The Breaker Times

Google TV Streamer

MSRP $99.00

“Google replaces Chromecast with a worthy streaming platform.”

Pros

• Priced at a sweet spot
• Google TV is smoother
• Improved remote control
• Includes smart home features

Cons

• Can’t hide behind a TV
• Smart-home features a little rough

There always some something about Chromecast with Google TV that just didn’t quite feel right. Underpowered. Awkward remote control. Wi-Fi-only. That’s not to say it wasn’t adequate as a streaming device. It was. Capable, even.

But with the new (if oddly named) Google TV Streamer, it really feels as if Google has rectified the sins of the past in a device that costs twice as much as its predecessor. What it did before it now does better. And it has new features that should soften the blow to your wallet, even if it still comes in at a price beneath Apple TV 4K, which we still consider to be the best streaming device you can buy.

Some of those new features feel unfinished, however. Others feel like a solution in search of a problem. And that only exacerbates my continued complaint about Google TV as a platform — it just has too darn much going on at any one time.

So what’s new in the Google TV Streamer? Is it worth an upgrade? And does it stand up against the surprise 2024 hit that was Walmart’s Onn 4K Pro? Let’s dig in.

About this review

As we publish this review, I’ve only had the Google TV Streamer for about five days. That’s admittedly not a lot of time for a review. I’m no stranger to Google TV, however. Or Android TV before that. (Go all the way back to the Logitech Revue Google TV box, if we must.) And I’m certainly no stranger to all the services we use with this sort of thing. While there’s a good bit new around the edges of the Google TV Streamer, the core experience remains the same.

Google had us load three beta versions of apps for pre-release testing: the Google TV Ambient Mode app, Google TV Home app, and the Google app for Android TV.

If something unexpected pops up in our further testing, we’ll update this review.

The new look and feel

Perhaps the biggest change with the Google TV Streamer is that this no longer is a dongle that will dangle behind your television. It’s meant to be out in the open. That potentially could be problematic depending on how you have things mounted, I suppose. But it’s also probably nothing you couldn’t fix with some Command Strips if it comes to that.

The change has as much to do with two new features as it does any other explanation, such as giving engineers more space in which to work. The Google TV Streamer now has Ethernet — that requires a bigger body — and it now supports Matter and Thread for smart-home features. I’ll get to those bits in a minute.

There’s really not a whole lot to look at here. The design language doesn’t really depart from Chromecast With Google TV. Still pretty flat. Still pretty thin, even though the surfboard-shaped top (maybe more skateboard-like?) belies the actual thickness of the device.

Any real business is being down in the back. There’s a USB-C port for power (and whatever weird dongle/adapter situation you might want to try out, should you need external storage or anything), the gigabit Ethernet port, HDMI port (Google says to use a HDMI 2.1 cable, which you’ll have to provide yourself), and a small button that very nicely takes us to …

The new remote control

The other obvious — though I wouldn’t call it monumental — change is the remote control. It’s a little bigger, for a better feel in the hand, Google says. I agree. It still has the same sort of matte plastic that the Chromecast remote sports, and this new remote has already picked up a few odd streaks and specs from basic use. It’s still powered by a pair of AAA batteries. And while I don’t think I’d call it my favorite remote control out of the dozen or so I have at home (I really should do something about that), it’s definitely improved.

The most important change is that the volume buttons have moved from their awkward positioning on the side to a properly sized two-button layout on the face of the remote. And the Home button is now where the Google Assistant button once lived. Whether you hold the remote in your left hand or your right, that puts the Home button in a better place, and makes the volume buttons more accessible. Good changes, both.

You also now get a programmable button, which actually made its debut earlier this year on the remote control for the Onn 4K Pro. Sometimes referred to as the “Magic Button” — which I shall not be calling it — the Google TV Streamer allows you to choose one of three functions for that button, instead of the two on the Onn 4K Pro. You can still set it to launch a specific app, or to allow you to change inputs on your TV. Or you can have it launch the new Google Home section of Google TV. (Again, you’re going to have to wait a little more on this part. We’re getting to it, I promise.)

The two branded buttons — YouTube and Netflix — still work as before. The YouTube button still lets you choose whether you want YouTube proper, YouTube TV, or YouTube Music to be the default action. (If you have the app installed, that is.)

