It’s come as a bit of a surprise to me, but Nvidia has officially launched its Shield Android TV console and it’s available to buy right now. Nvidia’s latest stab at Android and game streaming is an extremely thin microconsole designed to be plugged into a TV.
Equipped with a 64-bit Tegra X1 processor and 3GB RAM, the Nvidia Shield Android TV can support up to 4K resolution video output, and is capable of playing a host of controller-centric Android games, as well as streaming full PC titles from local PCs and its Nvidia GRID cloud service.
The Nvidia Shield set-top box obviously has quite a heavy skew towards television, and there’s all sorts of streaming services available on it in up to 4K including, including Netflix and Google Play.
So far, so set-top box. Where the Nvidia Shield Android TV attempts to differ itself however is in its gaming potential. Every unit comes bundled with an Nvidia Shield Controller, and all the games on its in-house storefront are controller capable. There’s a fair few games out at launch as well, including Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, The Talos Principle, and Telltale’s Game of Thrones. These are all playable natively, but there’s also the GRID streaming service. This is basically Nvidia’s method of streaming full-blown PC games directly to you, in a similar manner to the ill-fated OnLive. More titles are being added weekly, with 20 more already planned.
There are two different models of the Nvidia Android TV available at launch, with the $199 standard model coming with standard storage and the $299 Pro version coming a 500GB hard drive and a copy of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. If you’re after more space can both can have storage expanded via MicroSD and USB 3.0 drives.
This is Nvidia’s third bite at an Android-based device so it obviously sees some potential here to keep coming back for more. There’s certainly a cloud hanging over set-top boxes and whether they are necessary, particularly in these numbers, but Nvidia certainly believes Android could be the next viable home gaming platform.
What do you make of the Nvidia Android TV? Is it a tempting purchase or is Nvidia running down a dead-end with its Shield devices?
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