Shield TV Hits A Decade Of Android Updates As NVIDIA Reveals Future Plans
In just a matter of weeks, NVIDIA's original Shield TV console will turn 10 years old. What makes the milestone particularly remarkable is that even after a full decade of service, NVIDIA continues to dish out Android updates, and it has no plans of stopping. It's true that device makers have gotten better about longer term support for Android devices, but NVIDIA stands in a class all of its own with its ongoing commitment to keep the Shield TV relevant year after year.
This resonates with us because several of us at Hot Hardware own (or have owned) and still use a Shield TV console for our smart chores. Site owner Dave Altavilla actually owns two of them and when I was chatting with him about it, he described it as "still the best Android TV streamer on the market." That's not an unpopular opinion around these parts.
If you've been considering a Shield TV but are hesitant because of how long it's been on the market, you may be interested in what NVIDIA's senior vice president of hardware engineering at NVIDIA, Andrew Bell, told Ryan Whitwam at Ars Technica.
"We were all frustrated as buyers of phones and tablets that you buy a device, you get one or two updates, and that’s it," Bell said. "Early on when we were building Shield TV, we decided we were going to make it for a long time. Jensen and I had a discussion, and it was, 'How long do we want to support this thing?' And Jensen said, 'For as long as we shall live'."
NVIDIA has no plans of discontinuing support for the Shield TV, which has seen a couple of hardware refreshes since it first came out in 2015. The latest versions of the Shield TV and Shield TV Pro were released in 2019 and feature NVIDIA's Tegra X1+, a faster and more power efficient version of the Tegra X1 that shipped in previous models.
It's an older SoC at this stage, but still fast for what it does. Same goes for the original Tegra X1, so it's nice to see NVIDIA still updating the Shield TV, including the original 2015 models.
Will NVIDIA release another iteration of the streaming console? That remains to be seen. According to Bell, NVIDIA sells the same number of units no matter how much it plays around with pricing or how it markets the console, which is a good thing.
"We’re always playing in the labs, trying to discover new things,” said Bell. “We’ve played with new concepts for Shield and we’ll continue to play, and if we find something we’re super-excited about, we’ll probably make a go of it," Bell said.
Interestingly, Bell also told Whitwam that NVIDIA that part of the reason the Shield TV exists is because is because NVIDIA's engineers partially built the thing for themselves. He also reveals some more cool details that are worth a read.
