Android TV Box

Android TV Box  is a version of the Android operating system designed for digital media players. As a replacement for Google TV, it features a user interface designed around content discovery and voice search, surfacing content aggregated from various media apps and services, and integration with other recent Google technologies such as Assistant, Cast, and Knowledge Graph.

The platform was first unveiled in June 2014, with its Nexus Player launch device unveiled that October. The platform has also been adopted as smart TV middleware by a number of display companies including Sony, Sharp and VU TVs.

Android TV was first announced at Google I/O in June 2014, as a successor to the commercially unsuccessful Google TV. The Verge characterized it as being more in line with other digital media player platforms, but leveraging Google’s Knowledge Graphproject, Chromecast compatibility, a larger emphasis on search, closer ties to the Android ecosystem (including Google Play Store and integration with other Android families such as Android Wear), and focusing on supporting video games on the platform with support for Bluetooth gamepads and the Google Play Games framework. Some attendees received the platform’s development kit, the ADT-1; The Information reported that the ADT-1 was based on a scrapped “Nexus TV” launch device that was being developed internally by Google.

Google unveiled the first Android TV device, the Nexus Player developed by Asus, at an hardware event in October 2014.