What do you get when you buy an Android TV Box?

This is our customers number one question. What in the world makes these TV boxes so different between all of the people that sell them. It seems like everyone is trying to convince me that THEY have the best TV box. Well…let us let you in on a little secret. They are NEARLY all the same! Especially the popular models like the M8, M8N, and M8S. As long as they are original OEM with 2GB of RAM, the difference is so minor, that you would never be able to tell the difference during real world use. Now, this is assuming that you aren’t being sold a clone – this is where things can get a bit awry. To keep it short, a clone is a knock-off of another device and will have inferior hardware inside. These clones have cheaper internal components like off-brand RAM chips, bad wireless adapters, and off-brand eMMC (your internal storage). Now all of this may seem indistinguishable from the outside, but where you really run into problems is with the performance of your device and it’s health over time. Clones will run slower, have memory loss, and have a higher failure rate over time.

OEM ORIGINAL.

“Okay, so I found someone who tells me they sell OEM originals.. Now what?” – Well, we’d love to tell you that the road ends there, but it doesn’t. The first thing you should do is ask them to prove it. You’ll be able to tell pretty quickly if they know what they’re talking about. Though more importantly, these devices come in a more-or-less unusable and non-user friendly state when they arrive from China. The Android O/S is bare and not configured to display correctly on a TV, and worse, the Kodi Media Center is not programmed and even if it is, it’s rammed with so much junk, spam and bloatware that instead of watching your favorite movies and tv – your head will spin and you’ll just end up frustrated and overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that doesn’t work. The practice of stuffing the Kodi Media Center with as much “content” as possible is BAD and misleading to the customer. This is because it bloats the interface, inflates the Kodi data file which impacts performance, and leaves you with a large amount of non-working, low quality programs. Not very pleasant. This is the number one problem with sellers who buy and resell directly without checking or programming the box themselves.

SO WHAT DO YOU GET?

But let’s get back to the first question. “What do you get when you buy a TV box?”. Well you get a TV box of course, but what you pay for is someone who knows what they are doing to properly configure your TV box. Someone who has their finger on the pulse of the TV box scene and knows what works and what doesn’t. You also pay for on-going support and future updates. As much as we would love the TV box to be a one-time deal. It’s not. Software changes all the time and when your favorite apps don’t work anymore, you will need a place that provides updates so you can keep on streaming. So, if you’re thinking about buying from somewhere who doesn’t have a system in place to provide you support, serve your updates, and keep you in the loop with what works and doesn’t — what exactly are you paying for?