Google has just announced the Google TV streamer, a set-top box similar to the Apple TV designed to replace the tech giant’s older Chromecast products. It launches on 24 September for £99, significantly cheaper than Apple’s £149 streaming box.
Like the outgoing Chromecast dongle, the Google TV streamer runs on the Google TV interface, a streamlined operating system that unifies all of your various streaming apps into one dashboard, and that’s already built into some top-end televisions and streaming boxes.
The Google TV streamer also doubles as a smart home hub for Google Home and Nest devices and runs on the matter standard: a universal language for smart home products that lets smart home tech from different brands speak to one another seamlessly.
A single dashboard for all of your various streaming apps – including Netflix, Disney+ and Apple TV – the Google TV streamer turns any television into a smart TV and gives viewers access to over 700,000 movies and TV shows.
Like almost every other tech launch this year, artificial intelligence is at the heart of the new device. Gemini AI is used to curate your suggestions by tracking your watching habits and lets you build individual taste profiles for everyone in your family.
Gemini AI can also summarise and review episodes and entire seasons of your favourite shows, which is helpful given the increasingly giant gaps between seasons of some of our favourites, such as Severance and The Last of Us.
Google TV streamer
- Dimensions: 162mm x 75.6mm x 26.7mm
- Weight: 160.7g
- Resolution: Up to 4K, 60fps
- Video formats: Dolby Vision, HDR10, HDR10+, HLG
- Audio Formats: Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, and Dolby Atmos
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11ac (2.4 GHz / 5 GHz)
- Memory: 4GB
- Storage: 32GB
The new streaming box from Google is designed around providing lag-free 4K content, with a faster processor, 32GB of storage and double the memory all helping to improve performance and reduce stuttering and delays. Google says the porcelain-coloured box is designed to sit in front of your telly, rather than hide behind it – something it says will help with connectivity to smart home devices.
We’ll need to try one out in person before we know whether or not it looks good when placed out in the open on a TV unit. It certainly looks sleeker than any TV streaming box we’ve seen before – a minimalist, low-profile, pill-shaped pad that mimics the design-ethos of Google’s Pixel phones. The same aesthetic is used on the included voice remote, which gets a textured back for better grip and a more optimised button layout, with a customisable button you can assign to your favourite app.
As well as streaming TV shows, the Google TV streamer also wants to be a big screen dashboard for your connected smart home. It features a new Google Home app redesigned for large displays and can show you a live feed from your smart doorbell, let you control smart light bulbs, run automations, open and close smart blinds, adjust the temperature, start your portable air conditioner and more.
To get techy, the Google TV streamer supports the matter standard and acts as a thread-border router too. Essentially, that means it acts as a local hub for smart home devices, letting them directly communicate with one another without the lag or delay of transmitting through the cloud. Not all devices support matter yet, but it’s been adopted by all of the major smart home brands and is increasingly the new standard for smart home tech.
We’ll bring you a full review of the Google TV streamer when it launches in September.
Google Chromecast 4K with Google TV: Was £63.99, now £29.99, Currys.co.uk
The Google TV streamer is replacing the Chromecast in September, but Google’s older streaming dongle will still be supported and with the newer device launching soon we’re seeing big discounts.
The Google Chromecast dongle turns any TV into a smart one, a streaming stick and voice remote that brings together most of your favourite streaming apps into one place. The Google TV interface is one of the slickest we’ve tested and lets you search for TV shows, music and movies using voice commands.
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