The shield is worth every penny. Never once regretted what I spent on either of my shields.

Not sure what others your referring to but the mibox S is great and works fine for everyday streaming I have a shield as well and if it's worth the price(it definitely is) then the mibox S is worth every penny too.

mibox S is good enough for most people

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power users will be disappointed at the state of HD audio pass-through though

why is it that there are so few Android TV products readily available, at least in the US

Roku controls like 70% of the STB market in the US and Android TV is regulated to hobbyist circles there.

No one really is in the business of competing with Roku right now, although Amazon is certainly giving it a go (but they have ulterior motives of course). Smart TVs are also extremely popular and prevalent in the US, so STBs have increasingly become an even smaller market, with Android TV operating as an "also ran". It's just not worthwhile to invest in competing against the other stuff,

In the future, at least in the US, Android TV's destiny seems to lie in being a TV OS and/or for hobbyist and certain power users, but not for a general consumer usage.

That being said.... Amazon fire is actually Android TV, just a heavily modified version, so don't discount that.

Because the NVIDIA Shield is better than anything anyone else could make.

While Shield ‘s May be a bit pricey, they’re worth it. Keep an eye out for Google Express or eBay coupons. You’ll see 20% every now and then to help out. Shield has an official Amazon Prime app that Mi Box doesn’t.

The challenges are around how many people consume media. They don't necessarily shop around and have a variety of subscription services or a local media server. They buy a smart TV directly and/or pay for a cable plan.

That's where Android TV has seen a lot of adoption. Many TV's on the market with some sort of smart OS run Android. Additionally, many cable providers have started using Android TV as the core of their cable boxes, offering cable alongside OTT services like Netflix.

Compared to these two, there aren't too many people who would want to deal with an extra third thing. Yeah Nvidias Shield is a very good device, and great for some people, but it's not necessarily something I'd recommend to everyone.

To a point it is a victim of the lack of a coherent product plan from Google for Android

The set top box market for most people is to consume purchased content and thus the money to be made is not in hardware but rather in sales of movies / music / streaming content subscriptions

For those consumers Apple is a better choice with the full range of well supported hardware ( tv box / tablet / phone).

Unless Google gets serious about android being anything other than just a phone OS then it will continue to struggle on the non-phone platforms

(Nvidia is the exception in part because they are pushing games and the fact that it is a good tv box is secondary- and part of that success is the acknowledgement that a tv box isn’t going to be replaced every 2 years and thus needs a level of updates foreign to Google and Android in general)

What makes android tv so appealing that other types of streaming boxes won’t fit the bill?

The standalone set-top box market is tiny period. Roku and Apple TV aren't huge players either, and TVs with internet connectivity built in are a much, much bigger deal in the market, or internationally cable and satellite operator set-top boxes (quite a few of which run Android TV now).

Google is partially to blame for that. They had an infight for years regarding Android TV and Chromecast where chromecast had the upper hand despite simply being a subset of ATV.

So Google neglected ATV to a huge degree, then add on top the usual gang of asian cheap box manuacturers with sell and runs and close to unusable devices and TVs with lousy implementations on top of underpowered processors and you have a match made in hell.

It speaks a lot for itself, that the shield now after 4.5 years still is unsurpassed by other manufacturers and tvs after 3 years slowly become usable.

As for google, shoddy reference device then dumped then no reference device at all now a reference device again who only developers can get and you have a match made in hell v 2.0

They're usually in the tv, like Sony.

A 'Pixel TV' box would be nice. I guess Google just doesn't allocate a lot of effort towards the platform, otherwise they'd be working with a bunch of OEMs like Samsung, LG, Motorola, Huawei, etc. to get them their own streaming boxes. They can't even be bothered to do their own device. The ADT-1 was like Google's last honest try at it. Currently the Mix Box covers the affordable tier and the Shield covers the "top of the line" tier. There could definitely be more competition at the low end but I also don't think there's enough money in it for some of the bigger OEMs to dip into the market. I also think Samsung would rather push their own smart TVs as a solution for streaming.

The beelink GT Mini-"A" is android TV certified and about $85 with 2-4 gb ram and 32 or 64 gb rom . The interface looks exactly like the Nvidia Shield. You could look into that one

Word on the street is Google is really gonna push Android TV moving forward. They claim they will increase apps available on app store from 600ish to 3000+. Also they are supposed to certify many new boxes coming out soon, by the holiday season. MeCool already has at least one available but it still doesn't have the cert for HD Netflix/Prime

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Edit: Heres link to one MeCool Box w/AndroidTV

There are lots of Android TV devices. Unfortunately, most of them are either TV sets or STBs that are tied to a particular MVPD and aren't sold at retail.

I have other version of android tv box, powerful, efficient etc. # FREE for US#. Are you interested? :)

It comes down to certification. Nvidia is closed source. I mean you could get APK's through a side load but it is sold to be used with certified apps like netflix, hulu, and all those paid subscription apps. I love my open source buzztv. Whatever I think of I can get on it, I love the personalization. Only thing I miss is chromecast and google assistant but I can live without it.

Here if the Google ATV Certified, some Netflix approved master list of media players:

https://sites.google.com/view/droid-tv/streaming-gaming

New Google certified ATV devices real soon with an AMLogic S905X3 chipset might be worth a look.

They should run Android Pie 9.0 out of the box.

The S905X2/X3 chipset is noticeably faster vs the entry level, old S905X in the Mi Boxes and Jetstream.

Have a look at what I'm talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSHp_EUdnhw&feature=youtu.be

As with anything in Tech these days, unless they are dirt cheap throw away devices...

Really the quality of anything comes down to ongoing OS and Firmware support if keeping a device for a reasonable period.