On a laptop, Chrome casts any tab to a Chromecast in two clicks. On an iPhone, the same video on the same page has no way to the TV at all: no Cast button in Safari, none in Chrome, and the phone’s own Screen Mirroring does not list the Chromecast.
That is not a setting you have missed. Each of those three routes is closed for a different reason, and knowing which one tells you what will work instead.
Why the usual routes are closed
Safari does not speak Google Cast. Cast is Google’s protocol. Apple’s equivalent is AirPlay, and that is the only thing Safari’s video player offers. A video in Safari can go to an Apple TV or an AirPlay TV, never to a Chromecast.
Chrome for iPhone does not cast tabs. Google’s own help page for casting a tab lists the requirement as “a computer”, and screen casting as “Chrome on Mac, Windows, or Chromebook”. Chrome on the iPhone is built on Apple’s browser engine and does not carry that feature.
The Google Home app cannot mirror an iPhone. Casting your screen from Google Home is, in Google’s words, “only available on devices running Android 8.0 or later”. On an iPhone, the Home app sets up the Chromecast and controls it, and that is all.
iPhone Screen Mirroring is AirPlay. It only lists devices that receive AirPlay, so a Chromecast or a Google TV that does not support AirPlay never appears in it.
Check this first: does your TV also speak AirPlay?
Some televisions with Google TV or Chromecast built in also receive AirPlay 2 — Sony’s recent sets among them. Open the iPhone’s Control Center, tap Screen Mirroring, and see whether the TV is listed. If it is, the whole problem disappears: a video in Safari has an AirPlay button in its player, and that sends the video itself rather than a picture of your screen.
If it is not listed, the TV only speaks Cast, and the rest of this post is for you.
Where a Cast button does exist
Apps that build Google Cast in show the Cast icon in their own player: YouTube is the familiar one, and many streaming services’ apps do the same. If the video you want lives in an app like that, use the app. Its Cast button is the most reliable route there is, because the service built it to work with its own streams.
The trouble is video that lives only in a web page: a conference stream, a lecture recording, a sports feed on a site with no app. That page has a player, and the player has no Cast button on an iPhone.
The route that works: hand the stream to the Chromecast
Behind almost every web player is an address the player is reading — an HLS playlist (a
.m3u8 file) or a plain .mp4. A Chromecast can fetch and play both of those by itself; it
only needs to be told the address.
So the working route is an iPhone browser that does three things Safari does not:
- Loads the page and notices which video addresses it fetches.
- Finds the Chromecast on your Wi-Fi.
- Tells the Chromecast to play that address.
The Chromecast then fetches the video directly, at whatever quality the site offers. Your iPhone is not in the picture: it is not capturing the screen or re-encoding anything, so you can lock it, switch apps or open another page while the TV plays. That is the opposite of screen mirroring, which keeps the phone tied to that screen for as long as you watch.
Several iPhone apps work this way: Web Video Cast, iWebTV, Tubio, the TV Cast series from Kraus und Karnath, and my own, VidBeam. They differ in which televisions they reach and in how they charge, but the steps are the same.
Step by step
- Put the iPhone and the Chromecast on the same Wi-Fi network. Not a guest network: those usually stop devices from seeing each other, and the Chromecast simply never shows up.
- Open the page in the casting app, not in Safari. Use its address bar or search, exactly as you would in Safari.
- Start the video on the page. Many players only fetch the stream once you press play, so until then there is nothing to find.
- Pick the video the app found. A page often holds several: the main video at different qualities, plus trailers or adverts. The longest one is usually the one you want.
- Pick the Chromecast. Within a few seconds it switches input and starts loading.
- Use the phone as a remote. Pause, seek and stop from the app or, in most of them, the Lock Screen.
When it still will not play
- The video is DRM-protected. Paid streaming services encrypt their streams so that only their own player can decode them. No browser app can hand those to a Chromecast, and one that claims it can is not being straight with you. Use the service’s own app and its Cast button.
- The site only answers the phone. Some sites refuse a request that does not look like it came from the browser that opened the page, so the Chromecast’s own request is turned away. Some apps relay the video through the phone for those sites; the phone then has to stay on the Wi-Fi while the TV plays.
- The player builds the video inside the page. Some players assemble video from pieces in the page itself rather than pointing at one address. There is nothing to hand over.
- The Chromecast is asleep or on a different network. Wake the TV, then reopen the list of devices.
What I built for this
VidBeam is the iPhone browser I built for exactly this case. Open the page, tap the video it finds, and it plays on the TV. Its list of televisions holds AirPlay and Google Cast devices together, so you do not need to know which one your TV speaks. The controls stay on the Lock Screen, and closing the page or opening another one does not stop the TV.
It reaches AirPlay and Google Cast televisions only — not Roku, Fire TV or DLNA sets — and it cannot send DRM-protected video any more than the others can. It is on the App Store.