Sonos Cancels Its Streaming Video Player

According to The Verge, Sonos has abandoned its plans to release a streaming video player this year. From the report: The news was announced by the company's leadership during an all-hands call today. That product, codenamed Pinewood, was set to be Sonos' next major hardware launch. It was already deep into development and has spent months in beta testing. But now the team behind it will be reassigned to other projects as interim CEO Tom Conrad reprioritizes the company's future roadmap and continues what he hopes will be a turnaround from a bruising 2024. He told employees that a push into video from Sonos is off the table "for now." [...]

Pinewood was designed to offer many of the same streaming video apps as other devices on the market along with deep universal search and content aggregation. But as I reported last month, Sonos also intended for it to double as an HDMI switcher and support passthrough functionality for gaming consoles, 4K Blu-ray players, and more. The box was also set to allow new configurations of surround sound systems using Sonos' many speakers.

That library file limit

[tchdab1]

They ever fix it?

Re:

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

Nope. That's why I changed all my players to BlueOS.

What's the differentiator?

[necro81]

There are lots of streaming video players out there. You can get a Roku or Chromecast for $20-80, depending on the model. You can get a Firestick for $30-50. You can get an AppleTV or Nvidia Shield for $90-200. Hell, you can build a great video player [youtube.com] from a Raspberry Pi 5 for around $100.

What did Sonos think it was bringing to this party that would make the venture worthwhile?

Re:

[ZERO1ZERO]

Sonos should have had multi room streaming and source distribuion for video at least a decade ago. This missed the boat so hard on this.

You know how on their zone players you can feed a line in, so from a record deck, a computer, a TV, a line out on a pre amp and then stream THAT around the house to all your other sonus devices and lock it in so no delays or lags. That is pretty neat stuff.

All they had to do was make a zoneplayer with a video in and video out. Feed your hdmi into the device and have it s

Re:

[Kernel Kurtz]

I recently built a Pi4 as a general purpose media player. It has a Pi2AES audio hat to feed my DAC/headphone amp, and HDMI out to my AV receiver. Using Kodi it plays 4K just fine from local files, but streaming anything with DRM not so much. There is some Widevine support on Linux, but at least on the Pi it just does not cut it. This doesn't matter to me since I only ever intended it to play off my NAS anyway.

And on a side rant, when I first started using Linux almost 30 years ago sound was a shit sh

Future for Sonos

[Fuzi719]

The best thing that could happen with Sonos is they get acquired by Alphabet. That would benefit them and Google.