Thomson Streaming Box Plus Review: A Real Google TV Streamer Rival

The Thomson Streaming Box Plus 270 is Thomson’s entry into the standalone streaming box space — and it’s clearly aimed at the same spot as Google’s own Google TV Streamer. It runs Google TV, supports basically every major streaming app (local and global), includes both Wi-Fi 6 and Ethernet, and — unlike Google’s box — it even builds in a far-field mic for hands-free voice commands.

We also looked at how it stacks up against the Google TV Streamer, Nvidia Shield, and Apple TV 4K.

Key Hardware Specs: Thomson Streaming Box Plus 270

• Output: Up to 4K, 60 frames per second
• HDR formats: HDR10, HDR10+, HLG, Dolby Vision
• Chipset: Amlogic S905X4-B
  • CPU: quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 @ 2.0 GHz
  • GPU: ARM Mali-G31 MP2 @ 850 MHz
• RAM: 3GB
• Storage: 32GB total (about 22GB usable)
• Video codecs: MPEG2, MPEG4, HEVC, VP9-2, AV1
• Audio formats: Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Atmos (streaming)
• Networking: Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), Ethernet, Bluetooth 5.2
• OS / UI: Google TV on Android 12
• Casting: Built-in Google Cast
• Ports: HDMI out, Ethernet, USB, power
• Dimensions / weight: 43 x 118 x 118 mm, 296 g
• Accessories in box: streaming box, remote, HDMI cable, power adapter with swappable plug heads (EU + UK), quick-start sheet

Other notes:

• Supports Bluetooth game controllers
• Supports USB and wireless keyboards/mice
• No Thread radio

Design & First Look

The streaming device world spent years racing to make everything as tiny and cheap as possible — HDMI sticks, pucks, dongles. That’s convenient to hide, but cramped hardware means compromises.

Recently, though, even Google went back to a proper box form factor with the Google TV Streamer, which quietly signaled: “we need more space for real ports and better radios.” Thomson clearly agrees.

The Streaming Box Plus is a real box — available in black or white — and that opens the door for features you just don’t get in a dongle:

• Full-size Ethernet port
• USB port for extra storage / peripherals
• A physical HDMI port (of course)
• Far-field microphone array in the unit itself (not just in the remote)
• A physical hardware “mic off” slider on the side
• A front “find my remote” button

Yes, that last one is excellent: press the button on the box and the remote makes a sound so you can track it down.

Because it’s a box controlled over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and HDMI CEC, you can tuck it behind the TV and still control volume and power over your TV and sound system. So the old fear of “one more box means one more remote” really doesn’t apply anymore.

One thoughtful touch: the AC adapter includes swappable plug heads (EU / UK). One less thing to hunt for. The color-matched cables are nice too — though we wish the power cable were a bit longer for easier hiding behind wall-mounted TVs.

You can also hard-mute the always-listening mic via the physical slider if you don’t want voice features active at all.

Setup & Everyday Use

Setup follows the standard Google TV onboarding flow, which is mostly fine… and occasionally annoying. Like with many Google TV devices we’ve tested, the phone-based setup sometimes stalls halfway through, forcing you to finish on-screen with the remote. That’s not technically difficult, just slow, especially when you’re pecking in passwords one letter at a time.

Also, Google still insists on running mandatory updates before you’re even done setting up — which is not our favorite design choice.

Once you’re actually in, though, things smooth out quickly. The box auto-detected the TV we plugged it into and configured control without us lifting a finger:

• Power on/off sync worked out of the gate.
• Volume buttons on the Thomson remote controlled the TV’s speakers immediately.
• The box woke the TV and put it back to standby with no extra pairing steps.

As always, make sure HDMI-CEC is enabled on your TV (it usually is, but not 100% of the time).

Voice control

At first we thought the built-in mic wasn’t responding. Turns out there are two switches:

1. The physical mic slider on the box must be “on.”
2. You must also enable hands-free mic access in your Google TV profile.

Once both were enabled, voice worked as expected. You can say things like “Hey Google, turn off the TV,” and it will power down the display. There’s even a tiny speaker inside the box that plays feedback tones.

