Google Chromecast offers more questions than answers

At first blush, Google's self-manufactured Chromecast streaming device sounds irresistible. It will let you use your smartphone, tablet or computer to stream music and video to your television ... and it costs just $35.

That means whatever device you're using with Chromecast essentially becomes a remote control. You use the app for one of these services to find what you want to watch, and then Chromecast pulls the media directly from that service's cloud. The only thing you need the device for is playback control.
Having Chromecast pull directly from a service's cloud is a smarter, more efficient way of streaming in theory, but its success is contingent upon every content service going out of their way to support the feature. It's a risky strategy for Google (GOOG, Fortune 500).
And while we stream more content than ever and upload more of our own files to the cloud, most people still store a lot of photos and videos locally on their own devices. Failing to create a simple-to-use interface for streaming these files isn't just shortsighted. It's perplexing.