A new casting feature appears to be going live for some in Chrome on the desktop (including mainline releases), with the dialogue shown in the hero image above asking users to consent to "enable casting to cloud-based service." This includes, apparently, casting Chrome tabs to Hangouts.

Casting tabs to Hangouts isn't actually new - we first saw it last May - but the feature never appeared to be widespread, and at the time tab casting itself was still in beta. This new version, unfortunately, doesn't actually appear to work yet. But there's a Google Support page and everything for it, so it's definitely a thing.

Casting Chrome tabs into Hangouts is cool and all (presumably, they mean video hangouts), but this whole "cloud services" bit is what intrigues me. Exactly what other "cloud services" would I be casting to? The upcoming video chat client Duo doesn't seem like a good fit - that's definitely more conversational. But perhaps Google plans to integrate tab casting into more products at some point. I'm not coming up with any immediate use cases off the top of my head, so I'm sure curious what it is Google may have planned here.

Are you seeing the new Casting authorization dialog in Chrome? Are you able to actually cast tabs to a Hangout after accepting it? Let us know in the comments.

Source: Google Support

Thanks: Ben