You can get a lot more channels and movies than Chromecast with no monthly fee but with a few caveats

The Google Chromecast ($35) is following devices that have already been available in China and Asia for over one year.

A homegrown Chinese product could be bought for $40 in 2012 and it was sporting the latest ARM core at the time (Cortex A5). It turned any HDMI TV into a giant streaming display.

Chromecast supports YouTube, Netflix, and Google Play. Netflix costs about $9/month.

You can get a lot more channels and movies with no monthly fee but you need to pay a bit more upfront and you need a techy friend who can read some chinese to help you set it up. After that you memorize the icons to navigate and surf and pick your content.

Netflix does not have sports or live news and has a more limited selection of movies.

Here is a partial list of the icons that you would to go through to access your TVPad2 content. You can get to english movies and tv but the directory interface is chinese. The setup can be set to english but only the setup and admin would be english and you have to able to navigate the interface enough to set the admin to english.


For about $200-230 on Ebay and other sources you can get a TVPad2.

HD streamer can deliver more than 100,000 movies wirelessly with new titles that are constantly added. It is Wi-Fi ready to also allow an Internet experience. It can output to HDMI and AV (regular audio/video input).

You need to have the a wifi 802.11n router with a setting of WPA2 for the TVPad 2 to work. The WPA2 encoding is needed to get to over 300 mbps.

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