Many HD TV owners bought set-top boxes to stream online content, choosing from a variety of products created by the biggest names on the market. Google has joined this trend by offering Chromecast and the Nexus Player and the latter device is competing with Roku’s third generation set top box, which came with a processor that is five times faster than the previous one.
The Nexus Player is a digital media player manufactured by Google in collaboration with Asus, which runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop (upgradable to 5.1.1) and supports Google Cast, a feature that allows the users to select and control media playback on a TV. The device is powered by a 1.8GHz quad-core Intel Atom processor which is paired with PowerVR Series 6 Graphics and 1GB of RAM and has an internal memory of 8GB. The player looks like a big black hockey puck, which measures 120x120x20 mm and weights 235grams. The price of the Nexus Player, which was released in November 2014, is 79 dollars and can be bought from Google’s website.
The Roku 3 came in March 2013 and it has the same price as the Nexus Player, but its specs are much weaker, as the processor is clocked at 900MHz and it’s supported by a BCM11130 chipset along with 512MB of RAM and 256MB of internal storage, but which supports expansion. The device is relatively smaller, measuring 89x89x25 mm, it weights 170grams and has a square body with rounded corners, looking like a small black box.
It’s hard to decide which device to buy, because the hardware specs have a high importance. But, if the streamer doesn’t support your favorite channels, then the superior processor or better design won’t matter much. The developers behind the Roku 3 want to entertain their customers and they included channels like Netflix, Hulu, ESPN and other important names. The users can watch movies, TV series, sports and they’ll spend good quality time in front of their TVs along with their guests. However, there are more and more rumors about a successor which will support 4K videos, but it’s uncertain when we’ll see the Roku 4 on the market.
The Nexus Player allows you to play games and provides a remote that looks like Apple Tv’s remote, but which gives access to the Google Cast services and it supports voice commands. So, if you want to search for a movie, just press the Voice search button and say the name and you will get the result almost instantly.
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