Roku Forums

[dupondt]

Mr. Wood,

for many months now there have been both questions and controversy about the discontinuation of the SoundBridge range of products.

Neither you personally nor any of your employees have ever taken part in these discussions, which consequently added to such speculation.

There have, however, neither been questions nor controversy about Radio Roku (except, of course, when the service was down which happened quite frequently in the last couple months).

The time has come to change this.

Today, in spite of its glitches and bugs, Radio Roku is one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive internet radio guides on the web. Its database does not need to fear the comparison with others, and it has a stylish and practical user interface.

There are now 12,293 live approved stations listed within Radio Roku. More than 45,000 stream URLs either auto-uploaded by the SoundBridges or submitted by the users have been appropriately sorted into their relevant stations. Thousands of volunteers contributed to the growth and the improvement of the database.

Over the past 18 months the task of maintaining the database was nearly entirely done by two volunteer Moderators based in Europe, my very good friend alanmc and myself. During the whole of this time there has been no support from anyone at Roku! Remember? That's the company who started it all because you wanted to make money with both the SoundBridge and Radio Roku!

All of this was visible to a worldwide public and has been acknowledged by many people many times in these forums and in personal messages to the Moderators of Radio Roku. You, however, didn't even take notice of the progress, let alone acknowledge the results achieved by their many thousands of unpaid working hours.

Furthermore, the Moderators filed bug reports and submitted suggestions for the improvement of Radio Roku, and many members of these forums, too, repeatedly asked for bugs to be fixed and features to be improved. Neither you nor your staff have ever seriously dealt with these reports and suggestions.

All of this brings me to the conclusion that you have not only completely lost interest in the SoundBridge range of products, but also in Radio Roku. And if you have lost interest, why should your volunteer Moderators be motivated to continue their work?

It's a disgrace that you obviously are willing to let a revolutionary product like the SoundBridge and a fantastic service like Radio Roku go down the drain. But if this is what you have decided, you should at least have the guts to inform your customers, and not deliberately lie to them by maintaining the silence.

Finally, permit me to add a very personal observation. Having been born, raised and educated in Europe, I am used to people getting along with each other in a polite and respectful manner. Neither you personally nor your employees, albeit knowing that the maintenance of Radio Roku entirely depended on only two individuals, ever bothered to answer emails in a timely manner or tried to respect the basic rules of common courtesy. This not only demonstrates that there obviously is a major cultural gap between you and me, but also made it very clear that you always considered me and the other volunteers as useful idiots.

The idiot having written the above will therefore now stop to be useful for Roku and use his expertise to contribute to other projects where he at least receives a "thank-you" from time to time.

dupondt
_________________
Disclaimer: This post is published under the following licences: AFAIK, IMHO, IANAL. If you find orthographic and/or grammatical mistakes you can keep them.

[Burkhardi]

Hello Dupondt!

I wanted to use this to say thanks for the hard work that both you and Alan have done for RadioRoku and their users. I am sorry to hear things have come to this and I really hope (I type this with the fear of being labeled a “Fanboy” which I take as a negative term unless one uses it for themselves) that now that Roku is at the ebb of going live with the initial release of the N1000, that they (Roku and Anthony) will be able to rub their eyes, grab a cup of coffee and look at the whole picture and see what (in my opinion) a great product the SoundBridge line is and can be. I read so many post here and other places and on web sites how the SoundBridge is still state of the art and really can't be touched (even more so in it's low price point) and the UI is awesome compared to the other streams out there and their display is nice and big (and pretty) too.

The product line is 90% mature (in my eyes) and I don't think it would take much to get it to be all the buzz again, even more so since Roku's N1000 has really put them on the map and given them a whole new line of customers. Roku's ideas are normally way ahead of the curve so I know they can do this. This could be as much of a great thing for Roku as for the users!

RadioRoku has made the user experience so much better for the users too. I remember when the SoundBridge had no internet radio at all (in the UI) and then when they first added it and how clunky it was and then it got better but still took you having to know stream URL’s and update presets manually and such. Then came RADIOROKU and turned the whole thing into a great experience.

Who knows, perhaps we may see a RadioRoku channel added to the N1000? That would be neat and would just be a simple channel on the N1000’s UI that someone couild use or not use (for those that say they want to keep the N1000 basic and easy for the average joe).

In closing, thanks again for your help, dedication and support. I really hope this can be salvavge since I see you and Alan as key players (or the only players) that keep RadioRokuo alive and going.

I hope this is a truning point for the better and not the worse and that Roku will see what a great opportunity they have that has been on the back burner for a while now.

With much sadness, Matt
_________________
*Roku N1000 and Roku HD1000 (Rev B) via ethernet on a Samsung HLP5674W DLP in the living room*Roku M1000 via Wi-Fi in the bedroom*Roku R1000 in the kitchen*XP Pro SP2 running WMC and Slimserver (for SlimRoku) routed via WRT54GS

[RokuAnthony]

Hi Dupondt and All,

Let me start by saying Roku, our employees and our community certainly do appreciate your help maintaining Radio Roku. I apologize for not being as responsive as you would like.

