Comment by mrandish

It's a good question and I'm not actually sure as I'm not a hardware guy, just a user who's looked into these productz. So far, the popular Android TV set-top boxes (or sticks) I've seen use SoCs that seem dedicated to set-top applications. It may that mobile phone chipsets have different integration to support cellular modems and air interfaces.

There are some boxes which use use Android instead of Android TV but these tend to require using versions of the streaming apps made for mobile phones. I haven't really looked into these as they tend not to work well with remote controls so I haven't been interested.