Name: NVIDIA SHIELD TV Pro
Brand: NVIDIA

Nvidia has raised the price of the Shield TV Pro by half, and nothing inside the box has changed. It has the same chip, the same memory and the same storage it shipped with seven years ago. Nvidia has also dropped the cheaper, tube-shaped Shield TV, so the Pro is now the only way into its streaming platform.

For anyone shopping for a streaming box, that jump moves the Shield from enthusiast bargain to premium purchase. It now costs more than Apple’s most expensive Apple TV and twice as much as Google’s own TV Streamer. People who already own one lose nothing. Buyers replacing a dead unit or kitting out a second TV pay the difference.

The box now lists at $299.99, up from $199.99, which puts it $50 above the 128GB Apple TV 4K with Ethernet. For that money buyers still get a Tegra X1+ chip, 3GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, the configuration Nvidia shipped on day one.

Nvidia’s explanation fits in one sentence. “The cost of components, including memory, has increased substantially across the industry,” a company representative said. Memory makers have been moving production toward the high-bandwidth memory that AI servers need, and the ordinary RAM and flash storage inside phones, laptops and TV boxes has become scarcer and more expensive as a result.

There is an irony Nvidia did not point out. Its data-center accelerators, the chips at the center of the AI boom, are built around stacks of that same high-bandwidth memory. The company whose AI business is soaking up the industry’s memory supply is now passing the bill to the people who bought its living-room box to watch movies.

The Shield is the latest in a run of streaming hardware that got more expensive without getting better. Apple raised the Apple TV 4K from $129 to $199. Roku lifted the list price of every player it sells, some by 50%, and none of them gained a feature in exchange. Google pushed its TV Streamer from $100 to $150. Every one of those companies pointed to component costs.

The Pro still has real reasons to exist. Its AI upscaling sharpens HD streams for 4K screens, it handles Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, it runs GeForce Now cloud gaming, and its two USB 3.0 ports let it double as a Plex media server. Nvidia has also kept it updated far longer than most Android TV boxes, which is why it built a loyal following in the first place.

That longevity is also the catch. At $299.99, buyers get a box that runs Android 11, has no hardware decoding for AV1, the video format YouTube and Netflix increasingly rely on, and keeps only part of its 16GB free once the system software takes its share. Nvidia has not said whether the higher price is permanent, whether a successor is coming, or whether prices outside the US will follow. Stock is also thin: Best Buy briefly listed units at around $249 before selling out.

The new price took effect on October 2, almost exactly seven years after the Shield TV Pro launched at $199.99 in October 2019. It follows Apple’s increase in late June, Roku’s at the end of July and Google’s at the end of August. Nvidia said earlier this year that it would keep supporting the Shield with software updates for the foreseeable future, and that commitment still stands.

Seven years in, the Shield TV Pro has picked up a $100 surcharge and not a single new part.

Tags: Folarin Balogun, nvidia, Roku, Apple TV 4K, Google TV Streamer, memory shortage