I have a friend with a Chromecast who has a question about using two Chromecasts at the same time on the same LAN.

Google search isn't helping him because it seems that no one out there owns two of them, and Google isn't expecting people to buy/use them in that configuration.

He hasn't yet brought his Chromecast over to my house to test his question, but if we can find an answer here, he won't have to.

His question is: If he buys a second Chromecast, and plugs it into a second TV set at his house, and connects it to the same LAN as his first Chromecast, can he successfully cast two separate tabs from the same Chrome browswer to each of the two Chromecasts?

Anyone on the BBS happen to randomly know the answer to this?

No idea, but I am sure Google wants people to buy one for every TV in the house, so having multiple on the same LAN must be supported. Logically it should work, if not, major MRD fail.

I suggest having him over for beers and putting us all out of our misery

I don't have any Chromecasts, but I do have a GoogleTV and a TiVo. Both now support the YouTube-specific casting from the Android YouTube app. What happens, on my phone, when I hit the "cast" button, is that it gives me a pop-up menu with the names of my TiVo and my GoogleTV.

My guess is that this paradigm is how things are going to shake out.

Food for thought: if you've got a Chromecast installed on a shared WiFi segment (I'm thinking our university's WiFi network) then it's going to be visible to anybody. So far as I can tell, there's no way to do any sort of pairing. The Chromecast or GTV box will accept a casting request from anybody. This allows for an exciting new form of spamming: casting videos to randomly visible TV devices.

You heard it here first.

This has me tempted to see if the local Google office has guest WiFi, and a Chromecast sitting on that network...

It was among the first things I thought of after setting up the Chromecast: Anyone could spam our screen if they had our Wifi password. Fortunately, our neighbors do not.

You cannot broadcast to two Chromecasts simultaneously, as far as I'm aware. Is love to use them as an extremely inexpensive Sonos alternative, but no such luck.

I would also hope that any place with a guest WiFi network would be using client isolation, which would presumably keep you from seeing the device. But who knows how they have it set up...

Thanks, Dignan. Sounds like the information I was looking for.

I do not question, merely ask enlightenment: where do you have this knowledge from?

Also: Seems to me like a problem that's entirely software-side and browser-side, and might change in the future with software updates and/or third-party development.

I wish I could tell you, Tony. I know I've asked this question of another group, and that's the answer I received. I've been looking for it all morning but I don't remember where I asked it...

I'll keep looking and let you know.

I'm certain, though, that lots of people bought multiple Chromecasts, particularly in that first batch because it gave them three free months of Netflix. Many people bought multiples because you could keep putting in codes and getting free months (although it would only really work two or three times because the codes were only good through 2013).