Hands On With the Google Nexus Player

Google's Nexus Player is the company's best stab at the TV so far. I got a demo of it today at a Google event, and I'm hopeful. Hopefully, we'll see Android TV introduced into sets at CES.

The Nexus Player is a little disc, made by Asus and running an Intel Silvermont processor, which plugs into your TV. It comes with a small black remote (simple, not complex like some of the silly Google TV remotes were), and it has an optional gamepad. Its only ports are an HDMI-out, a power port, and a USB jack; I didn't see Ethernet, for instance.

Plug it into your TV, and you see a "smart TV" interface centered on content from Google Play, which takes top billing. What's really interesting is what's going on down below, though. According to Google, the Nexus Player is "just an Android device" and will run "any app downloaded from Google Play."

I can't wait to see how that plays out. Games, for instance, are restricted by their interfaces. If you want to play games, you'll probably want a Bluetooth gamepad like Asus's $39 unit, and you'll want to play gamepad-compatible games. Fortunately, there are a lot of those nowadays. You can also use a paired Android phone as an input device.


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The hotter question is whether all the Google Play entertainment apps will let themselves be run on the Nexus Player. Our demo sample showed Netflix, Pandora, Hulu and, of course, YouTube. So far, so good. But what about HBO GO? And Amazon, which has structured its Prime streaming app so it plays on Android phones but not tablets? Whether you'll really be able to play any content that Android suppors, or whether content owners will block this device, is a critically unanswered question.

The Nexus Player also does everything a Chromecast does, showing content from other Android devices in the home.

Like with Amazon's Fire TV , Google has also invested in voice search being a major way to search the company's content library. A search for "Halloween movies," spoken into the remote, turned up the whole horror movie series on Google Play and a lot of more family-friendly content on YouTube.

The Nexus Player costs $99 and enters a crowded field full of Amazon Fire TVs, Chromecasts, Rokus and such. They all suffer from the "Input 1 problem," which is that most ordinary consumers don't want to have to switch inputs away from their cable box or console gaming system for their content.

But the Nexus Player's real value is as a harbinger of Android TV. Sony, Sharp, and Philips have all said they'll bring Android TVs to market soon, probably at CES. The smart TV market is still a mess of competing, complex, proprietary interfaces, which has slowed the development of TV-compatible apps in general. Google's going to make a bid here, once again, to standardize and simplify.

For more, see PCMag's hands on with the Nexus 6 smartphone and Nexus 9 tablet (video below).