Basis is a player, not a provider. It hosts and sells no channels, movies or series. This page is about how it behaves on constrained hardware, and every figure on it comes from a test committed in the app's repository that records the device it ran on.
Your box does not have as much memory as you think
A box advertised with 1 GB of RAM does not hand an app 1 GB. Android reserves a large share for the system, then caps each app with a per process heap limit set by the manufacturer. On the cheap boxes this page is about, that cap sits near 96 MB. Everything the app does has to happen inside it, and when it does not, Android kills the app or the system starts trimming other things to survive.
That is why the symptom is so recognisable. The app is fine for a week, you add a bigger provider, and now it hangs on launch, drops back to the home screen, or takes half a minute to draw a list it used to draw instantly.
What is actually filling the heap
- The catalog. A mid sized provider sends tens of thousands of rows. A player that decodes that JSON into objects before showing you anything can spend 80 MB on data you are not looking at.
- The guide. Programme data is bigger than the channel list by an order of magnitude. A guide with 400,000 programmes parsed into memory is not going to fit in 96 MB.
- Posters. Image caches are usually sized as a percentage of available memory, and on a device that reports a larger ceiling than it can really sustain, that percentage is a trap.
The boxes this affects
| Device | Year | Chip | RAM | Storage | System |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chromecast with Google TV (HD)The tightest memory budget of any Google TV device Google has shipped. | 2022 | Amlogic S805X2 | 1.5 GB | 8 GB | Google TV, Android 12 |
| Chromecast with Google TV (4K)Storage fills faster than memory does, which is its own reason to care about install size. | 2020 | Amlogic S905D3 | 2 GB | 8 GB | Google TV, Android 12 |
| Google TV Streamer (4K)The comfortable end of the range. | 2024 | MediaTek MT8696 | 4 GB | 32 GB | Google TV, Android 14 |
| Nvidia Shield TV (2019)The tube. A gigabyte less than the Pro, and the one that shows memory pressure first. | 2019 | Nvidia Tegra X1+ | 2 GB | 8 GB | Android TV |
| Nvidia Shield TV Pro (2019)Still the fastest mainstream Android TV device years after release. | 2019 | Nvidia Tegra X1+ | 3 GB | 16 GB | Android TV |
| Xiaomi Mi Box SVery common, and old enough that heavy apps stutter on it. | 2018 | Amlogic S905X | 2 GB | 8 GB | Android TV |
| Generic 1 GB Android TV boxThe devices that cap an app's heap near 96 MB. | varies | varies | 1 GB | 8 GB | Android 7 to 9 |
Specifications as published by each manufacturer, read 2026-08-10.
The pattern is not really age, it is the memory column. A 2019 Shield Pro with 3 GB is comfortable. The 1.5 GB Chromecast and the pile of unbranded 1 GB boxes are where a heavy player stops being usable, and those are the devices that stay plugged in for years because they still play video perfectly well.
What Basis does about it
The design rule is that the whole catalog is never held in memory at once. It streams in, it lives on disk, and it is read back in pages. Measured:
Three further choices matter specifically on these devices:
- No large heap request. Android lets an app ask for a bigger ceiling. Basis used to, and it was removed in 1.5.7 once the app fit inside the normal one. A large heap never reduced memory pressure, it only moved the point at which the app died, and the system's own low memory killer ranks on total footprint rather than on heap ceiling anyway.
- A hard cap on the poster cache, pinned to a quarter of the device's normal memory class rather than a percentage of whatever ceiling the device reports.
- Playlist writes in batches of 2,000 rows, and on a device Android reports as low RAM the local database drops to a journal mode that avoids keeping a second copy of the write in flight.
Where Basis AI fits, and where it does not
Fitting a large catalog into a small box solves holding it. It does not solve finding anything in it, which on a remote is the harder of the two: a category tree somebody else named, browsed one press at a time, is how an evening disappears. Basis AI is the answer to that half. You describe what you want in a sentence and it finds the movies and series in your own catalog that match, rather than the internet, and the sentence is the only thing that leaves the device.
The part a page like this would normally leave out: Basis AI is a Pro feature and it runs in the phone and tablet interface. The Android TV interface has the ordinary keyword search box and no Basis AI in it today, so on the box this page is about, it is the phone in your hand that gets it. One Basis account covers both devices, and on Pro your position and your favourites travel between them. The search does not, yet.
What this does not fix
Being honest about the boundary, because a page like this can easily read as a promise to make old hardware new:
- Decoding. If your box's hardware decoder cannot handle a stream's format, Basis falls back to software decoding, and on a weak chip software decoding of a high bitrate stream will stutter. No player fixes that.
- Your provider. If the source is overloaded or the channel is down, every player shows you the same thing. Basis reconnects and tries a backup source, which helps with a brief drop and does nothing for an outage.
- Wi-Fi. Old boxes often have old radios. A 2018 box on 2.4 GHz in a crowded building is a network problem wearing a software costume.
- Storage. The catalog lives on disk, which is the whole point, and a box with 8 GB that is already full will struggle regardless.
Questions people ask
What is the minimum Android version?
Android 8.0. Below that the app will not install.
Will it run on 1 GB of RAM?
That is the case the catalog handling was built for, and the low memory paths in the app exist specifically because of the boxes that report a 96 MB heap cap. It is not a promise about your particular box, which is why the free tier exists: install it and find out in five minutes.
Does a smaller download mean a lighter app?
Not really, and it is worth saying so on a page like this. Download size is mostly decoders and artwork sitting on disk. What decides whether a box stays responsive is how much memory the app holds while running, which is the thing measured above.
Why does the first load take a while?
Because the catalog is being written to a local database rather than kept in memory. You pay that cost once per device, and every load after it is reading from disk.
Is there a version that works over a remote control?
Yes, and it is the same download. Basis picks a remote driven interface at runtime when it starts on a TV, so there is no separate TV build to find.
Can I search by describing what I want on the box?
Not on the box today. Basis AI, which reads a plain language sentence and finds the movies and series in your own catalog that match it, is a Pro feature in the phone and tablet interface. The remote driven interface on a TV box has the ordinary keyword search box. It is named here rather than left off because an old box driven by a remote is exactly where somebody would hope to find it.
Does it work on Amazon's streaming sticks?
Fire OS is not a tested target and the downloads page lists it as planned rather than shipping. This page is about Android TV and Google TV devices.