces combine:

Maintenance and technical debt: Supporting dozens of protocols, SDK versions, and device firmware levels multiplies QA and security costs.
DRM and licensing complexity: Modern streaming requires tight DRM (Widevine, PlayReady), and maintaining secure playback flows across evolving devices is expensive.
Product priorities and UX consolidation: Platforms simplify interfaces and focus on metrics that drive revenue (engagement, ad impressions, retention). Low‑use features get purged.
Hardware fragmentation and EOL: Smart TVs ship with custom OS forks. When vendors change their SDKs or remove APIs, apps lose capabilities.
Privacy and regulatory pressure: Telemetry, cross‑device identifiers, and new rules (regional privacy legislation) can force companies to rework or remove features.

Combine these and you have a steady churn: features that were once easy become brittle or costly, so companies remove them to reduce risk and cost.

The cultural arc: from novelty to commodity to obsolescence

Early adopters loved second‑screen features for social viewing, synchronized extras, and companion apps (think trivia queues, voting, and watch party cues). But by the late 2010s the cultural function shifted: the phone became less a remote and more a social overlay. Streaming services invested in built‑in social features, group watching via the service itself, and simplified lean‑back experiences that emphasize the remote, voice search, and AI recommendations.

By 2024–2026, streaming platforms leaned into in‑app watch groups and smart TV UX, and many companion features had diminished use. The result: fewer engineering resources allocated to second‑screen protocols, and eventually, feature removals like Netflix’s casting cutoff.

What Netflix’s 2026 change reveals

Netflix’s decision—publicized in January 2026—to remove mobile app casting for most modern smart TVs underscores several realities:

Even dominant platforms prune features when they no longer serve strategic objectives.
Backward‑compatible support survives only when device vendors, protocol maintainers, and apps align.
End‑users discover the brittleness of assuming networked features are permanent.

Practical advice: What users should do now

If casting mattered to you — in classrooms, presentations, or everyday streaming — there are immediate, practical steps to reduce future disruption.

Short-term fixes

Check app and device compatibility: If you must cast, keep a small toolkit of devices that still support the protocol you use (older Chromecasts, Nest Hubs, or TVs explicitly listed by the service).
Use wired fallback: HDMI cables, USB‑C to HDMI adapters, or local AirPlay mirroring remain reliable and DRM‑friendly solutions for classroom use.
Prefer native apps on the display device: Installing the streaming app directly on the TV or streaming stick sidesteps casting and reduces dependency on the phone as an intermediary.

Medium-term habits

Document your workflow: Keep a short ‘how we show videos’ note for classes or presentations with device names, app versions, and fallback methods.
Maintain at least one dedicated receiver: A simple, inexpensive device you control (e.g., an older Chromecast or a Linux‑based HDMI player) can act as your reproducible playback environment.
Monitor release notes: Streaming services sometimes announce deprecations in app release notes or developer blogs. A quick weekly scan can prevent surprises.

Actionable steps for researchers and archivists

For historians of technology and archivists, feature removal is a preservation problem. Networked media features are performative — they are defined by interactions across software, servers, and hardware. Here’s a pragmatic checklist you can use today.

Preservation checklist

Archive documentation and SDKs: Download and deposit Cast/receiver SDK docs, W3C Remote Playback and Presentation API specs, and vendor changelogs into institutional repositories (Internet Archive, Software Heritage). Archive SDKs and docs make it possible to reconstruct flows years later.
Capture binaries and APKs legally: Keep copies of app binaries and receiver firmware that enable reproduction of experiences. Use checksums and manifest metadata to record provenance. Tools such as apktool and manifest-driven docs help here.
Record UX and telemetry‑free traces: Video‑record interactions and store network traces (pcap files) captured in controlled lab environments to reconstruct signaling flows. Observability approaches from modern microservices playbooks are helpful (observe traces and pcap files).
Preserve device images: Dump firmware where legally permissible and document device UI states with screenshots and video at key moments. Public archives and publication workflows help preserve context (Software Heritage and similar archives).
Use emulation and VMs: Maintain Android emulator images and containerized servers that mimic older endpoints, so researchers can replay historical sessions without physical hardware. Consider keeping images on edge-first laptops and validated VMs.
Collaborate with legal counsel: Confirm that your preservation activities comply with terms of service and copyright law; where necessary, seek permission for archival reproduction. Work with legal teams that use modern documentation workflows (Docs‑as‑Code for legal teams).

