I'm in the market for an Android TV box and I'm wondering one thing. I'm really impressed with what Xbox One does. In case anyone's not familiar, Xbox One has an hdmi input, an hdmi output, and while you're on your xbox you can pull up your tv signal. This allows you to switch between using the device (the Xbox) and watching tv, without switching between inputs. Is there such thing as an Android tv box that works like that?
This is one of the things that I find odd about the current AndroidTV devices. My old Sony google TV box has HDMI input (my cable box) and I really like it a lot. Hopefully somebody will make an AndroidTV device that has this soon.
Logitech Revue?
The closest thing is buying a sling box and then casting it to your Android TV.
Not quite what you are looking for but you may want to consider buying an actual TV with Android TV built in. They are staring to hit the market. This would solve your problem of having the cable plugged into the TV with the ability to pull up Android apps without switching inputs.
Wait
I'm not sure I understand... What's inconvenient about switching inputs? Isn't that basically what you would be doing with the Android box? You would be asking it to switch from it's internally generated video to the one coming into it. Wouldn't either option be a single key press? If what bothers you is the idea of picking up a second remote to make that single keypress, it might be easier if you just pick up a learning remote that can control all devices at the same time. This would have the added benefit of avoiding you having to also pick up the remote of that other device.
We're part of the Android TV developer program and we're being told that the only "Android TV" aka Android 5.0 hardware that supports HDMI in will be televisions themselves via Sony, Philips, and Sharp. The only boxes available in the foreseeable future will be streamers like the Asus and Razer products. Google has split the ecosystem into TV's with built-in functionality and gaming streamer boxes.
We've been pushing Google pretty hard because our platform (Skipr.tv) requires HDMI input to perform its commercial-blocking magic. Since we've come up empty, we're working with an OEM to produce our own Android TV set-top box with Skipr pre-installed. But you could use it for whatever you like as well.
Our hardware is in the middle of integration testing with chipset partners so it will be roughly 2 months until we have a final design. We're going to launch a Kickstarter to make the hardware available. If you're interested head over to our site (skipr.tv) and sign up and we'll keep you in the loop.
We're really shocked and upset that Google has taken this stance but we're going to try to fix the situation ourselves. Glad to see we're not the only ones looking for this hardware!
If you by a silicon dust HD home run it supports dlna streaming which works with android TV.