The wireless sound specialist Sonos has reportedly canceled its not-so-secret “secret” project code-named Pinewood, meaning that it’s no longer going to enter the market for video streaming devices.
The decision by its new CEO Tom Conrad suggests Sonos will maintain its focus on audio products, which have come in for a lot of criticism in recent months.
According to The Verge, the company had planned to launch Pinewood in the second half of this year. The device was never officially talked about by Sonos, but journalists such as Mark Gurman of Bloomberg and Cris Welch at The Verge had regularly provided updates on its progress, despite its supposedly secret nature.
The journalists both have good connections at Sonos, and regularly received information including images of the device (see above), specifications, features and details on its roadmap.
Their reports over the last couple of years suggested that Sonos was aiming to build a very high-end streaming device that would sell for anything between $150 and $400, in-line with the company’s premium ethos. Sonos had previously confirmed it was developing an operating system called Ventura, though it didn’t specify how it would use that software.
To justify its sky-high price tag, Pinewood was meant to provide more sophisticated audio capabilities than rival streaming devices. Earlier specs published by Gurman and Welch suggested it would have several HDMI inputs for audio passthrough, and the ability to connect wirelessly to Sonos speakers to create a highly configurable wireless home theatre system. Sonos does this already with its soundbars, but Pinewood was meant to support more flexibles speaker configurations and assign individual speakers to select audio channels.
However, these supposed capabilities are now moot, as Sonos interim CEO Conrad has reportedly told employees during an all-hands meeting on March 12 that the entire project is a non-starter. The Verge notes that it may be revived later, but for now Conrad believes that it’s a waste of the company’s resources.
Indeed, there were a lot of questions raised by Sonos’s endeavors. Some employees had expressed concern that Pinewood would be as disappointing as the company’s Ace headphones, which earned good reviews but were largely hated by Sonos customers due to the lack of Wi-Fi streaming features. Moreover, many critics pointed out that there’s likely to be limited demand for a high-end streaming device, given the glut of lower cost devices available today and the reality that many TVs already have streaming apps built-in.
It’s notable that Pinewood was supposedly conceived by former Sonos CEO Patric Spence, who was forced to step down in the wake of a disastrous app relaunch last April. Back then, the company launched an overhauled mobile app for iOS and Android devices that was meant to deliver a performance boost and improve customisation, paving the way for new features to emerge later. But users immediately complained about numerous bugs in the revamped app, which also degraded the performance of their Sonos speakers. The company was also slated for removing much-loved functionality from the Sonos app.
With Conrad now in charge, he’s keeping busy trying to repair the damage by restoring the app’s lost functionality and performance, but progress on that front has been slow. Meanwhile, the idea of Sonos entering the video streaming market has also been lambasted by Sonos customers, with many of them insisting that it’s pointless.
Sonos, as a premium brand like Apple, is overly reliant on brand loyalty for its success, and it needs to retain the trust of its customer base. It’s the only way Sonos can continue to convince people to buy its £1,000-plus speakers, its £400-plus headphones and other high-priced products. By killing off Pinewood, Conrad can ensure the company remains laser-focused on fixing its audio products, and many customers appear to be celebrating the decision.
So for now, Sonos will do precisely that, though it’s worth pointing out that Pinewood could make a comeback once Sonos has fixed the problems relating to its app. Although the streaming device was criticized by most Sonos fans, there was some interest in the reported surround sound configuration features it was meant to have, as they would have given users more control over their home theatre systems.
Then again, it may be that Sonos simply takes the easier option of adding this kind of functionality to its wireless soundbars. That would make sense, given that many wired sound systems already support flexible configurations at a much lower price.
