Whipsaw designed the original Google Chromecast, a revolutionary $35 digital media player for streaming audio-video content to your TV through mobile and web apps. Users can browse, control playback, and adjust volume from their mobile device. Whipsaw provided industrial design, development strategy, graphical user interface, and packaging (with Google) for Chromecast. We strove to make the device so small that it could be plugged directly into the TV’s HDMI port behind the TV. Making the hardware minimal like this allowed the TV onscreen content to dominate, which is what consumers really wanted. Our design of a set of Chromecast icons and home screens further enhanced this radical new way to interact with your TV. The Chromecast shape was derived from form and function alike. The “key” shape is a metaphor for unlocking the Internet; the narrow front needed to clear adjacent cables when plugged in; and the round end contains an antenna on one side and a switch on the other. Over 30 million units have sold globally since launch, making Chromecast the best-selling streaming device in the United States in 2014. From Chromecast’s launch to May 2015, it handled more than 1.5 billion stream requests.
