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Xiaomi is primarily known for its smartphones and wearables, but it also sells streaming boxes and sticks running Android TV. Last year, the company launched the Mi TV Stick in Europe and India, which packed a respectable set of features for its low price tag. This year, the company is back with a more powerful iteration of its streaming stick with AV1 hardware decoding and 4K streaming support: the Xiaomi TV Stick 4K.

Strangely, Xiaomi has not made any formal announcement about its latest streaming stick's launch. Instead, it has simply made the product page live on its global website, as first spotted by @AndroidTV_Rumor.

The Xiaomi TV Stick 4K packs a quad-core Cortex-A35 CPU and Mali-G31 MP2 GPU that's paired with 2GB RAM and 8GB storage. The stick supports DTS HD and Dolby Atmos along with VP9 and H.265 codecs. More importantly, it has AV1 hardware decoding support, which offers up to 30% better compression than H.265. Netflix has started streaming its content to some of its subscribers using AV1, while YouTube already uses this codec for streaming content on supported devices.

On the connectivity front, the Xiaomi TV Stick 4K supports Wi-Fi 5GHz and Bluetooth 5.0. It plugs will directly plug into the HDMI port of your TV, with power going to it through the MicroUSB port. The bundled Bluetooth remote features dedicated buttons for Google Assistant, Netflix, and Prime Video.

Disappointingly, the Xiaomi TV Stick 4K runs on Android TV 11 instead of Google TV. Realme already has a 4K streaming stick running Google TV, so if you do intend to go for Xiaomi's offering, you'll miss out on the personalized recommendations and other improvements the new UI brings.

Compared to the Mi TV Stick, the 4K version packs notable upgrades in some key areas — more RAM, faster processor, and AV1 codec support, though it would have been good to see Xiaomi also bump the internal storage to 16GB.

There's no word on pricing, but the Xiaomi TV Stick 4K should be priced around the same ballpark as the Mi TV Stick.

Rajesh Pandey started following the tech field right around the time Android devices were going mainstream. He closely follows the latest development in the world of smartphones and what the tech giants are up to. He loves to tinker around with the latest gadgets to see what they are capable of.