Android TV covers a wide range of hardware, from budget boxes to higher-end models, and the cheaper end commonly ships with only 1-2GB of RAM. Android's own system processes and launcher already use a share of that before the player app even opens, so there's less room to begin with than on a phone or a higher-end box. A heavy channel list, an open multiview session, or several background apps left running can push total memory use past what the box has left, and the player is usually the app that gets closed to free space, since it's typically the one using the most at any given moment.

Log into the same account on another device, a phone or another streaming box, and see if the same crash happens there too. If it doesn't, the fault is local to that Android TV box rather than your account or the app itself, which changes what you should even bother troubleshooting. Also check whether crashes happen more the longer the box has been running without a restart, which points at accumulated memory pressure from apps that never fully closed, rather than a one-off bug in the player. That distinction decides whether a reboot or a reinstall is the right next move.

Android TV pushes OS updates on its own schedule, separate from any app update, and a new Android version can change how background processes or memory limits are handled without asking the app first. If crashes started right after your box updated itself, that's a strong signal: the app and the OS version briefly fell out of sync, and the player wasn't built or tested against that exact combination yet. Check for a matching app update, and reinstall the current version if nothing newer is available yet, since a clean reinstall can restore compatibility on its own even before a proper patch ships.

Yes, and it's worth doing before changing any app setting, since it costs nothing and rules out the most common cause fastest. Android TV doesn't always fully release memory from an app you've switched away from, so several backgrounded apps left open from earlier in the day can quietly eat into what's available for the player later on. Closing them from the app switcher, and giving the player app unrestricted background use in Android TV's settings so the system stops force-closing it when you switch away, both reduce how often the player gets killed to free space for something else.