Happy 1st Birthday, Chromecast! – Google celebrates the first birthday of their HDMI dongle…in the US

It may have only gone on-sale in Australia at the end of May, but it’s now been a year since the infamous Breakfast with Sundar event where the Chromecast was announced in the US.

This morning Google has celebrated the 1st birthday of the Chromecast, by announcing some statistics for the dongle.

And while Google never announces numbers, we can extrapolate that the Chromecast is popular. Since release the Chromecast has been a much sought after item, for months the dongle was out of stock at Amazon, Google Play and Best Buy. eBay profiteers who managed to source the dongle early on making a small fortune from people desperate to get their hands on the device. Exactly how many, we’ll probably never know for sure.

It took nearly a year, but it finally reached Australia officially on May 28th and while local uptake for apps has been slow, we now have Foxtel Presto, Quickflix and the promise of ABC iview on the way. There are more such as Mezzmo, but some of the real innovation has come from Google with their Screen mirroring which was announced at Google I/O.

So, to celebrate, in the US Google is offering 90 Days of Google Play Music All Access – Yep, nothing outside the US. But if you were an early adopter of Chromecast, and imported one from the US, you can try it out now as long as you’re not an existing All Access subscriber, head on over to chromecast.com/offers to get your offer. But if you purchased an Australian Chromecast you can still check out the Foxtel Presto service which gives you a month of access.

Happy Birthday Chromecast. We look forward to seeing if there’s any offers when May 28th 2015 rolls around.