Can India's Teewe do what Google's Chromecast can't?

Teewe believes it can beat Google to the living room of families around the world, reports Tech in Asia

Teewe’s office in Bengaluru is anything but posh. Young staff mill about the room. Engineers alternate stares between phone and TV screen as they test an app. Boxes pile in one corner, waiting to be shipped out. It’s a busy day at the start-up.

“We originally wanted to start a games studio,” says Sai Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Teewe, the 'we' including Teewe co-founder Shubh Malhotra.
 

But halfway through, Sai noticed how the television set hasn’t changed through the years. Yes, displays were getting better, but not the way people interacted with it. The seed was sown for Teewe, an HDMI stick like the Google Chromecast that can make dumb TVs smart.
 

 

For now, there isn’t much separating the much-lauded Chromecast from the Teewe. Low price of under $100? Check. Stream videos from your phone or laptop to the TV? Check.
 

So is Teewe a copycat? Not exactly.
 

“Our vision and direction is very different from the Chromecast,” he says, adding that products often start similar but diverge. And that’s exactly what he hopes to do after closing a $1.7 million funding round from Sequoia Capital and India Quotient in early 2015.
 

The Teewe costs Rs 2,399 ($37), same as the first-generation Chromecast in India. That’s about the price of a set-top box, and Teewe wants to enter the home of every family by replacing the set-top box with a tiny stick containing the same features and more (it could become a game console, for example). Even better, it would use something families already own as the remote controller: the smartphone. That’s audacious.

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This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.