If you own a Sony soundbar, an AV receiver, or one of the company’s older Blu-ray players, I’m sad to say that the Google Cast button you’ve always reached for is on borrowed time. From November 17, 2026, Sony is pulling a batch of network services from more than 70 legacy audio and video devices, and two of the casualties are the ones people actually use day-to-day: Spotify and casting.
The gear keeps working as an amplifier or a disc spinner, though the convenience you bought it for disappears. Which raises the obvious question — what replaces it? The name everyone is pointing to is Matter Casting, the open-standard successor that’s been billed as the fix for years now.
What Sony is switching off, and when
The list is long, even if the hardware is old
Sony’s own support notice is pretty blunt about it, saying access to the affected services ends on November 17, and from the next day the icons vanish from the interface as if they were never there. Anything you’d already downloaded may even stop opening. Spotify and Google Cast are constants across regions; in the US, Pandora, Slacker Radio, and Vudu are also on the list.
The full rundown puts the scale in perspective: roughly nine soundbars, 16 AV receivers, 17 Blu-ray players, and a scattering of home theater systems and wireless speakers. Most are old, as the devices on these lists tend to be, but that’s cold comfort if you’ve got the STR-DN1080 still doing perfectly solid work in your living room.
This keeps happening, and it’s not really about Google
The protocol is fine; it’s the licensed service that dies
None of this is unique to Sony, and it’s worth being clear about what’s actually ending. Bose did much the same to its SoundTouch speakers earlier this year, and Google discontinued the standalone Chromecast in 2024, folding it into the pricier Google TV Streamer. Google Cast, the protocol, though, isn’t going anywhere, as it’s still built into current Google TV devices and plenty of TVs on sale today, including Sony’s own Bravia sets.
What’s ending on these older Sony boxes is a licensed service that leans on servers Sony no longer wants to keep running. Put another way, the casting you get through someone else’s cloud lasts exactly as long as that person is willing to pay for it.
Where Matter Casting comes in
It hands off to the app already sitting on your TV
Matter Casting is the answer the industry keeps looking towards, and on paper it’s a good one. It’s part of the Matter smart-home standard overseen by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, which means it’s royalty-free, open to any manufacturer, and doesn’t require new hardware — the app on your phone and the app on your TV just need to support it.
The architecture is the best bit, as rather than mirroring your screen or running a parallel stream, it hands off to the native app already on the TV, so you keep full playback controls, 4K HDR, surround sound, and subtitles instead of whatever a shaky peer-to-peer link can manage. Amazon, which has been driving the standard since CES 2024, likes to point out that you can even keep Prime Video’s X-Ray overlay while casting. It is, in other words, the version of casting you might design if you were starting over.
So is it ready? Not really, not yet
Two years in, it’s still very nearly an Amazon-only feature
Two years after launch, Matter Casting is still, for the most part, Amazon’s party. On the phone side, Prime Video and STARZ support it; Plex, Pluto TV, Sling TV, and ZDF were all announced back in January 2024 and still haven’t shipped it. On the receiving end, you’re looking at the Echo Show 15, newer Fire TV devices, Panasonic sets with Fire TV built in, and a little TCL support. The two casting standards most people actually use every day — Google Cast and Apple’s AirPlay — come from companies showing no sign of adopting it.
An open standard that only one big player has embraced doesn’t really solve fragmentation; it just adds another logo to the pile. If you’re one of the people this Sony news actually affects, Matter Casting does nothing for you, and your 2018 soundbar isn’t receiving a firmware update to join the Matter fabric.
What to do if your Sony device is on the list
The amplifier still amplifies, it just needs a new brain
If your device is on the list (and it’s worth checking Sony’s model list before you assume), the good news is that nothing physically stops working. The amplifier still amplifies, and anything coming in via HDMI ARC, optical, RCA, Bluetooth, or local storage continues exactly as before. What you lose is the built-in smarts, and thankfully, that’s the cheap part to replace. If it were my setup, I’d add a small external streamer and let the Sony gear do what it’s genuinely good at — driving the speakers.
A Google TV Streamer or a Fire TV Stick restores casting and Spotify to a soundbar or AVR for well under $50, and for a music-first system, a WiiM streamer does the same job for audio. Your decade-old receiver becomes a very good amplifier with someone else’s brain bolted on, which is more or less what a receiver has always been.
Matter Casting might yet become the thing that fixes casting for good. The architecture deserves to win, and the fragmentation it’s meant to solve is real and irritating. For now, though, it’s a promising standard waiting for the rest of the industry to turn up, while the actual fix for a switched-off Sony box is a $40 stick and a spare HDMI port. Until the future arrives, it’ll have to do.
- Brand
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Amazon
- Operating System
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Fire OS
- Downloadable Apps
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Thousands
- Resolution
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4K, Dolby Vision, HDR10
- Ports
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HDMI
