I’d like to open a discussion regarding the potential for Framework building a media player box.
Currently, solutions like Apple TV offer strong hardware specs, but the closed OS and tightly integrated ecosystem restricts flexibility. Google TV streamer’s 2024 release brought only modest improvements in hardware, especially considering its $99 price point.
Meanwhile, products such as Fire TV, Roku, Onn, etc further fragment the market. They deliver an adequate user experience at various price points, but generally fall short of offering true advancement or differentiation for power users.
The NVIDIA Shield TV from 2019 still stands out as the enthusiast’s choice, but it is starting to show its age in both hardware capabilities and software updates.
Given the current landscape, I believe there’s an opportunity for Framework to offer a media player box.
Combining optimized hardware (Amlogic, Snapdragon, mediatek, AMD Strix) with options for various operating systems (Android, Linux, Steam, CoreELEC, etc.), such a platform could address current market gaps and cater to both mainstream and advanced users.
This platform could also serve as a base for ‘home automation’ use cases if it were to support matter & thread.
I fear that if Framework made something like that, it simply wouldn’t be price competitive, particularly if they gave it top of the line performance. A lot of those companies (if not all) have their own subscription and advertising revenue models that they draw on with their streaming box. This likely lets them charge less for the hardware.
Lacking that, I bet a Framework-made Android streaming box would cost more than the competition. I’m sure some enthusiasts would still buy one, but I think they’d struggle to get a meaningful foothold in the, as you mention, already saturated market.
But maybe I’m way off base. That’s just my initial thought.
If you don’t mind buying an old machine or one of those small fancy PCs, I would just stick with a home theater PC of some kind. Something to easily stream video over network, play local files, or best of all… stream YouTube video with an adblocker.
Our Chromecast is going out at the moment and I am considering experimenting switching over to an old Intel Nuc running Linux.
The current market is pretty saturated with decent hardware and somewhat questionable software, framework is pretty solid at hardware and pretty questionable at software/firmware, so not sure that is a particularly good fit.
You can get pretty decent intel n100(or n150) based passive machines for a bit over 100$ that can run whatever you want media wise.