Roku has exited the smart home hardware business — effective immediately. The company confirmed to Lowpass newsletter’s Janko Roettgers that it will wind down sales of all smart home devices and refocus entirely on streaming. No new models are coming. No roadmap remains.
The product pages are already stripped: most items are sold out across Roku’s site, Home Depot, and Amazon. Support for existing devices continues, but the line is closed. Permanently. Roku launched its first smart home gear in 2022, four years ago, and never built beyond rebadged hardware.
Its indoor camera SE was co-developed with Wyze. Its $40 Battery Camera and $60 Battery Camera Plus, released later, were notable only for claimed two-year battery life, not for proprietary tech or differentiated software. None topped $100. That pricing mattered.
Roku wasn’t chasing premium margins. It was filling a gap: cheap, ad-supported, no-subscription-required security cameras and plugs for users who didn’t want to pay Blink’s monthly fee or wrestle with Wyze’s patchy privacy record. Now that gap is wider. Wyze still offers microSD local storage, a rarity, but its 2024 cross-feed leak and refusal last year to commit to end-to-end encryption (per The Verge) leave real questions.
Blink locks core features behind subscriptions and requires separate hardware for local backup. Roku’s devices weren’t secure by design. They weren’t built in-house beyond basic firmware tweaks. But they were an option.
A simple one. The exit predates Fox’s acquisition of Roku, stock at retailers had already dried up before the deal closed. That timing matters: this wasn’t a post-merger purge. It was a quiet, strategic retreat.
Streaming remains Roku’s revenue engine. Smart home was never more than a sideline experiment, one that ended not with a bang, but with empty product pages and a spokesperson’s statement about “being the top streaming platform.” Roku’s smart home hardware will disappear from retail shelves over the next few weeks.
Firmware updates and cloud services for current owners continue, for now.
HTFiled by The Home Tech Desk
TVs, home appliances and the smart home: refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, purifiers, robot vacuums, the sets on the wall and the platforms that connect them. Launches, prices in the US and India, and what changed.
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