NVIDIA has announced the newly redesigned SHIELD TV with the promise of higher performance and enhanced functionality from the Android-powered media streamer. In addition to the updated industrial design the new SHIELD TV ships with a game controller in addition to a remote, adding value to what NVIDIA is calling "the world's most advanced streamer".
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on stage to introduce the new SHIELD TV
NVIDIA is citing "major improvements" to the new version of the SHIELD TV in the following areas:
Highest Performance, 4K HDR Media Streamer – SHIELD delivers the richest visual experience with support for 4K HDR and 3x the performance of any other streamer on the market. With Amazon Video in 4K HDR, SHIELD offers the largest, most open catalog of media in stunning 4K – also supporting Netflix, YouTube, Google Play Movie and VUDU. YouTube’s flagship TV app will also be available for SHIELD in the coming months, delivering immersive, 360-degree viewing experiences.
Amazing Games – SHIELD stands alone among media streamers, with the widest range of gaming capabilities and richest assortment of game content. GeForce NOW has been upgraded with Pascal performance and will soon add Ubisoft’s catalog of hits, including Watch Dogs 2, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, For Honor and countless others. Upcoming native game releases include The Witness, Tomb Raider and Shadowgun Legends.
AI in the Home – SHIELD is the first streamer to announce support of Google Assistant, optimized for TV and 100% hands-free. Coming soon, SmartThings Hub technology integration will instantly turn SHIELD into a smart home hub that can connect to hundreds of smart home devices. NVIDIA SPOT, an AI mic accessory makes SHIELD the central backbone of the AI home, extending intelligent control throughout the house.
NVIDIA has stated that the features announced for the new SHIELD TV will come to existing SHIELD devices via an over-the-air update this month; though the new hands-free commands will require the updated SHIELD controller (now bundled with the new SHIELD TV), which will be sold separately.
Pre-orders for the new SHIELD TV are now available with units shipping later in January. There will be two configurations, with the SHIELD TV media streamer, which includes a game controller and remote, priced at $199; and the SHIELD Pro home media server, which comes with a controller, remote with headset jack, and 500GB of on-board storage, priced at $299.
Full press release after the break.
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LAS VEGAS—CES—Jan. 4, 2017—NVIDIA today unveiled the new NVIDIA® SHIELD™ TV – an Android TV open-platform media streamer built on bleeding-edge visual computing technology that delivers unmatched experiences in streaming, gaming and AI.
Sporting a sleek, new design and now shipping with both a remote and a game controller, SHIELD provides the best, most complete entertainment experience in the living room.
“NVIDIA’s rich heritage in visual computing and deep learning has enabled us to create this revolutionary device,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA, who revealed SHIELD during his opening keynote address at CES.
“SHIELD TV is the world’s most advanced streamer. Its brilliant 4K HDR quality, hallmark NVIDIA gaming performance and broad access to media content will bring families hours of joy. And with SHIELD’s new AI home capability, we can control and interact with content through the magic of artificial intelligence from anywhere in the house,” he said.
Highest Performance, 4K HDR Media Streamer
The new SHIELD delivers the richest visual experience with support for 4K HDR and 3x the performance of any other streamer on the market. With the addition of Amazon Video in 4K HDR, SHIELD offers the largest, most open catalog of media in stunning 4K – also supporting Netflix, YouTube, Google Play Movies(1) and VUDU.
YouTube’s flagship TV app will also be available for SHIELD in the coming months, delivering immersive, 360-degree viewing experiences.
Amazing Games
SHIELD TV stands alone among media streamers, with the widest range of gaming capabilities and richest assortment of game content. Its library of games has been expanded to thousands of titles, with the ability coming soon to stream Ubisoft’s catalog of hits, including Watch Dogs 2, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, For Honor and countless others. New Ubisoft games will also be available, simultaneous with their PC release.
SHIELD continues to add hit franchises to the platform natively. Upcoming games include The Witness, Tomb Raider and Shadowgun Legends.
AI in the Home
In the coming months, SHIELD TV will be expanded with a series of AI capabilities that transforms home entertainment:
- First hands-free Google Assistant integration on TV. Google has optimized the Assistant experience on TV by having the home’s largest screen show visual answers in addition to an audio reply. Use voice commands to replace clicking a remote for finding content, pausing, fast-forwarding or rewinding. Plus, your Google Assistant can help better find content and answer questions.
- SmartThings Hub technology integration, instantly turning SHIELD into a smart home hub that can connect to hundreds of smart home devices.
