Product and Feature Ideas

  • 20 December 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 33 views
C

Several product ideas here. Please pass these along as appropriate.

 

Context first.

My home is an open floorplan apartment with a balcony. I use a ceiling-mounted projector (BenQ TK850, though it may be replaced) paired with a Sonos Arc, Two Sonos Ones, and a Sub. I also have two Ikea bookshelf speakers, a satellite One for an adjacent room, and a Sonos Roam. Roku Ultra is my content source. Limitations in the Sonos Arc (an ARC receiver port, but no HDMI pass-through) and the projector (stereo-only ARC port) necessitate the use of a niche product ($200-250) called an HDFury Arcana to connect the Roku, projector, and content source and support surround/ATMOS. The wiring for the setup requires 20-30 feet of HDMI cabling between the projector and the rest of the solution, which can be problematic. 

 

The Good:​​​​​​ it sounds great when it’s working!

The Bad: it’s somewhat unreliable. The introduction of the HDFury Arcana and the long cabling mean that it can take a few tries to get it all working. And there are a few other weird behaviors that I can omit, but that the product/feature ideas would solve.

The Annoying: I often want to walk outside while continuing to listen to audio from the TV (news on Youtube, etc). I am within WiFi range, but not the audio. I could bring the Sonos Roam, but I worry about bugging the neighbors.

 

Sonos is positioned to smooth all of the rough edges in the setup. Here are the product and feature ideas.

#1 - Projector as a Sonos Content Source - Develop a licensable solution for projector manufacturers to integrate with the Sonos system as an audio source. This would provide Sonos and projector ecosystem partners a differentiating value add. It would eliminate the cabling and reliability mess and provide a “sticky” customer feature that would steer them to particular projector choices and incentivize them to stick with Sonos. If it was popular, more projector partners would come knocking to license ($) this technology.

#2 - As an alternative to #1, produce an HDMI ARC receiver that would plug into projector (or TV) ARC ports and deliver the audio wirelessly. This wouldn’t overcome a projector’s ARC port limitations, but it would work well for many consumers. 

#3 - Sonos phone app as an audio receiver. This would solve the problem of walking outside and losing audio.

Beyond these, I would suggest the following:

#4 - Passthrough HDMI for the next Arc. The content source plugs into the passthrough HDMI port, then port delivers the content to the TV/Projector. I’m aware of some of the challenges related to content protection, but I also am doing this very thing with the HDFury Arcana. 

 

I would base my next projector purchase on whether #1 was supported. If I couldn’t have #1, but #2 was available, it would influence my next projector purchase and I would happily pay $100-200 for this device. I would use #3 daily. #4 would have reduced my need for #1 or #2; if presented with an Arc and an Arc+HDMI Passthrough, the feature in the latter would be worth $100-200 to me.

 

Thanks for reading!

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2 replies

melvimbe

Several product ideas here. Please pass these along as appropriate.

 

Context first.

My home is an open floorplan apartment with a balcony. I use a ceiling-mounted projector (BenQ TK850, though it may be replaced) paired with a Sonos Arc, Two Sonos Ones, and a Sub. I also have two Ikea bookshelf speakers, a satellite One for an adjacent room, and a Sonos Roam. Roku Ultra is my content source. Limitations in the Sonos Arc (an ARC receiver port, but no HDMI pass-through) and the projector (stereo-only ARC port) necessitate the use of a niche product ($200-250) called an HDFury Arcana to connect the Roku, projector, and content source and support surround/ATMOS. The wiring for the setup requires 20-30 feet of HDMI cabling between the projector and the rest of the solution, which can be problematic. 

 

The Good:​​​​​​ it sounds great when it’s working!

The Bad: it’s somewhat unreliable. The introduction of the HDFury Arcana and the long cabling mean that it can take a few tries to get it all working. And there are a few other weird behaviors that I can omit, but that the product/feature ideas would solve.

 

 

You may want to talk to HDFury about this.  I’ve seen them offer patches that fixe issues with specific cases.  It could also be an issue with your cable.

 

The Annoying: I often want to walk outside while continuing to listen to audio from the TV (news on Youtube, etc). I am within WiFi range, but not the audio. I could bring the Sonos Roam, but I worry about bugging the neighbors.

