Android TV, as a format and medium, is still in its infancy. As such, the platform does have a long way to go before it reaches the stage and level that it needs to be at to reach its full potential. That said, with its first year (of operating) approaching, the inroads to the development of Android TV are becoming clearer. When the Nexus Player was first released, there were a number of fundamental issues with the software. For instance, the Play Store which had been optimized for android TV, did not display that many apps and there were ever more fundamental issues, like the inability to reboot the system without having to pull out the plug. Since then though, both of these (as well as many others) have now been fixed with an update resolving the reboot issue and a recent update to the Play Store for Android TV seeing an abundance of apps becoming more visible.
In more recent times though, the roll-out of Android TV to other devices has also been on the increase. It was only this morning, that the news came through that some of the Sharp Televisions with built in Android TV had now become available to purchase. Not to mention on the standalone unit front, there has also now been the introduction of both the Razer Forge and the NVIDIA SHIELD. Thanks to all these newer introductions, it does seem likely that the evolution of Android TV will become further fueled more quickly, moving forward.
For instance, on a blog post on the NVIDIA official support forum yesterday, a customer care associate explained that an update will be rolling out to the SHIELD sometime this month. This update will bring with it support for MPEG-2, which is a feature that is not expected to receive support (as standard) on Android TV until the Android M update arrives. The benefit of the introduction of MPEG-2 is that users will able to effectively connect a TV tuner (or any MPEG-2 output device) to an Android TV device, in this case, the NVIDIA SHIELD. The NVIDIA blog in particular, highlights the ability to connect the HDHomeRun device. This will be seen as one way in which Android TV users will be able to ‘cut the cord’ on more traditional TV subscriptions. It is worth pointing out, that as this is a software update, the hardware already has this capability built-in and therefore, once activated, it will still be up to third-party developers to make use of the MPEG-2 support for the platform in the future.