Sonos hits eject on its video player plans

Sonos has had a pretty rough go of things over the last year. Its app redesign was so hated that we were absolutely floored when, in the company’s response to the backlash, Sonos chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin said the app redesign took “courage.” At least the company decided to look inwards and get back to the basics of what made it such a sought-after brand in the first place… right? Not quite. Sonos thought that an Android-based streaming box would be exactly what people needed to forget its disastrous 2024. In an already stacked world of streaming devices that range from onboard smart TV platforms to the costly-but-great Nvidia Shield TV Pro, where did Sonos executives think their product — codenamed Pinewood — would slot in?

Calmer heads have thankfully prevailed in the Sonos world. According to The Verge, Sonos has canceled its streaming video player. The news was announced internally in an “all-hands call” earlier today, as interim CEO Tom Conrad said that dropping into the video streaming world has been paused for the time being. Notably, this is not a complete rejection of the Pinewood project, but it’s as close as the company will get for now.

Streaming boxes galore

There are way too many streaming devices out on the market today. While our personal favorite premium streaming device is now six years old, the Nvidia Shield Pro still does everything you could want a device that costs up to $200 to do. The Roku Express 4K+ is the best value streaming stick, and even if some people prefer the Apple TV 4K over the Google TV Streamer, both are a great bang for your buck. For Sonos to insert itself into this space and expect success right away, it would’ve been a foolish endeavor. Even if the device offered something different from most (and it was supposed to double as an HDMI switcher, according to previous reports), very few people would spend hundreds of dollars more on what boils down to mostly the same product.

With all those fantastic streaming devices, we’re glad Sonos is seemingly getting back to its roots. After the app redesign debacle of 2024, which saw popular features like “Shuffle All” and alarm functionality removed entirely, Sonos started to get back on the right track with its fantastic Sonos Ace headphones, which hit the mark for a premium headphones product. The Sonos Arc was exactly what we wanted out of a soundbar, too. At the end of the day, many people want Sonos to continue focusing on audio-based products that push the boundaries of what we should expect from premium sound systems. We want to wirelessly stream our vinyls to multi-thousand-dollar speaker setups. We don’t need a $200-$400 streaming box that does much of the same on top of that.