Remote

The remote is clearly modeled after Google’s Google TV remote, but with extra buttons:

• Four sponsored shortcut buttons (which we could honestly live without)
• A customizable “star” button, which is actually great: you can map it to your favorite app or to the Google Home panel so you can quickly toggle smart devices in your house
• Direction pad, back, power, input, etc.

It doesn’t feel premium — all plastic, rounded back, uses normal batteries instead of USB charging — but it’s perfectly usable. Button feel is actually a touch better than Google’s own in some cases. And if you want to go deeper, you can remap certain buttons using a free “Button Mapper” app from the Google TV store.

Power & Performance

Under the hood, the Streaming Box Plus uses an ARM-based Amlogic SoC. We measured energy use and compared it with other streamers like Apple TV 4K (2022), Nvidia Shield (2019), and the Google TV Streamer. Power draw during video playback tends to land in the ~3W range, which is higher than Apple TV 4K but lower than Nvidia Shield.

In general:

• Idle / menus: around 2.5W
• Streaming video: roughly 3–3.7W
• Light gaming: about 3.4–4.4W
• Standby: ~2.4W

So it’s low-power, but not the most power-efficient box on the market.

Google TV Experience (Apps, UI, Playback)

Functionally, this box behaves like any recent Google TV device: Chromecast with Google TV, Google TV Streamer, or a Sony / TCL / Philips TV running Google TV. The difference is that TVs also include tuners; the Thomson box is strictly for streaming.

Google TV’s interface is built around rows of content suggestions and app recommendations. You get:

• App rows from supported services
• A cross-service “Continue Watching” row (for apps that integrate properly)
• A big rotating ad carousel across the top
• Personalized suggestions

In the US, Google TV has more tabs and more aggressive content surfacing. In Europe, the layout is still a bit simpler, which honestly means fewer in-your-face ads — for now.

All of the major apps worked in testing: Netflix, YouTube, Apple TV app, local broadcaster apps, etc. The box can output:

• Up to 4K resolution
• Up to 60fps
• HDR10 / HDR10+ / HLG
• Dolby Vision

Those formats auto-switch correctly, so SDR ↔ HDR ↔ Dolby Vision changes happen without you diving into settings.

Frame rate matching

This is where Google TV as a platform still lags Apple TV 4K.

There is an API for frame rate matching in Google TV, but almost nobody uses it. Netflix does, so Netflix can switch output between 24Hz and 60Hz as needed. Most other apps don’t. Result:

• A European 50fps show might be played back at 60Hz output, which introduces subtle judder because 50 doesn’t evenly divide into 60.
• An American 24fps movie might also be played at 60Hz in certain apps, which also causes mild stutter.

If you mostly watch European broadcast-style content (25/50fps), you can manually force the box to output 4K50 instead of 4K60 in settings to improve motion. But then US/film content (24fps) won’t be perfectly smooth.

Apple TV 4K still has the best system-wide frame rate and dynamic range matching across most apps. Neither Google’s own box nor Thomson’s box can touch that yet.

Smart home control, Assistant, AI

The Thomson box includes the same Google Home control panel we’ve seen on the Google TV Streamer. You can pull up smart home devices, adjust thermostats, etc. Even without Thread built in, we were able to adjust Nest thermostats instantly via Wi-Fi.

Google Assistant is built in. The usual complaints still apply:

• It’s extremely picky about phrasing. Saying “find Lord of the Rings movies” gave irrelevant YouTube search results. Saying “Lord of the Rings movies” (without “find”) actually pulled up the intended titles.
• Search results are heavily biased toward YouTube, which Google owns.

There’s also Google’s Gemini AI integration in the Play Store movie pages: short AI-written summaries and “you might also like” recs. It technically works (we saw it in Europe with the UI language set to English), but it’s just cloud-side AI text — nothing running locally, nothing you couldn’t live without.

Hardware Comparison: Thomson vs Google TV Streamer vs Shield vs Apple TV

Let’s talk silicon.

Thomson Streaming Box Plus

• Amlogic S905X4-B
• 4x ARM A55 cores @ 2.0GHz
• Mali-G31 MP2 GPU
• 3GB RAM
• 32GB storage (22GB usable)

Google TV Streamer

• MediaTek MT8696
• 4x ARM A55 cores @ 2.0GHz
• PowerVR Rogue GE9215 GPU
• 4GB RAM
• 32GB storage (24GB usable)

So on paper:

• Google’s box has 1GB more RAM and slightly better CPU scores in benchmarks.
• GPU performance between the two is effectively the same.
• Thomson gives you Wi-Fi 6 (Google’s box is Wi-Fi 5) and Bluetooth 5.2 instead of 5.1.

