When you think of Roku, you can associate the name with television — whether you think of one of these online dongle, televisionor even its streaming platform. Today, however, you can view Roku in a whole new way. The company has announced that they are partnering with Wyzea smart home camera manufacturer, to produce a line smart home products.
Roku will launch 10 products. These will include indoor and outdoor smart plugs and smart lights, and accordingly, consider a partnership with Wyze, a series of five cameras. There will be a basic indoor and outdoor camera block, as well as an indoor panning camera, a floodlight camera and a video doorbell. With the exception of the doorbell, everything will be available October 17 from Walmart and Roku’s own website; Roku has informed WIRED that the doorbell will be available soon.
Affordable automation
While the lights and plugs are attractively priced — plugs will retail for $9 and $15, and bulbs and light strips will range from $7 to $45 — the star attraction is the line. image. No wonder they look almost identical to Wyze’s.
The main difference lies in the operating system and subscription model. Roku’s camera is aimed at customers who already use one or more Roku devices. If you own a Roku, you can download the new Roku Smart Home app, available on iOS and Android and separate from Roku’s streaming app.
After you connect your camera to the app, you can pull up the live feed to your TV or use voice control to watch. The Roku Smart Home app includes data encryption and two-factor authentication (although we think it’s worth noting here that Wyze left a security breach unresolved and unnoticeable). Within three years until the beginning of this year). These cameras come with a 14-day free subscription trial and after that it costs $3 per camera per month.
This pricing strategy is similar to Wyze’s Cam Plus subscription, which costs $2 per month per camera. However, it’s different from other video camera subscriptions, like Nest Aware, which include all the cameras in your household. You can still use the camera without a subscription, but you won’t be able to customize your alerts and it won’t include cloud storage.
Whole house approach
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Photo: Roku
With this partnership, it appears Roku is basing on the same calculation that many smart home manufacturers have done before: that once a customer has purchased a device in an ecosystem, leaving going will be more difficult. Did you buy an incredibly affordable and amazing TCL TV? Then you will probably get a light strip and a camera that works with it! And monitor your home from your TV instead of checking your phone.
Roku and Wyze products are generally simple, affordable, disposable smart home devices. But it remains to be seen whether this strategy will work as other manufacturers — Amazon, Apple, and Google, among others — are aiming for a smart home standards that will allow customers to use any smart home device they want together.
Either way, anyone with a Wi-Fi connection can run their smart home with a degree in computer science or countless time and patience.
