Roku scraps smart home plans to concentrate on streaming – and that's good with me

Roku appears to be dropping its smart home products so that it can focus on what it's known for - streaming entertainment.

Roku entered the smart home segment with a small selection of devices - cameras, doorbell, light strips and so on - with the most recent addition being cameras with a long battery life.

But Roku's smart home hardware has never really been that widely available and in terms of impact, we're not sure that anyone will miss its discontinuation. With Roku now owned by Fox, it might be that there's some refocusing of Roku's business.

The news comes from Janko Roettger's Lowpass newsletter (via Gizmodo), reporting that a Roku spokesperson confirmed that the focus would be on becoming the "top streaming platform".

Roku's smart home products - and the move into the segment - fits a pattern that we've seen before from brands like Sky and in the past Hive. In both cases, the companies took OEM products and rebranded them; in both cases, the results didn't stand up against established rivals.

Blink is one of the dominant players at the affordable end of the segment and is owned by Amazon. That gives it the advantage of huge exposure, regular discounts and a wide ecosystem of self-developed devices.

It does, however, lean on subscriptions to power many of the features, although starting at £2.50 a month, it's one of the cheapest subscriptions around.

Roku's affordable smart home position was also threatened by brands like Tapo, which has a huge range of devices, often at very aggressive prices with most of the features available without a subscription - using microSD storage on the devices themselves.

It's understandable that Roku would look to use its brand to make this expansion in hardware offerings, but the smart home isn't that simple. Devices need to work together, seamlessly, or come with an ecosystem advantage to encourage people to buy in.

While Roku seems to be leaving the smart home, Apple is just making its entrance with HomeView. Even with Apple's might behind it, one of the downsides of the HomeView is the limited compatibility with some big brand systems, like Ring.