Over a decade in, Nvidia says it isn’t giving up on the Shield TV any time soon, with updates still coming, and new hardware not necessarily off of the table.
In an interview with ArsTechnica, Nvidia’s Andrew Bell goes over the effort that’s gone into keeping the Shield TV alive for all of these years. The first Shield was released in 2015, and even though it’s been a half-decade since the last hardware release, updates haven’t stopped – the most recent one dropped in November.
Bell says that the Shield project started “selfishly, a little bit, we built Shield for ourselves,” explaining that Nvidia employees “wanted a really good TV streamer that was high-quality and high-performance, and not necessarily in the Apple ecosystem” and Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, gave a push to “sell it to people.” Thus, the Shield was born, with Huang apparently also saying that Nvidia can support the device “for as long as we shall live.”
That’s why, over 10 years later, even the first-generation Shield is still actively supported.
The whole interview is full of neat tidbits about the product’s development and history, but the most interesting part is about the future of Shield. Bell explains that Nvidia is still manufacturing Shield TV units because “the same number of people come out of the woodwork every week to buy Shield.”
Software updates for Shield TV, and production as a whole, is not ending “any time soon,” Bell said. And, in fact, it sounds like the door is still open to a new Shield in the future. Bell says:
We’re always playing in the labs, trying to discover new things. 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.
As it stands today, it sounds like there are no firm plans for a Shield TV sequel – it’s been over 5 years since the last Shield TV hardware release – but it could still happen someday. “We talk about it all the time—I’d love to.” Bell added that a new Shield would “prioritize” newer video technology such as AV1 decoding, HDR10+, updates to Dolby Vision, and more. Also mentioned was that a newer model could potentially ditch that obnoxious Netflix button on the current remote, which Bell said was a result of Netflix’s “strong” certification requirements in 2019.
With the Android TV & Google TV world still devoid of anything that properly competes with the Shield, needless to say it’s something we’d also love to see happen. Would you?
More on Google TV:
- Google TV tests new ‘Free’ and ‘Shop’ tabs to showcase additional content [Gallery]
- Some of Epson’s Google TV projectors are getting a major Gemini upgrade
- Google TV’s future sounds a bit bleak even as TCL nears the crown
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