Let me spend a few lines outlining the SoundBridge saga and its current status, in the hope that I can clear a few things up. We love the SoundBridge line. We produced 6 different versions of the hardware (M500, M1000, M1001, M2000, R1000, embedded module). We released dozens of software updates for no charge. Everything from bug fixes to major new features like RadioRoku.com. We invested millions of dollars in product development and marketing. But the unfortunate truth is that we have never made money on SoundBridge and continue to loose money on it. Although there is a core following of enthusiasts the love it (me included), the mass market of consumers spend their music player money on iPods and iPod docks.

Employees don’t work for free, and eventually we started shifting our SoundBridge employees to projects that are more profitable. If we hadn’t done this, Roku would have gone out of business, and there would be no support or no radio Roku for customers. But this is the reason you don’t get much soundbridge employee communication.

We still support radioroku.com and soundbridge. We provide repair and replacement service. We have increased the IT budget recently to improve radio roku’s “up time”. We occasionally fix firmware issues that effect customers. And we still sell the product, although that probably won’t continue past this year.

We have hopes that radioroku.com will continue to provide service to our other product lines at some point in the future, and we occasionally plot a SoundBridge come-back, but these are not guaranteed and subject to business realities.

By the way, although we are a California headquartered company, much of SoundBridge development was done in our Cambridge, UK office, and I was born in the UK.

Best Regards,

Anthony Wood
CEO
Roku, Inc.

Ps. I will be avoiding the temptation to reply to any more posts on this topic.

[alanmc]

. . . . now where's my pinch-of-salt?

[FrankB]

It's so frustrating. I just convinced my mother to get a Soundbridge this past weekend. People just don't get it. Such a well done product line.

Thanks to Roku, thanks to the volunteer maintainers. I and my family love my 5 Soundbridges!

Frank

[AmazinglySmooth]

Has Roku considered partnering with other content providers (such as SXM or Slacker)?

[Burkhardi]

[cslewis2003]

That is disappointing news to hear that the soundbridge product will be discontinued. IMHO, it represents the most cost effective network music device on the market today, but clearly, as is true with most things in life, video killed the radio star.

Given your business decision to no longer produce the product, would you consider opening the hardware / software platform to your obviously dedicated user?

Perhaps we could figure out how to improve or cost reduce the unit to the point of profitability - the EL display, while gorgeous, can be downloaded to something much cheaper.

Just a thought.

[Burkhardi]

[ejcinpl]

Mr. Woods email reply was pathetic. While I understand that companies have to make decisions on products and markets to pursue based upon profitability, the saga of the soundbridge could have been handled much better. I personally have had to make such decisions, both for startup companies and multibillion dollar corporations, and when you make a decision to not support a product line you do it up front and notify the consumers of that product. Unfortunately Roku has followed a path with the soundbridge that leads to very negative customer reactions. I was very tempted to respond to the Wall Street Journal reporter on this forum and provide my "perspective" on Roku.

There have been many threads on this forum asking for clarification on where the soundbridge stood with no answers. I believe this email reply is the first 'official' notice of the discontinuance of the product line . A fact which will make consumers who have just paid for a new soundbridge/radio very happy to hear. It does not matter where you were born this is just a bad business practice and if I were managing Mr. Wood I would fire him.

Its really too bad as I have three soundbridge radio's and two M1001's and liked the product. I won't be buying a Roku Netflix product because of this experience and will tell others to look at other solutions (of which there are many).

ejcinpl

[stretch]

I wouldn't be surprised if large numbers of SB's were returned by people thinking the unit was "broken" when the real problem was multicast issues in their router.

BTW, In Australia, an M2000 was approximately $800 . No wonder they didn't sell too well.
_________________
2 x M2000's
Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ with Firefly svn-1676
NSLU2, 500GB Maxtor One Touch III, uNSLUng 6.8, Firefly svn-1696
music library in FLAC format

[StarTechRadio]

It would appear that nobody is now maintaining the Radio Roku database. As the volunteer moderators are no longer willing to undertake this task having been (obviously) poorly treated and ignored by Roku management, just who will add and update the stations that I and many others have already submitted for approval?

[gerry123]

I had the cheap model (pinnacle home music here in the UK) until recently where I accidentally put 9 volts up it's rectum and it was never the same again.

Now I loved my soundbridge, especially in the summer where it sat in my shed with an old Alba stereo and a couple of boombox speakers playing all the summer hits while we sat having a barbecue in those long hot summer days. (remember them?) They seem to have gone the same route as my SB did.

Now as summer is approaching again, I thought, I'll get another one, scoured the web, then I thought I'll have a look on here to see if there are any posts to see where the best deal may be. Came across this thread and my heart sank. There is no way I'm going to get another SB if Roku are ending the support.

To cut a long story short... I have decided to to go with a squeezebox 3 instead. Boy did I make the right choice. It's so much better, quicker, sounds even better than my old SB used to and it's so much easier to setup. Used to have problems connecting to my router with the SB, not the SB3. Connects first time and can do so much more.

I used to love my soundbridge, but that love affair it seems was doomed from the start. I have a new love in my life.

Buy a Squeezebox, you'll never know what true love is if you don't.

Gerry.

[Ries-gr]

[gerry123]