- NVIDIA SPOT™, an AI mic accessory that makes SHIELD the central backbone of the AI home, extending intelligent control throughout the house.
Support for SHIELD
“We’re excited to be part of the new SHIELD TV, powered by the Android TV platform,” said Sascha Prueter, director of Android TV at Google. “When the Google Assistant comes to Android TV in the coming months, SHIELD users will be able to enjoy a hands-free Android TV experience through ‘Ok Google’ voice commands.”
Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, said, “By seamlessly integrating great gaming, rich media content and AI, NVIDIA has established a whole new standard for streamers. With its broad mix of services and immaculate execution, SHIELD represents the future of home entertainment.”
Pricing and Availability
SHIELD TV is available for pre-order now and will ship in the United States, Canada and select European regions in January for $199.99, including controller and remote. SHIELD Pro will be available later this month with controller, remote with headset jack and 500GB of storage. A separate version of SHIELD, with custom software optimized for China, will be available later this year. The NVIDIA SPOT mic accessory for SHIELD will sell for $49.99.
Features(2) announced for the new SHIELD TV will come to current SHIELD devices through an over-the-air software upgrade, available in January.
More information is available at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/
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About NVIDIA
NVIDIA‘s (NASDAQ: NVDA) invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined modern computer graphics and revolutionized parallel computing. More recently, GPU deep learning ignited modern AI — the next era of computing — with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world. Today, NVIDIA is increasingly known as “the AI computing company.” More information at http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/.
- Google Play Movies available in coming months.
- Hands-free commands require the new SHIELD controller, bundled with next-generation SHIELD TV and sold separately.
NVIDIA SPOT or NVIDIA SPY ?
NVIDIA SPOT or NVIDIA SPY ?
I thought the same thing. 😉
I thought the same thing. 😉
I thought the same thing. 😉
I thought the same thing. 😉
I thought the exact same
I thought the exact same thing… Big brother in the house…
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“Highest Performance, 4K HDR
“Highest Performance, 4K HDR Media Streamer – SHIELD delivers the richest visual experience with support for 4K HDR and 3x the performance of any other streamer on the market.”
3x the performance of any other streamer? Steaming is kind of a you can or you can’t thing, so that doesn’t seem to make to much sense in that sentence. The 3x number would have made more sense in the paragraph about gaming.
You have clue about streaming
You have clue about streaming it seems.
3X performance…big deal its
3X performance…big deal its a streamer box. You can get the RoKu Premier+ for $99. Does 4k60p with HDR. Plus it has far more support in content. Yea it won’t have as fancy a UI with flashy animations but so what content will look the same for half the price.
The UX-design on the NVIDIA
The UX-design on the NVIDIA Shield TV is nothing to write home about.. That’s actually one of the major issues I had with it when I tested it as my go to streaming device now that I have a LG OLED 65-inch and wanted a streaming device capable of 4K and HDR.
The home screen is really bland and boring. There is nothing fancy going on there. And my biggest grip was how outdated and old the UX-design of the Plex-app felt on this device. NVIDIA talks about Plex all over in their marketing, it can even double as a Plex Media Server and not just a player so it seems like there are some kind of collaboration between NVIDIA and Plex. But still it features a rather bland and old Plex UX-design and it’s remarkably slow at loading in album art when scrolling through my library considering the hardware and performance that is available.
And my girlfriends kept complaining about the YouTube-app and how she felt the UX-design was inferior to the one on the Apple TV (Gen.4) where her “endless” list of people / channels she have subscribed to gets displayed in a “one person/icon” per row on the left-side menu, making her having to scroll forever in order to jump between people she have subscribe to compared to the Apple TV where you have all your subscribed people / channels in a full grid over the entire display so where you can see about 7-8 people max at one time on the Android Shield TV, she could see 4-6x times as many on the Apple TV.
It’s really sad that the entire experience get hold back by the software. The hardware is much more capable, even the “old” Shield TV features full support for 4K, HDR and it offer native playback of pretty much every video and audio codec in existence. The Plex-app even features Refresh Rate Switching so movies and TV shows in 24p gets outputted in 24p instead of 60 like on most other devices.
But all this feels somewhat redundant and less important when the Apple TV (Gen.4) trumps the Shield TV completely when it comes to UX-design and user experience. Not only on the OS itself, but also in the various apps.