 

Sonos is positioned to smooth all of the rough edges in the setup. Here are the product and feature ideas.

#1 - Projector as a Sonos Content Source - Develop a licensable solution for projector manufacturers to integrate with the Sonos system as an audio source. This would provide Sonos and projector ecosystem partners a differentiating value add. It would eliminate the cabling and reliability mess and provide a “sticky” customer feature that would steer them to particular projector choices and incentivize them to stick with Sonos. If it was popular, more projector partners would come knocking to license ($) this technology.

 

 

I can’t see Sonos doing this exactly.  There are rumors that Sonos looked into direct integration with TVs, but it wasn’t workable.  

#2 - As an alternative to #1, produce an HDMI ARC receiver that would plug into projector (or TV) ARC ports and deliver the audio wirelessly. This wouldn’t overcome a projector’s ARC port limitations, but it would work well for many consumers. 

 

 

I think this is a more likely solution, as it would work for much larger market  Projectors and TVs.  I think Sonos is actually working on their own video streaming device though, which would help for your case, but not be a fully complete solution

 

#3 - Sonos phone app as an audio receiver. This would solve the problem of walking outside and losing audio.

 

 

I don’t think that’s going to happen for licensing reasons among other things.  Spotify, for example, doesn’t want you to play their streams on the phone through the Sonos app, they want you to do it with the Spotify app.  But, Sonos is rumored to be releasing headphones next year, which would allow you to listen to TV audio outside without bothering neighbors...theoreticality,

 

Beyond these, I would suggest the following:

#4 - Passthrough HDMI for the next Arc. The content source plugs into the passthrough HDMI port, then port delivers the content to the TV/Projector. I’m aware of some of the challenges related to content protection, but I also am doing this very thing with the HDFury Arcana. 

 

 

Popular request.  It’s not needed for a lot of users, and would still be an issue for those who have multiple sources (you’d need an HDMI switch too).  Sonos has been aware of this for a long time.

 

 

I would base my next projector purchase on whether #1 was supported. If I couldn’t have #1, but #2 was available, it would influence my next projector purchase and I would happily pay $100-200 for this device. I would use #3 daily. #4 would have reduced my need for #1 or #2; if presented with an Arc and an Arc+HDMI Passthrough, the feature in the latter would be worth $100-200 to me.

 

Thanks for reading!

Would you consider replacing your Roku with a Sonos streaming box that sent audio wirelessly to your Arc?  What if it also buffered the video and audio so that they played in perfect sync across grouped rooms?  Obviously, would still need to be a quality streaming box.

Danny
C

Thanks for the reply, Danny!

On HDFury - I’ll look into firmware. This is a good idea.

#1 - I wonder what didn’t work. Maybe the size of the addressable market for the projector manufacturer?

#2 - Would be nice. I might replace my projector to get surround if this was available.

#3 - Agreed about the app competing with a future headphones offering. I guess I’ll just have to keep using my Roku remote. Wish I could lock it so the buttons wouldn’t press when it was in my pocket. 🤷‍♂️ If there was something really special about these headphones, I’d consider buying them. But the more I (or the market) perceive that the easy stuff being kept back to direct me into the ecosystem, the more this may feel like abuse. I genuinely like Sonos and it’s important that Sonos maintains its good relationship with customers.

#4 - Yup. This one seems like a miss to me. And yes, I’ve got an HDMI switch that rarely gets touched.

 

Danny wrote:

Would you consider replacing your Roku with a Sonos streaming box that sent audio wirelessly to your Arc?  What if it also buffered the video and audio so that they played in perfect sync across grouped rooms?  Obviously, would still need to be a quality streaming box.

 

If it was superior to the Roku, yes. If it literally was a box with Roku’s OS, yes. But the feature by itself for a degraded experience, no. Worth noting that I do have surround today and it works fine with the Roku. Just have to fiddle with getting the whole system to boot up sometimes. >$2.2k in and some $200 in addition to cover what I perceive to be Sonos’s rough edges, the system works well enough. But why shouldn’t it work fantastically? Isn’t that at the core of Sonos’s value proposition?

 

Thanks for the feedback, Danny

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