In practice:

• Navigating menus in the Thomson box feels very close to the Google TV Streamer — both are clearly smoother than the older Chromecast with Google TV dongle.
• Neither comes close to Nvidia Shield in raw GPU horsepower.
• Apple TV 4K is still in its own league performance-wise and responsiveness-wise, especially in graphics-heavy tasks.

One extra plus for Thomson: you can expand storage using the USB port. That’s handy for sideloaded apps, emulators, or big local media libraries.

The box ships with Android 12, which means the UI itself renders in 4K instead of 1080p upscaled (something older Android TV / Google TV devices were still doing in Android 11 days).

HDMI reality check

Thomson advertises HDMI 2.1, but this is one of those “HDMI 2.1 means everything now” naming problems. The actual output tops out at 4K 60Hz with HDR, which is basically HDMI 2.0-level bandwidth. That’s totally fine for streaming, but just understand you’re not getting 4K120 output from this box.

AV1 decoding works properly, including on YouTube in 4K HDR, which is nice for future-proofing as more services move to AV1.

For local media playback (Plex, Kodi, etc.):

• Apps run fine.
• Frame rate handling is better inside those apps than via normal streaming apps.
• But this is not a Shield replacement. There’s no passthrough for high-end lossless home theater audio like Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA, and it won’t handle Blu-ray-style Dolby Vision Profile 7. This is a streamer, not a disc player.

Audio-wise:

• Streaming Atmos works (Netflix, Apple TV+, etc.).
• Regular Dolby formats are supported.
• DTS audio formats and lossless Dolby TrueHD are not supported.

Light Gaming

As expected, this is not a gaming powerhouse. The CPU/GPU combo is entry-level. You can play casual Android / Google TV games (Beach Buggy Racing, Asphalt 8, platformers, that kind of thing) with a Bluetooth controller from Xbox or PlayStation.

Anything more serious? You’ll need game streaming. Nvidia’s GeForce Now and Boosteroid are both available as apps on Google TV and will run here. Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming app still isn’t officially on Google TV yet.

So: it’s playable for simple stuff, and it can be a cloud gaming client, but it will not replace a console.

Verdict

The Thomson Streaming Box Plus is, in almost every meaningful way, a true competitor to the Google TV Streamer. The differences between them are small but real:

Where Thomson is ahead:

• Wi-Fi 6 instead of Wi-Fi 5
• Bluetooth 5.2
• Built-in hands-free mic + physical mic kill switch
• Ethernet port, USB port, and a literal “find my remote” button on the box
• Interchangeable power plugs in the box
• Storage expansion via USB

Where Google’s box is ahead:

• Slightly stronger CPU performance and one extra gig of RAM
• Thread support (important if you want your streaming box to double as a smart home hub in a Matter/Thread ecosystem)

And where both fall short of dreamland:

• Neither matches Apple TV 4K for smoothness, responsiveness, or system-wide frame rate matching
• Neither matches Nvidia Shield for local media playback flexibility and audio passthrough
• Neither fully solves Google TV’s quirks with Assistant voice search, clunky onboarding, and frame rate issues outside of Netflix

But taken on its own terms, the Thomson box is easy to recommend:

• Setup is straightforward.
• It instantly controls your TV power and volume through HDMI-CEC.
• It supports 4K HDR (including Dolby Vision) and Dolby Atmos from mainstream apps.
• It’s faster and more capable than old HDMI dongles.
• It gives you Ethernet, USB, and Wi-Fi 6 in one box.

Would we like even more powerful hardware, lossless audio passthrough, DTS:X support, full frame-rate matching across apps, and Thread? Absolutely. But to be fair, almost no mainstream streamer checks all those boxes today.

Bottom line:
If you want a Google TV box that behaves like Google’s own streamer but with Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, a built-in mic, and a remote-finder button — and you’re fine without Thread — the Thomson Streaming Box Plus 270 is a legit alternative at essentially the same class and price point.