Believe it or not, NVIDIA launched its first SHIELD TV in 2015, marking nearly a decade of continuous support for the platform. In an interview with Ars Technica, Andrew Bell, NVIDIA’s senior VP of hardware engineering, reassured the company’s loyal fan base that they have no plans to abandon the SHIELD TV anytime soon, promising ongoing updates in the years to come. Bell expressed frustration with the limited updates typically provided for phones and tablets, saying, “Early on when we were building SHIELD TV, we decided we were going to support it for a long time.” He recalled a conversation with CEO Jensen Huang about the duration of support, to which Huang responded, “For as long as we shall live.”
As NVIDIA enters the second decade of supporting the SHIELD TV, they continue to produce the 2019 version, featuring the NVIDIA Tegra X1+ processor, 3 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of storage. There was once talk within the gaming community and among NVIDIA engineers about venturing into making a gaming console. “Pretty much everybody who worked at NVIDIA in the early days really wanted to make a game console,” Bell confirmed. However, the complexity of building a console, which requires not just a GPU but also a CPU, an OS, games, and a user interface, deterred the company from pursuing this path.
Interestingly, when NVIDIA was a smaller company, engineers initially built the SHIELD for themselves. “Selfishly, a little bit, we built SHIELD for ourselves,” Bell admitted to Ars Technica. They wanted a high-quality, high-performance TV streamer outside of the Apple ecosystem. After creating some prototypes and getting excited about the potential, CEO Jensen Huang suggested, “Why don’t we bring it out and sell it to people?” Sales of the NVIDIA SHIELD TV have remained consistent over the past decade, continuing to sell as strongly as they did during its launch week.