Google is pushing out a silent over-the-air update to all its Chromecast units, bringing some much-needed bug fixes and optimizations.

Chromecast has now been upgraded to version 12940, which introduces “better discovery of Chromecast devices,” as well as “improvements to stability when using Google Play Movies.”

Over the past month, Koushik Dutta has showed off his phone-to-Chromesast and Dropbox-to Chromecast streaming apps, and now he’s back again to show us an adaptation he has made to CyanogenMod which allows users to stream any media app directly to Chromecast.

Netflix published an update on Google Play yesterday for its users who have been experiencing issues when running its mobile app on either their cellphone or tablet.

Since Google’s launch of Chromecast on July 27, Sundair Pichai insisted that Google TV would evolve alongside its TV platform and that neither device would substitute the other. Now it looks like Sony is in the process of developing what could be a new Google TV-based product or a Chromecast competitor.

Suddenly, Google is a major hardware company. And a surprisingly great one. But why?

I asked a Motorola executive involved in the Moto X project recently whether Google’s ownership of the company had any effect on their decision to get radical.

By radical, of course, I mean doing things no handset maker had ever done, such as make phones operate hands-free and build them to order in the United States for delivery in four days.

You’ll note that these and other radical attributes of the Moto X are options that would have been available to Motorola with or without Google. After all, the X8 Mobile Computing System that enables hands-free usage is Motorola’s, not Google’s, and was originally developed for Motorola smartwatches.

So why is Motorola suddenly radical now that Google owns the company?