VIDEO STREAMS

Which of these five video streamers will meet all your streaming needs?

While it’s true that any television worth its salt will have a plethora of streaming options built in to its online ‘smarts’, it’s also a fact that plenty of sets won’t be able to supply everything you might require. And those apps a TV can handle won’t always be in the best, most high-resolution format – which is where a video streamer comes in.

These clever little sticks and boxes are a single portal to the very best that the world of video and music streaming has to offer. And some of them manage to do even more than that, offering themselves also as a hub for voice-controlling your system and smart home. Impressive indeed.

Over the next five pages, we present a range of the most popular video streamers on the market, some of them excellent, one or two more with the potential to be so – but all of them offering the pick of the best catch-up TV services and streaming options, from Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to BBC iplayer, NOWTV, and any number of other gateways to the video content, 4K or otherwise, that the modern world craves.

Here, we have five different pieces of kit that between them cover all the options: from Amazon’s impressive pair of Fire TV streamers, through to streaming pioneer Roku and its new Premiere device. And there are more specialised options from Now TV (for easy subscription-free access to Sky’s enormous output) and Apple TV, which of course has only just released its own Apple TV+ streaming service – top-notch image quality, although still perhaps a little limited in terms of content.

So, whatever your television fails to deliver streaming-app-wise, one of these bits of kit will enable you to enter the third decade of the 21st century fully tooled up, televisually at least.