One of the many great features you get with owning a Chromecast is the ability to cast pretty much any media you want. You can stream Netflix, YouTube, Spotify - even Amazon Music - directly to it. You can use an Amazon Alexa device as an audio-based Chromecast, but there's a catch - it only works with Amazon Music. That means you can't stream any of your favorite music services directly to your Echo device and you're locked into Amazon's offerings. What's more, you need a subscription which Amazon Music to do that. It's called Alexa Cast, and it's rolling out now.
Of course, its abilities lie in its ease of use. You can simply connect to your Echo device and start playing music. We can only imagine that it will be expanded to support other services at a later date, but for now, it's a bit limited. Not everybody wants to pay for an Amazon Music subscription, especially when services like Spotify already dominate the market. We can see it eventually flourishing into a full-blown Google Chromecast competitor once it grows. Alexa Cast even allows you to play music on multiple devices at the same time, great for a house party if you've got more than one device.
Alexa Cast works with any Alexa-enabled device. That means it supports Echo speakers, third-party Alexa products, and some of the Fire devices that you can get today. It's not exactly a revolutionary, never-before-seen feature, but it's one that helps the company compete with Google's offerings. Still, if it continues to offer only exclusive services then that will deem the feature irrelevant for many. While an Amazon Prime subscription does include the company's Music service, most people have all of their playlists on other services. We'll see how Alexa Cast is expanded in the future, but it's going to require a lot of work on Amazon's part to make it fully competitive.