Further food for thought: if you look sideways at a GTV box, it's really a switch with two inputs: the external HDMI input (typically your cable box or TiVo) and the internal GTV feed. Mine adds a third input: the integrated Blu-ray player.

That's not too far away from the new generation of low-end home theater receivers. Consider, for example the bottom-of-the-line Denon AVR-1312 ($250 list, $180 direct from Denon on sale). It's got 4 HDMI inputs, 1 HDMI output, and a small handful of other inputs. The back panel is mostly blank. Higher-end Denon units add support for Apple Airplay and other networked features, but those probably have Denon's crappy UI. Conversely, if you shoehorned a GTV box in here, you'd instantly have a very useful device at what would probably still be a dirt cheap price.



I do agree that Google hasn't been doing very much lately with GTV. The only recent feature bump I can think of is the YouTube app integration with Android phones, which is too buggy to use, at least for me. They also have been tweaking minor things, like updating the Google Play Store app to having rough parity with what you find on phones. I think part of the problem is that there just aren't that many things you *do* with a box like this. The only apps we regularly run are Pandora and Google Play (both for music) and occasionally ViMu Player (nee GTVBox), which connects to my computer upstairs to stream MKV files and such. Since GTV remote controllers are completely useless for gaming, you won't see a lot of native game ports. (Given the specs of a modern GTV box, it's kinda surprising that Google hasn't pushed them as a console gaming platform, not even for casual Wii-like games.)

The biggest mystery to me is that HBO has a native Android version of HBO Go, but they require GTV users to go through the web browser, which is much more painful to navigate. Plus, if/when Google strips Flash out of the GTV Chrome browser, HBO Go support will die.