Recall that button on the back of the Google TV Streamer? That’s a one-touch toggle to activate the Find My Remote feature. Hit it, and the remote starts chirping via a (new!) speaker on its underside. You also can activate that feature from within the Google Home app on a phone, or use your voice with Google Assistant on any other voice-capable device. Hitting the button on the back of the Google TV Streamer is simple enough, though.

Smart home control

As promised, here comes the smart home part of the Google TV Streamer. I’m going to break it down into two parts: There’s the stuff you can actually see and use, and the stuff that does things in the background that you’ll sort of never actually see.

The Home panel

Google Home has come to Google TV Streamer. Not that it hasn’t been in the past. You could always use your voice to view a camera — “Hey, Google, show me the pool camera,” for instance. But that was on-demand stuff. Now, starting with the Google TV Streamer, Google Home has a proper, erm, home in Google TV.

The Home Panel, as it’s also called, lives in the side menu of the Google TV user interface. Google TV Streamer is the first device on which it appears, and Google wouldn’t tell me if or when we’d see it on other Google TV devices. (I wouldn’t bet against it.)

The easiest way to get the Home Panel is to hold down the Home button on the remote. Or you can go as far to the right as you can on the home screen. (Just hold down the Home button, though.) You’ll click through to start the setup process — I was asked to verify my account, which is a good thing — and then I got the option to actually enable the Home panel, and whether I wanted doorbell notifications to appear on the screen.

Blessedly, this was all the setup I had to do. (Smart home setup can be notoriously messy.) Immediately I saw options for all my cameras, lights, and “climate,” which in my case means the fourth-generation Nest Thermostat and its external temperature sensor. It even set up favorite devices for me, with the Nest Thermostat and cameras now at the ready. It’s all really intuitive and mostly well done. I can see a live view of my cameras, and click in if I want to see them in a larger view. I can adjust the temperature on the Nest Thermostat — just select it, then use the left or right buttons on the directional pad on the remote. Very cool. Google says all the Nest Thermostats that can be controlled from the Google Home app should appear here.

I did run into a few minor issues. If you try to click into the thermostat like you might the camera, you get a little message at the bottom of the screen that reads “Additional actions are not supported on TV.” That’s kind of robotic and clunky, but OK.

Viewing cameras is great, but that’s all I could do. I couldn’t actually control any of them. If a camera was off, it stayed off. If it was on, I couldn’t turn it off. Saying “turn on the pool camera” to the remote control brings up related videos on YouTube. Not helpful in the slightest. So you’ll still need another device to deal with that, if necessary. And if a camera is off, why show it at all in the favorites? Google tells me that’s by design. Because the TV remote is a communal device — theoretically anyone can pick it up and do whatever with it — Google doesn’t want any random person to be able to turn cameras off or on. I’d like to see that be an option, though, given that these are typically devices that will be used in homes.

And while you can hear what’s going on in front of the camera just fine, you can’t respond to anyone like you can from a phone. That’d be a nice feature to have, given that the Google TV Streamer remote has a microphone.

And perhaps it’s a small thing, but the notifications for the latest-generation of Nest Doorbells struggle a bit. The latest models record video in a vertical 4:3 aspect ratio, which then gets squeezed to within an inch of its now horizontal life in the notification that pops up when someone rings the bell. Add to that the seven-second or so delay I experienced — plus the fact that you get more of a time-lapse preview and not real-time video — and it’s a pretty worthless experience. I’ll just get up and look out the window instead.

At least when you go into the Home Panel the live view from the various Nest cameras will appear in their proper aspect ratios. The doorbell is a vertical 4:3, while other cameras have much smaller 16:9 horizontal windows.

Matter and Thread

I hate talking about smart home protocols. They’re the sort of thing that normal consumers — a fine human being such as yourself — really shouldn’t need to know. Either a product works with something, or it doesn’t. Matter is a protocol that allows devices from competing companies actually play nicely together. And Google TV Streamer supports Matter.

That means an accessory — say, a light or a lock or a camera — that supports Matter will definitely work with Google TV Streamer and can use it as a way to become a part of Google Home. Very cool. Most of my smart home accessories already worked just fine with Google Home, but it’s nice to know support is finally becoming more universal.

