2024 was a tough year for Sonos. The public sex cruise ship videocompany completely revamped its mobile app, but instead of making it better, Sonos messed it up in a myriad of ways. Now it's scrambling to earn the trust of its user base once again.
The way to do that, it appears, is through a new product category. According to The Verge, Sonos is planning to launch a streaming box, with a price tag between $200 and $400.
The product, codenamed Pinewood, is going to be Android-based. It's going to look like most such devices — The Verge, who has seen images of the product, says it's a "flattened black square and slightly thicker than a deck of trading cards."
The Pinewood streamer will reportedly offer content from various streaming platforms, including Netflix, Max, and Disney+, with a unified user experience and universal search to find content across various accounts. It will come with a physical remote control unit with integrated voice control. This is tough to achieve — accessing all these various streaming platforms under one UI — but if Sonos could pull it off, it could be a big incentive to buy the product.
But the Pinewood streamer will come with other interesting options. Thanks to HDMI passthrough functionality, you'll be able to plug other devices, including gaming consoles and 4K Blu-ray players into it. And of course, the streamer will be able to send TV audio, lag-free, to its soundbars and speakers. User should also be able to configure surround sound by using the Sonos speakers they have in their household.
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It won't be easy to pull this off. Part of the controversy surrounding Sonos' new app is the fact that it broke integration between various Sonos products, which has always been one of the company's strengths. The new Pinewood streamer sounds like something that aims to become a core component of a user's home audio and video ecosystem, and this will require everything to go extremely smoothly.
There's also some strong competition in the streaming box arena, including devices such as Apple TV, Nvidia Shield TV, Roku's Streaming Stick, Google's TV Streamer, and Amazon's Fire TV stick (all of which cost way less than $200). Sonos reportedly doesn't plan any other new hardware soon, so the Pinewood streamer might turn out to be its most important product of 2025.