By Ben Schoon
Publication Date: 2026-01-30 16:30:00
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…