Hopefully Android 7 (Nougat) will do something with the UX-design of the Android TV OS. But I highly doubt anything will happen to the YouTube-app and the Plex-app anytime soon.
So apparently the pro is the
So apparently the pro is the same exact box as the older 500gb shield tv. The standard box has some features removed (no SD card, etc).
It’s the exact same box /
It’s the exact same box / hardware. It’s the same Tegra X1 SoC, there is no difference besides a re-designed Game Pad, the media remote is now included (something it should have been all along) etc..
The only difference is it being somewhat smaller (?) and some small differences in software. Differences that will most likely get added (unless NVIDIA is really ripping people off) with the Android 7 (Nougat) update to the “old” NVIDIA Shield TV.
How such a device gets air-time on NVIDIA conference at CES is beyond me. It really underlines how mediocre and lacklustre this conference really was.
It says it has pascal
It says it has pascal graphics so it is definitely not the same processor.
Damn I guess they meant the
Damn I guess they meant the Geforce Now has Pascal. Maybe this is a scam!
For that price you could buy
For that price you could buy an on-sale Xbox one s…
The Xbox One and One S isn’t
The Xbox One and One S isn’t really a streaming device so the comparison becomes somewhat awkward. The Plex-app on the Xbox One is one of the slowest on the market and it’s not even close to supporting the same amount of video and audio codes as the Shield TV and there is no refresh rate auto switching etc..
Uh yes it is. There are apps
Uh yes it is. There are apps for all the major streaming services on the Xbox One. Plus its a great gaming box with far more support than the Shield will ever have.
This is a product in search of a market. There are cheaper alternatives in the pure streaming market and the Xbox or PS4 are far better gaming machines.
This unit is the best
This unit is the best streaming device out there.
It supports it all. AVC, HEVC, VP9 (+Profile 2) and supports all audio codecs MASTER/ATMOS etc.
It can even fuction as a PLEX server.
People that think it’s expensive and a Xbox can replace it, have no clue about TV/streaming boxes and codecs in general.
This is prolly the worse
This is prolly the worse rebranded product since 680 ti to 770…jk but that just tells ya how much it feels Nvidia is trying to milk….everything.
Anyone who is writing this
Anyone who is writing this off as an over-price piece of plastic simply does not understand the complexities of home media streaming in regards to both video and audio quality. Sure, this unit is overkill for a 32 inch tv in your bedroom used to binge on Netflix when you are too lazy to get out of bed. But, if you have a legitimate home theater setup with an actual speaker system and a tv + av receiver capable of delivering 4k HDR and HD Audio (Including Atmos), there is simply no other streaming box on the market that delivers anything near the performance and feature set of the shield tv.
I’m sure that market is so
I’m sure that market is so huge that this deserves more coverage than the thing they chose not to announce ;}.
Yes, Shield TV it is perfect
Yes, Shield TV it is perfect device (except for fan).
Unfortunately TV built in smart features mean there is no market.
” Unfortunately TV built in
” Unfortunately TV built in smart features mean there is no market.”
The last decade has taught people time and again that a ‘smart’ TV is a ‘smart’ TV for about a year at absolute best, and beyond that it remains a dumb TV after the company drop support and all the services stop working. If any of them ever actually worked in the first place. Or the performance wasn’t so execrable that you didn’t even want to suffer through trying in the first place.
$99 Roku does it all. So yes
$99 Roku does it all. So yes this is way overpriced and only a tine, tiny number will ever be sold.
I’m confused about this,
I’m confused about this, according to NVIDIA’s own website confirms the specs are the same as the previous SHIELD TV? It looks like all NVIDIA did was to add 4K HDR support to the device via OS update, then limit the feature to the 2017 SHIELD, then finally to take the SHIELD controller and make it more angular like the GTX 10 series founders edition cards.
I was hoping for updated SOC… But I guess NVIDIA’s SOC resources are tied up with the Nintendo Switch.
Helps to read the original
Helps to read the original article, where they state the OG shield gets the features.
It’s a minor rebrand with some redesigns and now they include the remote us 1st gen buyers had to buy separate.
what are the bleeping specs?
what are the bleeping specs?
One of the best hardware
One of the best hardware purchases I’ve made in recent years. It does EVERYTHING and it does it at light speed. The UI might be nothing to write about, but for my needs (mostly YouTube and Kodi) it’s pretty much perfect. Good to see they’ll continue to support the current Shield TV.
A really expensive old Arm
A really expensive old Arm box with features removed? Wow… way to go nvidia…