Issue casting BT Sport from my Android phone to Chromecast

[uptodat]

Thanks.

[ShaunGR]

Yes just tried casting the Wolves-Utd game to both of my 1st gen chromecast devises and neither work just getting the spinning circle screen for a while before disconnecting back the chromecast home page.

[DarrenDev]

I'm afraid there's nothing that can be done today - you'll not be able to use your 1st gen Chromecast from an Android device today. If there's an iPhone or iPad available to you, I suggest you use that to start the casting.

[ShaunGR]

......and after trying the casting I now can't watch it on my tablet as it says I have too many streams open.....d'Oh !!

[ShaunGR]

Thanks Darren...not that desperate at the moment as Utd are playing pretty rubbish...lol.

[gomezz]

Just to add my name to the list of people for whom this has stopped working. Follows on from a late EPG change so did not record the rugby replay repeat from early this morning followed by the replay being available on the app on my phone but not on my Youview box. So a triple whammy!

[gomezz]

I forgot to add that Eurosport Player and the Discovery+ player have also stopped working (while others like ITVX and iPlayer still do) so I am wondering if it is something to do with merging the three platforms?

[DarrenDev]

Nope - nothing is being merged. They'll just be suffering with the same Google bug that we are.

[gomezz]

Another thing I tried was casting from my laptop using the Chrome browser to watch some rugby highlights. That did work although the video was a bit jerky as I believe it is a known issue as BT Sport no longer officially supports this method?

Wondering if the way forward is to upgrade to a newer Chromecast dongle. If that supports Skip Back / Forward as well as basic Play / Pause / Stop then that would be worth having.

[DarrenDev]

It's taken a few hours, but that's it finally fixed for 1st generation Chromecast devices.  I'm confused to say the least though.

The cause of the issue was the browser version on the device - it's so old, it doesn't understand some of our code. 

Chromecasts are just Chrome web browsers running with specific scripts to control them.  Newer devices currently run Chrome version 90, which was released in 2021.  The 1st generation device is now running Chrome 70 - originally released in October 2018.  Our scripts relied on features that were introduced in Chrome 80, which was released in February 2020.

Either:

The firmware update to 1st generation devices in December has downgraded the Chrome browser to an old version

or

BT Sport Chromecast has been failing since November 2022 when we first started using newer script features

It seems unlikely to me that it had been failing for over a month before the first person noticed, so that would suggest they downgraded the browser?  Possibly for performance reasons?

Either way, that's it now working again.  I would advise anyone with a first generation device to think about upgrading though - they're much slower than newer devices, and I know some providers have already dropped support for them due to their limited capabilities.