Contributor I

Speaker groups now possible in Google after patent lawsuit. When will Sonos match features?

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24 hours after winning the current stage of a lawsuit, Google is rolling out a feature that allows individual speakers to be in multiple groups.

Google wins Sonos patent case, immediately ships speaker software update | Ars Technica

Where is Sonos on adding this same feature? I have an Arc, Sub (3G), and 2xEra 300s. Based on my room positioning, I’d love to use the Eras with the sub in a stereo format to listen to music or for TV/movies use all four speakers in full surround (Arc as bar, Eras as surrounds). I can do this by manually changing the speakers between groups but then lose TruePlay functionality unless I want to spend a few minutes configuring Trueplay every time I switch. It feels a little odd that Sonos is suing Google for (at least in part) a feature it isn’t even deploying despite request from the community for years, based on my searching.

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jgatie

All of my speakers are in one room. Groups isn’t available until you have three rooms (per the app, “This feature is only available on systems with three or more rooms”), and even then it seems geared toward music rather than providing surround sound.

Right. As I said above, Sonos has no way of breaking up speakers bonded together as rooms into separate groups.

And neither does Google.

melvimbe

The reason Google rolled out this feature so quickly is so that it will make Sonos look bad for the appeal of this decision, forcing Google to roll it back out (rather than rewritting the feature)...again. They want this to appear as if Sonos is taking features away from Google customers, rather than Google stealing code from Sonos.

Also - Per the Arstechnica article, I don’t think the question in the litigation is that Google stole code, it’s that the action/capability itself was patented by Sonos. If that’s not the case I’d appreciate some details elucidating!

Honestly, I don’t think I even trust media to report on this issue correctly, not at that level of detail. Even though it’s a crucial level of detail. I definitely did see media articles that stated the issue in question was the code, or mechanism, in which the feature was implemented, not the feature itself. Point being that even if I found articles stated this way or that, I don’t really see it as a convincing argument anymore.

I really don’t even trust the justice system on this. The issue seems to be too nuanced for the judge to understand properly, and I get the impression that the judge is picking sides here. Not to mention that the general public is picking sides based on which system they are invested in, or whether they prefer David or Goliath.

On a broader level, and definitely just my personal opinion, patent stealing isn’t really the biggest concern here. It’s the fact that tech giants like Google, Amazon, Apple are able to leverage their strong presence in multiple markets to strategic advantage against competitors in those markets. While good for consumers in one way, in that tech giants are able to provide some goods, services and infrastructure at prices other companies couldn’t possibly be profitable at, they prevent smaller companies from being successful, because they can’t match the capital (taken from other lines of business, they can’t provide the infrastructure, don’t have an army of lawyers, can’t lobby politicians at the same level, etc etc. I firmly believe that if corporations were blocked from participating in multiple markets as a single entity, then we would have many more options of products and services and competitive products in the long run.

Danny

T

treecounselorAuthor

Contributor I

All of my speakers are in one room. Groups isn’t available until you have three rooms (per the app, “This feature is only available on systems with three or more rooms”), and even then it seems geared toward music rather than providing surround sound.

Right. As I said above, Sonos has no way of breaking up speakers bonded together as rooms into separate groups.

And neither does Google.

Yes, Google does. The Google Home app allows me to select individual speakers to add to a group instead of the entire room. You can then play music to either the speaker group or the room. To be fair, you can only do this with music unless you’re willing to tolerate/remediate significant latency issues (possible when watching something from a PC, less so any apps).

jgatie

Yes, Google does. The Google Home app allows me to select individual speakers to add to a group instead of the entire room. You can then play music to either the speaker group or the room. To be fair, you can only do this with music unless you’re willing to tolerate/remediate significant latency issues (possible when watching something from a PC, less so any apps).

I’ve seen nothing in this announcement which states you can easily break up a stereo pair in order to play one of the speakers in another group. Please link to any verbiage which says you can.

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