[wesk05]

yes but the article is about bringing the updated VP9 profile to the current generation of the shield , no where does it mention a requirement for new hardware

The article is making the assumption that encrypted VP9 is of a different profile. It will be a different profile only if Google is using encrypted VP9 profile 2 for the UHD movies. If the movies are in profile 0, the only thing that needs to be updated is support for encrypted streams. Shield actually supports Widevine VP9, but it looks like Google is using native AES128 common encryption for VP9 which the Shield doesn't seem to support. nVIDIA is likely to update this part.

As I mentioned in the previous post, although possible, it is very unlikely that nVIDIA will actually update the VP9 decoder for the current generation Shield. This is where the new Shield comes into picture. We will just have to wait and see what exactly nVIDIA is going to do.