But Matter support goes both ways. It means Google TV Streamer will be visible to other devices that support Matter. That’s where things get a little messy, though I’ll caveat this next bit by saying if you’re only in the Google ecosystem there’s a good chance none of this will apply, and you can skip on down to the next section. If you’re a smart home (fool) buff and love the messy sort of nature of the business, though, read on.

I have a bunch of Apple stuff at home, in addition to all my Google gear. That includes Apple TV 4K, which also supports Matter. (I imagine this sort of scenario would apply to Samsung’s Smart Things, too.) As I was doing the initial setup of Google TV Streamer, I was asked if I wanted to “Add device to iOS network.” To be clear, this was an option in the Google Home app setup process. I said “yes,” and now Google TV Streamer shows up as a HomeKit accessory. Intriguing.

I was really curious what I could possibly control on the Google TV Streamer via HomeKit. Turns out it identifies as some sort of toggle switch, with power, play/pause, play/stop, and mute listed as actions. Only, none of them actually seemed to work. They show up as switches. I can toggle them. And they do nothing.

Was this at all useful? No. Was it interesting? Slightly.

One big question I do have is how well it works with things like non-Google cameras. Since I don’t have any here, I don’t know. But if the integration with my Philips Hue lights is any indication, it should be OK.

By the way, I haven’t mentioned Thread, which Google TV Streamer also supports. It’s even more of an invisible protocol (on which Matter is built) and basically lets devices that use it talk to each other directly, on the far reaches of your home Wi-Fi network and without some other hub. That’s all you need to know.

Ambient mode and screensavers

Screensavers remain a fairly important feature on this sort of device, as they give you a way to turn a large, otherwise unused TV (when you’re not watching anything) into a way to showcase artwork of various sorts.

Google’s has gotten pretty good over the years. If you’re using Google Photos, it’s simple to have it display a specific album, or you can have it curate photos for you. And, as always, there’s a pre-selected Art Gallery option, which is also nice. But new this time around is custom AI art, very much in the same vein as what Amazon is doing on Fire TV.

You’ll find this in the Ambient Display options. Google has a few sample AI images that you can go ahead and use if you want, but it’s really hoping you’ll make your own via a voice prompt.

Some of the preinstalled samples look more real than others. The New York-style street scene could fool folks. Same for the flowers. The woodland nymph or underwater scenes? Probably not.

It was fun for a few minutes to try to create my own. But it also started to feel like work. Maybe I’m just not good at coming up with prompts. Maybe my brain just isn’t creative like that. But I just didn’t feel like anyone needed my custom prompt to come up with a fairly generic beach scene. But Google has an answer for that, too, with suggest prompts like “airbrushed,” “translucent,” “landscape,” and “imaginary” — as if this wasn’t all imaginary. You go through a sort of Mad Libs workflow and end up with something that looks pretty cool. Or looks like generic AI-generated art. Or you can just hit “inspire me” and it’ll just make something random.

This is all a tiny bit of fun. It’s fine. But it’s also the sort of thing that you’re going to have to be really into if you’re going to want to spend any time on it. I much prefer the idea of picking and choosing some preloaded stuff — or using the gallery of pictures that I actually took — rather than spending the brain cycles to come up with my own not-actually-art.

I’ve also been accused of not being fun, though. If you’re into AI art, this should be fun.

What it’s like to use

Let’s go back to the beginning. I haven’t talked about the setup process or Google TV itself because other than the Google Home panel and AI-generated ambient art, there’s really nothing new in the grand scheme of things. It’s basically exactly like you’ve come to know and love (or tolerate) on Chromecast with Google TV, or the Onn 4K Pro, or any of the numerous TVs that use Google TV as their operating system.

So I’m not going to re-litigate Google TV itself as a platform, other than to say there’s still a ton going on with the home screen. Too much, really. Too many recommendations. Too much trying to steer you toward a specific app or service or show, all in the name of helping you find what you want to watch. The Live tab may well be the most useful, bringing together the likes of YouTube TV’s channels (assuming you’re a subscriber) with various free streaming services that have partnered with Google to have their advertising-supported channels included. (Pro tip: Give the extremely buried “apps only mode” a try. It’s much easier than using a custom launcher on Google TV.)

