The best example of Nvidia’s obsession with support, believe it or not, is the two-year gap in updates.
In the dozens of updates to the Shield TV, there have been times when fans feared Nvidia was out of the box. Most notably, there was no public update for the Shield TV in 2023 or 2024, but over-the-air updates resumed in 2025.
Bell explained, “From the outside it looked like we’d calmed down, but it’s actually one of our bigger growth efforts.”
The origins of that effort, unsurprisingly, stretch back years to the launch of the Nintendo Switch. The Shield runs on Nvidia’s custom Tegra X1 Arm chip, the same processor that Nintendo chose to power the original Switch in 2017. Shortly after release, modders discovered a chip flaw that could bypass Nintendo’s security measures, enabling homebrew (and piracy). An updated Tegra
Initially, Nvidia was able to roll out patches from time to time to protect against the vulnerability, but by 2023, the Shield needed something more. Around that time, owners of 2015 and 2017 Shield boxes noticed that DRM-protected 4K content often failed to play — this was due to the same bug that affected the Switch years earlier.
With a new, non-vulnerable product on the market, many companies may have accepted that the functionality of the older product would be lost, but Nvidia’s passion for the Shield remained. Bell consulted with Huang, whom he calls Shield customer No. 1, about the meaning of their “as long as we survive” pledge, and the team was given approval to spend the time necessary to fix the vulnerability on the first two generations of Shield TV.
According to Bell, it took about 18 months to get there, which required building an entirely new security stack. He points out that Android updates aren’t really that much use compared to DRM protection, and some of its partners weren’t eager to re-certify older products. The Shield team fought for this because they felt, as they had throughout the product, that they had made a promise to customers who expected certain features in the box.
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