 Chances are you're spending a good amount of your time indoors and based on the fact that both YouTube and Netflix Had to cut the stream quality to keep up with demand. It seems like a lot of that time is being spent watching videos online like Right now. Well Given that then it seems like now is a perfect time to investigate Nvidia's claims about last year's new shield TV because it has an awesome feature called AI Upscaling which Nvidia claims can take lower quality content Let's say 1080p and with the power of machine learning upscale said content to look like native 4k Sounds like a load of horse to me, but Jake assures me that it's actually really really cool So let's proceed With this segue to our sponsor Honey is a free web browser extension that will find you the best promo codes in the checkout on shopping websites like Amazon eBay and more get it today at join honey.com slash LTT. It's free Both the shield TV and shield TV Pro feature and videos updated Tegra X 1 plus 16 nanometer processor a fully fledged Android TV experience and support for 4k HDR video across basically every platform you can imagine along with CEC control on supported devices meaning that you can use your TV remote to control it and Other than looks the only difference between the two of them is their RAM and storage configs along with support for running a Plex media server Which is kind of like your own self-hosted private Netflix and support for Nvidia share for capturing gameplay and streaming to twitch It's also worth noting that the decreased RAM on the base model shield means that it's unable to play some of the triple a games Which were ported over to Android which Nvidia had dubbed advanced Android gaming or as I call it ah on the subject of gaming you might have noticed the lack of a shield game controller and the seemingly downgraded specs The biggest reason for it seems to be that this time around Nvidia is back to pushing the Android TV Aspect of the shield hard with gaming falling to quite literally the 13th section on the product page Remember guys, this is a product from Nvidia. I guess it kind of makes sense though I mean I already have a switch and a gaming PC So for me my shield is a streaming device first and a game console Two or three times a year when family comes over this shift also makes it more price competitive without affecting the user Experience much since why would you use this when basically any Bluetooth controller that you already own is gonna work Just fine with a shield. So with that in mind the focus of our review is going to be around media streaming starting with the remote I Cannot say that I've seen a remote quite like this one before a bit heavier than your average remote But I will say the triangular feel does give it a surprisingly comfortable hand feel the buttons feel Pretty nice actually and thanks to the inclusion of an accelerometer The remote can actually sense when you pick it up and turn on the adjustable backlighting neat The rest of the design is really nothing special honestly aside from the gigantic Netflix button on the bottom which honestly I found kind of annoying because it's so easy to Accidentally press the good news is that you can use the button remapper app to change what any of these buttons do There's also a buzzer inside the remote to make it easier to find in case you lose it every remote should have this feature Once it's on the setup procedure is brain dead easy pair your Android phone or iPhone Sign your life away a few times and get greeted by the Android TV home screen with Recommended content oozing from every one of its pores honestly that's about my only Complaint about Android TV and then by extension the shield experience. It's a little pushy that is Five that is five rows dedicated to just YouTube what even is this? fortunately, you can click left on each row because nobody cares about trending and Get rid of it now We can finally take a look at what might be the coolest feature of this device and videos proprietary AI upscaling uses a combination of Traditional upscaling where the image is simply stretched to fit the resolution Combined with the power of a highly trained neural network to provide an experience That's close to if you were actually watching content That's native to whatever resolution you're upscaling to so in my case. That's 4k So Jake's provided a couple of clips for us to try out to see just how good this AI upscaling is Conveniently Nvidia actually provides a handy dandy little hotkey that you can press to see a side-by-side of what? Basic versus AI enhanced upscaling looks like this is a 1080p clip But if we hold this button we can actually see a before and after and there's certain things that I would say do not Work as well you end up with a little bit of weird shimmering and background focus sometimes, but man Textures the way they manage to improve especially things like hair and environmental textures is Absolutely mind-blowing There's a little bit that we're gonna look at later That's quite impressive a little bit less so on him Just cuz he's so close that there's not a lot of extra detail to pull out of it, but this wood here Actually here is pretty impressive, too This is way more than just a sharpening filter look at that wood stone hair Actually these little berries here look markedly better with the AI upscaling versus without Things that are moving really fast it seems to have a bit more wow the difference in these mountains here is night and day This too I feel like I got to sit a little bit further back here. Sorry guys I'm just gonna be completely out of the frame here right now It's being fed with a 20 megabit 1080p stream. This is a great movie by the way knives out definitely worth a watch anyway In live-action the effect is definitely more subtle But it's noticeable as I swipe across things like the textures of clothing Hair so a lot of the same things that were better in the animation are also better here It's not overdone though. That's the problem with cheapo Like I guess non AI upscaling is that it tends to just kind of sharpen everything Whereas here you can really tell that it's being applied Strategically like it doesn't sharpen this thing in the background here It only sharpens what you need to sharpen With the stubble here, that's the detail that really stands out to the eye when you're sitting back at couch distance I don't know what else to say other than that Nvidia's new AI upscaling tech is not just another silly marketing gimmick with AI slapped on it it really does work and I guess that's just kind of the theme like why would you spend? $200 on a shield they just Work, you know Whether it's Jake daily driving these two for the last month at home or the fact that I've been daily driving this thing Since it came out in 2017 Once you clean up the home screen and get your apps installed. It's just kind of a flawless experience It updates automagically It's easy for less tech literate people to use because they don't have to learn how to cast from their phone And of the limited times that Jake tried Nvidia game stream. Apparently it worked perfectly I don't know. I don't really use it anymore with my 2017 model but because I've got a gaming pc there now, but there you have it and Probably the biggest standout He says is that the issues with his old chromecast or Xbox one or actually I've had these issues with my pc before too Where certain video codecs will just buffer for no reason or content will be slow to initially load the shield TVs have had five years to get to the point where they just freaking work and Here we are and videos got support nailed down for pretty much every streaming service and video codec that you can think of and For a media streaming box. 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Yeah, it's great protect yourself from potential bad times Got it linked below if you guys enjoyed this video And you're perhaps looking for an inexpensive TV to pair your new shield TV with maybe check out our roundup of cheap TVs where I had To pick out which ones were which prices with a punishment if I got them wrong That's us, gonna