Pricing guide · August 2026

What hotel casting actually costs

When a hotel guest casts Netflix from their phone to the room TV without typing a password, there's a purpose-built system behind it. Those systems publish prices — here they are in one table, plus the question the sales pages skip: at how many rooms does this start making sense?

Published pricing, normalized per TV

Compiled from public pages and published quotes of the main vendors, August 2026. Exact quotes vary by contract length and room count.

Cost item	Typical range	Notes
Subscription, per TV/Chromecast	~$3/month (billed annually)	The recurring line every vendor shares
Casting hardware, per TV	$30–60	Chromecast plus mounting/adapters, depending on kit
Property appliance / gateway	~$230 one-time	The box that isolates guest devices per room on the network
Managed Wi-Fi requirements	varies, often existing	Casting needs VLAN-per-room isolation — trivial in a hotel, rare in an apartment
Install and support	bundled to quoted	Assumes an IT contact on property

Source: Public pricing and product pages: RoomCast (TeleAdapt), Cast Gateway, OnlyCast, Airwave — August 2026

Year-one cost for a 40-room hotel: roughly $230 + 40×($45 + $36) ≈ $3,470 — about $7 a room per month. Competitive with one room-service tray. For two apartments: $230 + 2×$81 ≈ $392 in year one, or over $16 per TV per month — for hardware designed to sit in a rack you don't have.

Why the model breaks below ~10 rooms

Hotel casting is priced around three assumptions: many rooms amortizing one appliance, an IT person who owns the network, and a Wi-Fi controller that can isolate each room into its own VLAN. A short-term-rental host with one to five apartments fails all three — the appliance doesn't amortize, there is no IT person, and the router is whatever the ISP shipped.

That's not a criticism of the products; it's their market working as designed. The takeaway for a small host is different: the experience these systems deliver — guest streams with their own account, room resets at checkout — is exactly right, and guests now expect it from hotels. What's missing is a version whose cost structure starts at one apartment instead of forty rooms.

That version is what Guest TV is being validated to be: the same guest-owns-the-login model, delivered as software on the TV's own Android TV — no appliance, no per-TV dongle, expected at $9 a month per property. If the demand check fails, the honest fallback for small hosts remains a Roku with Guest Mode.

Questions from hosts pricing this out

Can I just buy one Chromecast without the hotel system?

You can, and casting will work — but a bare Chromecast on a flat home network remembers devices and sessions, so guest A's phone may reappear on guest B's TV, and nothing resets at checkout. The appliance exists precisely to prevent that. Without it you've recreated the logged-in-stranger problem in casting form.

Do guests actually use casting instead of TV apps?

Hotels report high usage because it skips typing passwords with a remote. In apartments, TV-app sign-in via QR code gets to the same place — the phone does the typing either way. The win isn't the protocol; it's the guest using their own account.

Is there a middle option for 10–20 units?

That's the awkward zone: big enough that per-checkout manual work hurts, small enough that appliances per property sting. Some operators at that size negotiate multi-property casting contracts; the math starts working around the point you also hire cleaners as employees rather than gig workers.