At the start of Google I/O on May 28, NVIDIA released the shield console. Available on Amazon.com and Nvidia.com for $199 and reviewed here:
http://anandtech.com/show/9289/the-nvidia-shield-android-tv-review
It supports 4K Netflix streaming out of the box, and is the only device to do so. Now subscribers to Netflix 4K can finally use it. It costs extra, the base Netflix subscription price ($7.99) doesn't include the 4K streaming package.
Is this the start of Google taking over the living room? Games, movies, music, infotainment, all streamed from the cloud.
Fastest Android SoC out there at the moment:
-Quadcore A57
-Maxwell 2 SMM GPU
-3 GB LP4 DRAM
-4K display (OK not included :-P )
It also includes a game controller. The games streaming service might be cheaper than buying a GTX, and could potentially be used as a home server for movie streaming or basic FTP /disk streaming tasks. Should be interesting to see what apps get released for it. It's faster than most embedded systems used such as routers, scanners, and HTPCs. With Kodi + portable HDD, I could keep my desktop PC turned off most of the time now.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday June 01 2015, @04:52PM
Sad thing is I have explained the benefits to him and even demonstrated them. He once came to me with disks from his old Linksys NAS which failed to power up. I plugged them into my Linux laptop with an an ATA adapter, ran mdadm with the discovery option and then mounted it. He was very surprised at how easy it was to recover his data.
I have also shown him my old HTPC and a few other Linux goodies but he just didn't care for it. He is a Windows admin, so there might be bias. But I know him and it is because he wants the cheapest, most simple, and easiest answer to a problem. Setting up a Linux HTPC vs spending 40 bucks on a fire tv stick and installing Kodi is a no brainer to him. So fire TV it is.