It's interesting to me how entitled people feel to get a public SDK. Presumably there was a reason that Google chose to not release it until now; the usual reason is that Google doesn't want people building apps on unstable APIs, because that means a bad experience for both consumers and developers. I'm personally happy that they spent the time to actually make the SDK solid.
The problem is that it makes for a crap product roll-out. If you remember the Chromecast announcement, the SDK was presented as coming imminently.
It really wasn't cool when they selected preferred providers to be the only ones allowed to release anything built with the SDK. This weird limbo period really pissed lots of early buyers off.
>the usual reason is that Google doesn't want people building apps on unstable APIs
But they let lots of preferred groups build apps. Very complex ones, not just the the simple "put my photos on my TV" apps even. The SDK has obviously been in good shape for months.
AND THEN they simply broke their initial Netflix promise because it was simply too popular.
It was clear from some of the early experiments with the SDK that it was "good" enough for many early apps. And if later improvements showed up, then that's great.
Back before December, they made another announcement that made it sound like it was going to be out any day. And then it slipped and slipped some more. Just release it and say it's beta. After all it's Google and most of the stuff they ship is barely better than a beta anyway.
The problem is that a chosen few got help to put their apps on there and be first-to-market, while everyone else was left in the dark with no documentation and not even an expectation of when the SDK would be released. Up until today it supported a tiny subset of what it claimed - MPEG-DASH playback had to be done via dash.js, which can't even run smoothly on the device, SmoothStreaming playback was completely impossible unless you rolled a complete HTML5 player from scratch using MSE.
Meanwhile, the Netflix app isn't even a proper HTML5 app - it's literally flashed onto every device sold and opened via a command. The Hulu app's player is named "chromekey_player.js" so presumably they were able to start before the Chromecast was even called the Chromecast.
While Google are under no obligation to provide an even playing field, it wasn't a great start for the platform - hopefully things will be better now.
