Sonos cancels the development and launch of its video player in ‘streaming’

Sonos canceled the development and launch of its first video playback device in ‘streaming’ With internal Pinewood name, which will no longer be the main launch of the company’s hardware this year, in order to focus its efforts on the ‘software’ section.

During the last year, the technology company has been dealing with various problems generated by the failed update of its Sonos application That, launched in May 2024 as an open platform where to gather all the content of its different services, brought numerous failures that prevented users of the company from continuing to use them normally.

This problem caused Sonos to have to launch several updates to try to solve the problem and, in addition, it meant postponing the launch of new technological products, which were planned for the fourth quarter of last year.

One of these products was your First decodera ‘streaming’ video player who, with Pinewood code nameis designed to give access to numerous ‘streaming’ content platforms in a unified ‘software’ experience, in line with other products in the sector such as Apple TV 4K, Nvidia Shield and Roku Ultra.

In this sense, last February it was announced that Sonos continued with the development of Pinewood, however, the company has decided now to cancel its launch, Although I was already in an advanced development phase, even after the realization of beta tests.

This has been communicated by the interim CEO of Sonos, Tom Conrad, in a call with the project staff to which The Verge has had access, where he has indicated that the Company will return to prioritize the future road map in which “for now” the video is not contemplated.

With the cancellation of its ‘streaming’ device, the technological intends to focus on Restore the performance of its ‘software’ section. Thus, as the spokeswoman for Sonos, Erin Pategas, has underlined, in statements to the aforementioned environment, They maintain “a long relationship with The Trade desk”, The company behind the operating system that was going to run in the Pinewood player.

With all this, Sonos ‘streaming’ video player was designed to launch for a high price, between 200 and 400 dollarsmore typical of a premium range in this type of products. Likewise, he also incorporated Several HDMI ports and compatibility for Content transfer for video game consoles y Blu-ray 4k players, among other playback devices. All with Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and WiFi 7.

Taking this into account, The Verge has also pointed out that Some employees They showed their concern In case the sonos ‘streaming’ video player It was not up to established brands In this category of products, as is the case of Roku, Amazon, Apple and Google.

As a result, for the moment, the technological has Abandoned its initial plans by discarding the Pinewood project Definitely and has relocated the team in other technological projects.