Beamcast: Cast to TV

Marco Forlin

In-app purchases

About this app

Beamcast sends what you are watching on your phone to your TV, and casting is free and unlimited: no ads, no timers, no account.

Open a page in the built-in browser and start the video: Beamcast finds it and casts it. Or pick a video, a photo or a song from your phone and send that instead. The phone stays yours - pause, jump, change the volume and line up what comes next, with the controls on the notification and on the lock screen.

Works with
• Chromecast and TVs with Google Cast built in
• Smart TVs, media players and other DLNA/UPnP devices on your Wi-Fi
• LG TVs with webOS: Beamcast opens a page of its own in the TV's browser, and web videos play there too
A few protocols done well instead of many done badly. Google Cast is Google's technology, DLNA is an open standard and webOS belongs to LG: Beamcast works with all three, is not made by Google or LG and is not affiliated with them.

Casting is free, and it stays free
As many videos as you like, for as long as you like, with no ads and no timers - in the free plan and in Premium alike. There are no ads anywhere in Beamcast: not now, not later.

From your phone
• Videos, photos and music from your own library
• A player inside the app, to check a file before it goes to the TV
• Subtitles: attach an SRT or WebVTT file. On Google Cast devices you can also pick a track already in the video and choose the text size; on a DLNA device the file is handed to the TV, which shows it if it can
• Pick the quality when a stream offers more than one
• Beamcast remembers where you stopped and starts again from there

Privacy
No account and no sign-up: history, bookmarks, lists and playback positions stay on this phone. Beamcast has no server of its own, and there is no analytics, advertising or crash-reporting SDK in the app. Your data can be exported to a file and carried to another phone. Google Cast is Google's own technology and reports its session events to Google: the privacy policy says so, and says the rest too.

Premium - one purchase, forever
€4.99 once, or the equivalent in your currency. No subscription, no trial, no renewal. It adds:
• Unlimited lists, one for every show you follow
• Up to 10 browser tabs
• Sleep timer, which stops playback on its own while you doze off
• Continue watching: everything you left halfway, in one place
• Subtitle sync, to nudge the subtitles you attached yourself back into place
• Several videos at once: pick many from your library and they all go in the queue
• Accent color
• …and one surprise

Premium adds, it does not take away. The free plan has two limits and only two: one "to watch" list, and two browser tabs. Casting is not one of them and never will be.

What Beamcast does not do
• It does not mirror your screen: one video goes to the device, the phone stays yours.
• It does not copy the content onto your phone. What you are already watching is what reaches the TV.
• It does not remove or work around content protection. Protected content is recognized before anything is sent, and refused with a message that explains why.
• Some services do not allow casting from apps other than their own. On those, Beamcast detects nothing and points you to their app.
• It has no catalog and recommends no sites: what can be cast is what you opened yourself.

What you need
• Phone and TV on the same Wi-Fi network. Beamcast needs Wi-Fi: it cannot cast over mobile data.
• A VPN on the phone, or client isolation on the router, can hide devices - the app says so when it finds none.
• Android 8.0 or later.

Beamcast is in English and Italian. Something broken, or missing? Write to [e-mail]: one person reads that inbox, and answers.

What’s new

LG TVs with webOS: a new LG webOS entry in Devices plays web videos too, through the TV's browser.

Media: search by name or folder, or pick any file with the new folder icon.

Web streams on a DLNA TV: the app warns you and tries anyway, and tells you if the TV can't play them.

Fixed: battery drain after a Wi-Fi drop or with a phone video paused, a DLNA TV ignoring commands for 10 minutes, and "Retry" in Detected media.

Something broken? [e-mail]