Once you have everything up and running (and I still highly recommend using a phone to set it all up), there are a few things worth mentioning.

First is that Google TV Streamer is already running Android 14, with the August 1, 2024, security patch. Neither Chromecast nor the Onn 4K Pro are that up to date yet. I didn’t see any real visible difference using the beta apps listed at the top of this review, other than to add the AI-generation Ambient Display screensavers as an option in settings.

Second is that while this is a device with 32GB of on-board storage, I only had 23GB available after first boot, and that’s out of 26GB that are actually left over for any sort of use. That included all the streaming apps I had it go ahead and download as part of the setup process. For what it’s worth, that’s the same as what I have with the Onn 4K Pro. It’s just part of the way Android-based devices work.

You might also need to decide if you want to only use Wi-Fi, or if you’ll use Ethernet. I have a gigabit fiber connection at home, going through an . Using the Analiti speed test app, I was easily seeing wired downstream speeds at at least 600Mbps to 700Mbps, and around half that (maybe a little less) on Wi-Fi. Google TV Streamer supports Wi-Fi 6 (which is 802.11ax, for those of us who loathe the new naming convention). So long as you don’t have any bottlenecks, either should be more than enough to basically stream anything you want. If you have the option to plug in with Ethernet, I’d do so, just because. (And especially if you’re going to be watching movie files on a local server that you definitely acquired legally.) But for most folks? So long as your ISP’s internet speed is decent and your router supports it? Wi-Fi should be plenty fast.

Doing the usual Google TV-type things went just as it always has. I watched a smattering of things, from live stuff on Google TV, to 4K content on Netflix and Disney+, plus a healthy dose of YouTube proper. Things switched from SDR to HDR and HLG and Dolby Vision without my having to worry about it. Audio in Dolby Atmos was recognized by my soundbar. In other words, same as it ever was.

The competition

I mentioned before that the overall experience of using the Google TV Streamer really isn’t unlike other current devices. If you’ve used Google TV at all over the past few years, you already know what to expect.

The differences really are at the edges. For example: The Onn 4K Pro has an available always-listening microphone so you can shout voice commands at it without needing the remote control. Google TV Streamer doesn’t. But it does, however, have gigabit Ethernet, whereas Onn 4K Pro tops out at 10/100 speeds. If a faster wired connection matters to you, go with the more expensive Google TV Streamer.

Chromecast is lacking in almost every way, except one — it’s smaller. I’ve already written that I’m going to keep a Chromecast in my travel bag for hotel use because it’s smaller and more portable. (And because I already have it.) I’m maybe not going to defend that take quite as strongly as I thought I would. Yes, Google TV Streamer is a good bit bigger than a Chromecast. But it’s not so big that I’d have to leave something else at home. That said, Google has been pretty clear that Google TV Streamer is replacing Chromecast. (Even though both are available as of this writing.)

Should you buy it?

I have absolutely no reason to not recommend Google TV Streamer. If that maybe doesn’t sound like a full-throated recommendation, it’s not quite how you should take it. So far, in my early use, it’s definitely been smoother and a good bit faster than Chromecast with Google TV. It’s at least marginally better than the Onn 4K Pro, which costs half as much.

For my money, I’d buy Google TV Streamer because it’s new. Because it’s likely going to keep the attention of Google longer than an older device. I’d buy it for Matter and Thread and the new Google Home features. (And as a reminder, we don’t yet know if they’ll be available on other devices anytime soon.) And I’d buy it because it’s Google, and I’m a brand snob like that.

I’d also buy it because it’s the next generation of smart streaming device for the Android crowd, though it certainly isn’t only meant for them. (I set mine up with an iPhone.) But I’d also buy it knowing that Google TV itself is still trying to do way too much at once, bludgeoning users with options — that now include prompting your own AI-generated screen savers — instead of just giving them a simple way to watch the things they want to watch, whether it’s a movie or a show or a security camera or doorbell.

And, sure, I’d buy Google TV Streamer because in the busy world of streaming TV platforms, Google TV absolutely still holds its own among the four major options.