By default, when your TV is idle, it just displays a black screen. However, with Android TV, you can get your TV to display useful information when it’s not in use. Thanks to the Daydream feature in Android devices, you can get your TV to display information like the current time, along with the date, and weather right on the screen. Using an app like “Lucid Daydream” (free, with in-app purchases), you can get this feature on your Android TV. There are a lot of other modules available in Lucid Daydream, including calendar events, notifications, and more. You can choose the things you want your TV to display, from Daydream settings.

Another cool thing you can do with your Android TV, is cast your phone or laptop screen to your TV over WiFi. Thanks to Google Cast integration in Android TV, you don’t even need to set anything up. Just open the media file that you want to cast to your TV, and start streaming. On laptops, you can easily cast to your Android TV, with Google Chrome. You can choose to cast just the tab you’re in, or your entire desktop to your Android TV.

If there’s one problem with affordable Android TV boxes, like the Mi Box ($69), it’s that they come with extremely limited storage space. Fortunately, you can easily add a lot of storage to these boxes, thanks to their USB OTG support. You can easily add a USB flash drive to the Android TV box, and increase the amount of storage your TV has.