Moving the kitchen TV display off Chromecast: the 2026 hardware landscape

Chromecast with Google TV is discontinued. We have spent the year looking at what replaces it for restaurant order displays (Fire TV, Onn, Vega OS, Apple TV), and here is where we landed.

By Carlos Butler

Co-founder, engineering

Friday, 17 April 2026 4 min read

An editorial illustration of a large wall-mounted flat-screen display in a busy restaurant kitchen, showing rows of stylised order tickets in warm ambient light

For about four years our recommended “kitchen display” setup has been a Chromecast with Google TV, the 4K model, paired with a cheap HDMI monitor and ORDR’s Kitchen UI web page set to full-screen. It was under £60 all-in, it had Android apps when we needed them, and every restaurant has a TV tuner somewhere.

In 2025, Google quietly pulled the plug. The Chromecast with Google TV is discontinued. The replacement is the Google TV Streamer, which is more expensive, less suited to a kitchen wall, and has nudged us to rethink the entire category.

This post is a long-overdue write-up of what you can actually buy in April 2026 to put a POS order board on a television, and which ones we have tested.

The shortlist

We wanted a box that ticks four things:

Cheap enough to buy one per location and not think twice. Under £60 ideally.
Boots into a stable Chrome-based browser, because ORDR’s Kitchen UI is a web page and we do not want to ship a native app just for displays.
Survives 12 hours of being always-on in a hot kitchen without bricking itself in six months.
Has an Ethernet option, or at least tolerates weak Wi-Fi gracefully.

Fire TV Stick 4K Select: the budget winner

Amazon released the Fire TV Stick 4K Select at €48 / £45 in late 2025. It runs Amazon’s own Vega OS rather than Fire OS (Android-based). Browser support is limited compared with Fire OS, but there is a Silk browser build that is good enough to load the ORDR Kitchen UI and run it indefinitely.

The good: genuinely cheap, native HDMI stick, no dangling box, Vega is leaner and more power-efficient than Fire OS.

The bad: no Ethernet. You can pair it with the official Amazon Ethernet adapter, but that adds £15 and a dangly cable. No sideloaded Android apps if you need them later.

Verdict: the default recommendation for a single-TV kitchen that already has decent Wi-Fi. For the price it is hard to beat.

Onn 4K Pro streamer: the surprise

Walmart’s Onn 4K Pro is ~£55 in the UK via imports. It runs Google TV (i.e. Android), has an Ethernet port built in, and idles quietly.

The good: proper Ethernet, runs a full Chrome / TV-based browser, accepts sideloaded APKs if you need to test a native app later.

The bad: Walmart hardware is harder to support in the EU. Firmware updates come through Google’s release channels, but if it bricks, the RMA path is not great.

Verdict: the best option if you want the old Chromecast-with-Google-TV experience at roughly the same price. If a restaurant has ten locations and wants one-per-site, this is what we suggest.

Apple TV 4K: the premium outlier

About £160 for the Ethernet model. Runs tvOS.

The good: the best remote in the category, excellent browser via Safari on tvOS, rock-solid reliability, genuinely fast.

The bad: the price. Four times the cost of a Fire TV Stick. For a single-location operator who happens to already own an Apple TV, it is perfect. For a chain, multiply by the number of locations.

Verdict: only worth it if you are already deep in the Apple ecosystem or have a restaurant owner who refuses to use anything else.

The also-rans

Raspberry Pi 5 running Raspberry Pi OS in kiosk mode. Costs more than a Fire TV Stick after a case and power supply. Works beautifully. Higher maintenance overhead: SD card wear is a real thing if you ever power-cycle hard, which kitchens do.
Generic Android TV boxes from Amazon. Avoid. Firmware quality is a lottery. You will spend the savings on support calls.
A spare laptop pointing at the TV. Genuinely the simplest option. But laptops in kitchens do not live long.

What actually matters for an order display

Hardware is maybe 20% of the problem. The other 80% is:

Auto-launch the browser on power-up. Every box we tested can do this, but each has its own way. Document it.
Disable the screen-off timer and any idle-mode. Kitchen TVs need to run indefinitely.
Have a recovery story for when Wi-Fi drops. ORDR’s Kitchen UI buffers the last state locally, so a 30-second network blip does not blank the display, but check that whatever board you use behaves the same way.
Physical mounting. A £40 VESA mount that survives a grease-laden kitchen is worth more than a £20 streaming stick that pops out when a chef brushes past it.

Our current recommendation

One or two locations, Wi-Fi reliable: Fire TV Stick 4K Select. £45. Done.
Three-plus locations or unreliable Wi-Fi: Onn 4K Pro with Ethernet. £55. Roughly the same power profile.
Apple-first operator: Apple TV 4K. £160. Perfect, just expensive.

All three run ORDR’s Kitchen UI as a web page with no native app required.

What ORDR does about this

ORDR’s Kitchen UI is a browser-native page that works on every streaming box listed above, plus any Android tablet or spare laptop. We ship print-fallback too: if the display dies mid-service, kitchen tickets keep printing. See the help centre article on the Kitchen UI for the up-to-date setup guide.