More power and one cool trick

There’s a part of me that wants to love the Google TV Streamer, but in many ways, it’s fallen flat for me because using it feels exactly like using the older Chromecast with Google TV or the Google TV interface built into my smart projector. Sure, it’s a little faster, and I feel like I can rely on it a little more, but the upgrade doesn’t change much once I start watching content.

Let’s start with my favourite upgrade, and that’s the new remote. Don’t get your hopes up — I wouldn’t describe it as premium. It’s still just as plasticky and cheap-feeling as it was with the latest Chromecast, but this time, it’s a little larger and has a speaker built-in, so you can make it chirp if you lose it. Simply press the button on the back of the set-top box or ask Google Assistant and it plays a loud sound. The best I can describe the remote as, is fine. There’s nothing technically wrong with it, but with all the splash Google is trying to make about the TV streamer being a premium TV-watching device, I would have loved to see the remote get a more substantial upgrade. The only real other addition is the small ‘Star’ button that you can map yourself, but since it replaces the input select key, I suspect a lot of people are going to need to map it to change inputs if they want to use this remote as their only TV controlling device, so the addition feels pretty moot in my eyes. I have mine set to open my Plex app, and it’s pretty handy, but I would have loved for this button to be larger and not replace the input select option.

Where the Google TV Streamer really excels is how smooth the operating system feels. This removes the annoyance of the slight lag you might feel when using the older Chromecast or a TV with built-in Google TV, but really, it just proves how underpowered all those other devices are. And even after saying that, I wouldn’t call it that fast, but it’s finally enough not to be annoying, which is something. Reports claim that it’s the same chipset as the Amazon Fire TV Stick Max, which is $50 cheaper in Canada and has WiFi 6E support.

Still, it’s likely faster than all Google TV devices except for the Nvidia Shield, but you still have to see ads on the home screen sometimes. There are also all kinds of recommendations on the main screen that I thought would be cool when I first reviewed the Chromecast in 2020, but years later, I never look at them, and even the ‘keep watching’ section feels hit and miss with how accurate it is. Sometimes, it will show me a YouTube video I was watching a few days ago, but rarely will it show me what I was actually in the middle of watching on my phone before I decided to move over to the TV. The voice controls are good, but you still don’t see Netflix or Plex content on the home screen, so since those are some of my primary streaming services, the recommendations don’t do a lot for me. That said, the interface will tap into Crave now, which is a lot nicer for bringing HBO content to the forefront of the OS.

When I set up my Streamer, I had to restart it a few times because it kept crashing when I tried to set it up with my phone. After finally giving up on that and manually typing in all my information, I was able to get it running, and it’s been fine since then. It also has access to lots of apps that I use on the TV, so it’s been pretty great. However, the Plex app feels substantially lower quality than it does on Apple TV. It works and has all the same options, but it just feels a little less polished and more like it’s using Google’s design language from 2016, not 2024. That’s more of a knock on Plex than it is on Google, but it illustrates that apps might not always be the best versions of themselves on Google’s platform. Sure, the Google TV Streamer might have enough power to push around a cool app with nice animations, but since Google TV OS runs on cheap TVs, the app has to be as simple as possible so it works on that wide variety of devices. I also had to go in and turn on a setting to make sure the frame rate matched the content I was watching, or I would get a weird motion-smoothing type experience, which was really annoying to have still to do in 2024.

There are some nice upgrades to Google TV packed into this device, like the ability to control your smart home, view camera feeds, and someday make AI-generated screensavers (who’s asking for that?), but those are pretty outside the core TV experience, so I’m not sure how much of a selling feature those will be. That being said, Google TVs allow you to use photos from your own photo library or other rotating photographs from real people for your screensaver, and I like both of those options. However, Google used to let you use cool satellite photos of Earth from Google Maps as your screensaver, and I’m sad that they have been removed.

You can also set up multiple user profiles, which can make it easier if you live with roommates or want a more locked-down experience for your kids. I also found that the TV defaulted YouTube to 4K when the videos supported it, which was a really subtle quality of life addition. Another nice quality-of-life improvement is that if you’re using earbuds that support Android Quick Pair, you can just hold the pair button on your buds, and they’ll pop up on your screen. I also like how easy it is to search for movies on Google on my phone or the web and then add them to my watch list, which appears on the TV. I would have also loved to see some Material You implementation on this device, but all in all, the software looks nice.

My projector already runs Google TV, and yeah, it might be a little slower, but since there’s no option to boot directly into HDMI 2 on it, it feels just as annoying to navigate through the interface to the input selector, and then choose input two just to be greeted with the same home screen as I was just at, but now it runs marginally faster. After doing that for a few weeks, I’d rather just deal with the slower Google TV interface on the projector. You can set Google TV-powered projectors and TVs to boot into the last used input, but since I’m running a soundbar through HDMI as well, the projector will boot to that instead of the Google TV Streamer if the streamer went to sleep last time I used it instead of being turned off directly. I’d love for Google to make it an option to choose what input to boot into, as Roku does.

This device sits in a weird spot at the end of the day. Sure, it’s a little smoother than the Google TV interface on my TV, but it’s not so much better that I would be willing to pay $129 for it. Maybe if the ads disappeared, I would be more interested in the upgrade, but it feels like a steep ask for what’s on offer right now. In Canada, the device only comes in the white porcelain colour as well, which is fine, and definitely not a huge deal, but it’s really strange that the darker option is a U.S. exclusive, and I find the white does stick out a little more than I’d like in my media centre.

You can find the Google TV Streamer at the Google Store or lots of other retailers like Best Buy.