Why not Mozilla's Hello service?

It's browser-based, encrypted, open source and P2P.
You do currently have to use Firefox to generate the initial URL to share (but that will hopefully be remedied in the near future).

Anyone else think this is simply an attempt to let the issue calm down and be forgotten by the public?

You'd think this would have made the news.

I wish you were right, but I've spoke with one of the main developers about this and Firefox is indeed using the SDK.
Unless Google opens up things on the desktop, Firefox will likely not be getting Chromecast support anytime soon.

We will likely see an increase of client-side encoding VP9 through WebRTC.
Let others debate the extent of use, but browser-based video chat and screencasting will likely increase. This should pop many I've-never-encoded-a-video-before cherries.
The usage of VP9 will not be solely for 4k videos.

Criticize the technical merits all you like, but Mozilla's partnership with Foxconn to produce inexpensive phones may turn out to be very strategic (for both parties).

It was Q.

I feel like my response is supposed to be "Ohh! That's what it would look like if it were different!"
But the reality is that I didn't have much of an idea of what it looks like now.

I really would like to see this same setup in asm.js to see how it compares.

Why does everyone assume that Google is the only game in town for funding Firefox?
Firefox has 1 out of 5 users on the internet. If Google lost Firefox it would be significant. They really wouldn't want to lose it.
Microsoft would love to have Firefox's default search area (and love taking it from Google) and they've repeatedly demonstrated their ability and desire to throw gobs of money at a product until it succeeds (or clearly fails beyond redemption) - and Bing is one of those products.
It seems like few people made the connection when Microsoft partnered with Mozilla to release a version of Firefox "powered by Bing search". Just a month or so later Mozilla announced their three year, $900 million search deal with Google. It seems clear that Mozilla either just before, or during, negotiations with Google demonstrated their ability to pull the trigger with Microsoft.
Google does not want to lose Firefox, but further would hate to lose it to MS. Either way, even if they did, Mozilla would not go hungry.

Best start praying to the god of whatever alternate dimension you've stepped into because someone just handed the laws of probability an anvil.

Eich often does a good job of intelligently addressing questions in the comments. I strongly encourage looking through them to learn more.
In reply to one question about the binaries he replied:

And another,

It appears we can have a good amount of confidence that what's in the code is what's in the binary.

I'm curious how they will handle the driver situation in Android.
As I understand it the specific drivers for your device's hardware are package (compiled?) with the OS, making it infeasible to swap out parts.
Perhaps drivers could be stored in updatable firmware on the modules?

Oh crap, then what's this pile of brown stuff in front of me?

I checked the site and I think this bears repeating: The tuner in question is approaching a quarter of a million dollars in costs (perhaps more depending on the '+' part of '30+').

At that rate, wouldn't it be more economical to pay a hacker to build/design one based on MythTV that pulls off the same features (then whip out another or upgrade when you need it)? Heck, you could hire a couple MythTV developers.