Watch WSL In Staggering Quality

To be fair, it does not take much to impress me in this area. I normally watch the WSL events on my second monitor while pretending to work on my main monitor. It's not a bad resolution and it works okay, so I have never bothered to change it. But now I wish I had.

My brother is a little more tech minded than myself and someone who likes to have the best connection via gold speaker cables, you know the sort. He decided to get me a Chromecast V2 for my birthday a couple of months ago and at the time I may have seemed a little ungrateful, only through ignorance. I knew what it was, but could not see how it would make my viewing experience any better. Ashamedly the little device stood untouched in its box for a good 6 weeks while I struggled to find a potential use for it.

My sibling phoned me a couple of days before I had decided I would 'recycle' his present (shocking behaviour I know) to ask how I was getting on with the Chromecast. I was straight with him and said I could not think of a use for it. I already had a smart TV and my second TV has a Google MINIX box with it which I used for watching the surfing when not at work, so I kind of had all my bases covered. I recall that he told me on that call that 'somehow' the magic disc transported anything from an app  on your phone onto your TV in better quality than anything else he had seen.

I thought I ought to try it at least. I opened the box (which immediately lessened the retail value in my mind). The Oi Rio Pro Brazil had just started and was currently live so I had something to test it on.

When I opened the box, there was the disc thing which is the Chromecast and a power lead. That's it, apart from a piece of card saying that I should download the Google 'Home' App. I did as commanded, installed the app clicked 'yes' three times after I had plugged the Chromecast into my 1080p TV. I hit the WSL app on my phone and hit the 'cast' button and boom. That's when I changed my mind.

I would like to say that if Kelly Slater had been attending the event, I would have been able to see the hairs on his head. The quality was exceptional. The funky little disc connects itself to the wifi via your device and then just gets on with it, your phone can leave the house but the little chromecast will carry on doing what it was told.  I have no idea how the small box does it, and it sounds like no one else does either, but the fact remains I have never seen anything displayed in such quality on that TV. I was gobsmacked, hence my decision to write about it in a surf mag.

The best thing is that all you need is an HDMI port on the side of your TV, and access to a mobile phone or tablet, Android or Apple. After just researching the product now, I see you can get an Ultra version too. Even better quality if you have a 4K TV.

Like I said, I am not a techno geek and I would not usually get excited enough to talk about something tech, never mind actually write an article about it, but this thing is pretty amazing and also pretty easy on the wallet.

Get your own Chromcast for about 18-20 pounds (20-25 euro or about 30 USD) .

Lastly and as an afterthought, if you are worried about not having enough bandwidth (fast enough internet), my test was performed on an ADSL connection that gets about 11MB/sec if I am lucky (pretty bad).