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Android TV is coming to actual televisions in addition to other boxes and, I'm sure, a stick or 10 in the near future. It's not yet available in the UK but that may also change in the future. Supported apps will expand, voice search will target more services and prices will fall.
The Nexus Player was first introduced in late 2014 as one of the first devices running Android TV. At the time, we said the player was a “fine first draft.” The bare bones of the device were there but developer support was lacking. Since then, while Android TV has slowly been integrated into several smart TVs and Nvidia’s fancy Shield TV, the best bet for Google’s living room strategy still appears to be Chromecast. The Nexus Player has what it needs to provide a great user experience, but its not delivering, yet. App selection is thin, search isn’t universal, there are too few categories for organizing content, and the Wi-Fi stability was buggy on our office’s crowded network.
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Our team makes recommendations after thoroughly researching products and services for your home. When you purchase something we've recommended, the commissions we receive help support our research. You can cast Hulu, but Google Home is not able to initiate it yet. It shows all your cast-enabled apps, not Home-compatible. The Nexus Player puck itself is extremely simple – too simple, if you ask us. Three ports line the back, including a single HDMI output, a Micro USB port, and a DC power port.
Unless Google opens up the Nexus Player to more than a few dozen apps, it simply doesn't do anything to stand out in the polished crowd of media hubs already on the market. I played a few games on the Nexus Player with the gamepad, including Badland, The Walking Dead Season One, and Reaper. All three games worked flawlessly with the controller, handling both gameplay and menu navigation with the physical controls with ease. The gamepad was well suited to Reaper's side-scrolling brawler/platformer action and Badland's Helicopter/Flappy Birds-like button mashing, and both games were responsive. However, The Walking Dead felt sluggish with the analog sticks, which were slow to move the cursor around the screen.
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It's not quite as good as the clickers of the other boxes, but it still gets the job done. The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes. Now tap Format Data and continue with the formatting process. This will remove encryption and delete all files stored in the internal storage. With the device unplugged, plug in the device while holding the Bottom Button until a menu is displayed. Before proceeding, ensure the data you would like to retain is backed up to your PC and/or your Google account, or equivalent.
A third problem occurred when I tried to cast a Netflix video and got an error message on the TV, and I could only resolve the problem by grabbing the remote, signing out of the Netflix app and signing back in again. I’ve also had a couple of noisome “Device Lost … Ending Session” messages pop up when casting from Google’s Nexus 9 tablet, though these didn’t cause any functional issues. The selection’s divided into simple point-and-click ‘remote games’, and more complex ‘gamepad’ titles. Oddly, Asphalt is listed as a remote game but requires a gamepad anyway.
What Happened to Google’s Nexus Player?
In addition to that, a total of 8 GB flash storage is provided for downloading and storing games and other apps, at the same time 1 GB of memory must be already big enough to keep the Android 5.0 OS run efficiently. On one occasion, my phone and tablet simply didn’t see the Nexus Player on my local network, and I had to restart the set-top box to fix the problem. Another time, the apps themselves would load, but no audio or video came out, and I had to restart once again.
The big players are here, like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Songza, and of course YouTube. But there aren't a whole lot of options besides the major movie and music services. At the time of this writing, the Google Play Store on the Nexus Player had only 23 non-game entertainment apps. Food Network and TED TV are nice, but I couldn't load Twitch streams or listen to my Spotify playlists.
David has reviewed TVs, streaming services, streaming devices and home entertainment gear at CNET since 2002. He is an ISF certified, NIST trained calibrator and developed CNET's TV test procedure himself. Previously David wrote reviews and features for Sound & Vision magazine and eTown.com. He is known to two people on Twitter as "The Cormac McCarthy of consumer electronics."
As noted in Install section, v5.0 build LRX21M and LRX21V don't seem to have ADB debugging options (i.e. for connecting to device over a network). Also, Sideload Launcher may not be needed as sideloaded Kodi shows up under Apps on Nexus Player's main screen. Nexus Player is an x86-64 (64-bit Intel Atom CPU) based Android digital media player co-developed by Google and Asus. Running the Android 5.0 "Lollipop" operating system, this Nexus Player was the first device to employ Google's Android TV platform. It feels very solid in the hand, though I found the analog sticks to feel just a little bit too tight for my tastes.
Users can access the Google Play store directly through the user interface to rent / buy movies, TV shows and stream play music. Someday, upgrading from a Chromecast to a Nexus Player or other Android TV device could be a no-brainer, but that won’t happen until Cast functionality becomes more fluid and less wonky, and until Android TV gets more apps. In the meantime, you won’t miss out on much by spending significantly less. The gaming component of Nexus Player is interesting as well, but you need a $40 controller—more than the price of Chromecast alone—to take full advantage, and it too needs a lot of work to reach its potential.
On the other hand, the Nexus Player supports the latest Wi-Fi standard (802.11ac) which is capable of more than double the throughput of the prior 802.11n standard. The frustrating lack of an Ethernet jack is compounded by the fact that Android TV clearly supports such a connection, evidenced by an Ethernet option in the settings menu. The remote is a plain 5.4-inch matte black wand that apes the Fire TV's remote in layout and design. It has a prominent circular navigation pad with a selection button in the middle flanked a Voice Search button above, and Back, Play/Pause, and Home buttons below. A small microphone above the Voice Search button lets you speak into the remote to look for media.
The version of Android TV on my Nexus Player sample (Version 5.0, Build LRX21K) lacks some of the options described there , so I gave up at that point. If you plan on using the Nexus Player for gaming, you'll be happy to note the relatively powerful "1.8GHz Quad Core Atom" processor and "Imagination PowerVR Series 6 Graphics 2D/3D Engine." It also has 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. I had to relocate one of my Nexus Players tonight and rename it.
The Nexus Player and Android TV allows consumers to use an HDTV set to play music, watch video originating from Internet services or a local network, and play games . The primary interface is interacted with using a remote with a D-pad dial and 5 buttons. The remote also includes a microphone for voice search functions within supported apps and the main system interface. Android TV can be paired with Bluetooth gaming controllers to interact with the system interface / applications, as well as, playing games.
What is Google’s Nexus Player
The tiled interface looks a lot like the Xbox One's at first glance. It's very responsive on the powerful Nexus Player and has a relatively clean, uncluttered look with a central bar of four large thumbnails, above a row of icons for apps, another for games. Search is rightly prominent, and I like that the background changes to reflect the currently highlighted item. Then there's TabCasting, another feature from Chromecast that potentially allows the contents of Chrome browser pages to appear on-screen. It's still marked "Beta" by Google, and in our experience is even less convenient than true Casting or native apps, and more prone to dropouts, stutter and other deal-breaking failures .
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