Tools that help: Wireshark for network capture, FFmpeg for video capture and transcoding, apktool for inspecting Android apps, pychromecast and other open source cast libraries for emulation and testing, and archiving services such as the Internet Archive and Software Heritage.

Case study timeline — a condensed memory

Understanding the arc helps predict the next stage. Here’s a compressed timeline of the second‑screen story:

Early 2010s: Discovery and launch efforts (DIAL) began; AirPlay and Miracast offered vendor‑specific approaches.
2013–mid‑2010s: Chromecast popularized the receiver‑pull model; Google Cast SDK lowered dev barriers.
Mid‑2010s to early‑2020s: Broad adoption as apps added cast buttons and companion experiences flourished.
2020–2024: Smart TVs matured, apps moved onto devices, and companion features slowed in development priority.
Late‑2025 to Jan 2026: Platform consolidation and strategic simplification led to high‑profile removals, including Netflix’s casting change.

Future predictions and what to watch in 2026 and beyond

From 2026 onward I expect three parallel trends.

More deliberate ephemerality: Companies will declare features experimental, time‑box support, and move fast — making archival capture a necessary discipline.
Web‑first standards pressure: Expect renewed interest in browser-based remote playback standards (Presentation API, WebRTC-based flows) as a way to reduce fragmentation.
Consolidation of companion functionality into platforms: Watch for streaming services and TV OS vendors to bake social and second‑screen features in at the platform level, reducing cross‑vendor interop.

For preservationists this means the window for capturing artifacts is narrow. The technical artifacts that matter — SDKs, protocol specs, firmware, UX recordings — are often removed precisely when they become historically interesting.

Ethics, legalities, and community stewardship

Preservation isn’t purely technical. There are ethical and legal obligations: respect copyright, user privacy, and vendor terms. Where possible, build community agreements with rights holders to enable research access. Universities, libraries, and independent technologists should form partnerships with streaming platforms to create preservation sandboxes that mimic production environments without exposing live customer data.

Conclusion: casting is dead — long live careful documentation

Netflix’s 2026 casting removal is not merely an app change; it is a pointer to a broader dynamic in digital media: many experiences are composite and fragile. For users, the practical lesson is to plan redundancies and prefer direct playback when reliability matters. For historians and archivists, the lesson is urgent: ephemeral networked features require active preservation strategies now, before vendors reconfigure their stacks and leave only memories and broken UIs behind.

Actionable next steps (one‑page checklist)

Inventory: List apps, devices, and workflows that depend on casting.
Fallbacks: Identify one wired and one wireless fallback for each critical workflow.
Archive: Save documentation, SDKs, and at least one copy of each relevant app binary.
Record: Capture video and network traces of representative playback sessions.
Share: Contribute artifacts and metadata to trusted archives or institutional repositories.

Call to action

If you manage classrooms, archives, or research projects: start an archival sprint this quarter. Download the checklist above, gather your devices, and deposit the first round of documentation with the Internet Archive or your institutional repository. If you’re a developer or product person: document deprecation plans publicly and partner with archivists. And if you’re a curious reader or student: subscribe to updates on this topic and join the conversation about how we preserve living media experiences in an era of rapid platform change.

Preserve the process, not just the pixels. The ways we controlled and experienced media — the second screen, the remoteless dongle, the phone as director — are part of our digital cultural record. They deserve the same careful stewardship we expect for older media forms.

historical

Contributor

Senior editor and content strategist. Writing about technology, design, and the future of digital media. Follow along for deep dives into the industry's moving parts.

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