With all the streaming devices out there these days, getting video from the internet to your TV isn’t difficult. Deciding which device makes the most sense for you, though, is a whole other story.

For years, I was a reluctant Roku kind of guy. I had a set-top box that let me play stuff from Netflix, YouTube, and other such services in my living room. Like most streaming devices I’d used, it was clunky and annoying — but it was a lesser-of-evils sort of situation that I begrudgingly accepted, with the hopes that something better would eventually come along.

And boy, did it ever: Three years ago, Google’s first Chromecast hit the market and changed everything I thought I knew (and hated) about internet-to-TV streaming. It was a “brilliantly simple solution to a problem that’s been overcomplicated for far too long,” as I wrote after a month of living with the gadget:

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