What's important in a TV box is the support for the latest codecs and certification. The main aim is to watch live and stream contents.

If I wanted to play games and perform heavy CPU tasks for simulations as such I won't be buying a TV box.

The thing is this. Why China OEMs and cheap generic brands couldn't catch up with the competition despite boasting so many powerful hardware specs as such. They totally failed in their software departments and firmware/ROM updates. Just sell the boxes and forget about any updates thereafter. What's the use? That's why they can go so much cheaper. Their software department is almost non existent.They throw all their money into the box design and marketing.

Why China brands of phones and tv boxes never gain much market share. They are still far left out from the software support compared to the Western markets. You can boasts of the best hardware but if your software development for that particular device is half cook, it also means a failed product.

Haha agreed but end of the day the money is always involved in acquiring the certification standards. We could buy the China boxes cheap because they cut such funding for applying such certifications from Netflix, and Google(acquired Widevine) as well as proper software development for their products.

The Amlogic chipsets do support the required standards natively but unfortunately the box manufacturers refuse to pay royalties and thus blocked by them.

For all you know the "offer" is less enticing to Netflix compared to the big ones who plans to keep their monopolies.