Tech giant Google has announced that it will cease the direct sale of its Nexus Play set-top box. The device had been pulled off the shelves of some major third-party retailers like Best Buy for months now. After the Google Store was restocked in early April, the search engine giant officially pulled the Nexus Play off of the online store's listing.

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The Google Nexus Player was manufactured by Asus and was introduced late in 2014. It is the first set-top box to run on Android TV. Despite this breakthrough, the Nexus Player is not entirely a new idea since Google had already released Google TV by the time it was introduced.

In fact, the Nexus Player was considered by many tech analysts as a follow up to the Google TV, which had flopped. Ultimately, the Nexus Player was overshadowed by Google's breakout hit in the set-top box market, the Chromecast.

According to The Verge, the cancellation of the Nexus Player does not bode ill to the Android TV since it is the operating system that will power all Sony and Sharp smart TVs that are to be released this year. Moreover, the NVidia Shield can be used to run Google TV on an existing TV, and it even supports 4K resolution.

Following the news about the Nexus Player, a Google spokesperson said, "Android TV continues to be a living room favorite as one of the best smart TV experiences. We are pleased with the success and have seen millions of activations so far."

On the other hand, some electronics manufacturers have chosen to use Google Cast to run their devices instead of Android TV. Google Cast is the platform that makes the Chromecast work.

According to Fortune, during the Nexus Player's brief tenure in the market, the device went head-to-head with some of the industry's leading media streaming devices like Roku products, as well as the Apple TV.

TagsGoogle, Nexus Player, Google Nexus Player, Google updates, Google Chromecast, set-top box, Google set-top box, Chrome