I would concur with your assessment, I have always seen the BluOs being built into the price of the hardware as the Roon lifetime subscription equivalent.
How Harman will chose to deal with the line item in the long term liability column that is Roon “lifetime” subscriptions will be quite interesting. I’m betting that the Harman accounting staff was less than chuffed about this issue.
It’s the most obvious evolution, a Bluesound type solution. Harman has the skills to develop hardware from the brands they own, but not software. And why should they do so, when a solution already exists that allows them to be ahead of the game without much effort? In that case, what’s the future for lifetime licenses, which won’t pay anything? Perhaps a special price on Harman-JBL-Arcam Streamer? 
How about …
Roon becomes the OS for the Harman family of products— no Harman no Roon
Conspiracy Theory Rules OK 
It is always interesting to talk about what the future might bring. I’m as guilty of that as anyone. In a prior professional life, I worked on lots of “merger and acquisition” deals involving all size companies, including startups. Some of these are household names today. My “truth” from this experience, is that nobody knows in the beginning how things will ultimately shake out. All the parties to the deal have ideas and plans of course (otherwise nobody would do the deal), but there are so many unknowns that two years down the road often looks very different from what was planned. This is particularly true in the high-tech, fast-changing world.
What gives me comfort is the thought that my ability to access music in the way I desire is so much better today than it was 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 40 years ago. So change has been very good for my music consumption.
Here’s exactly the point! The writing has been on the wall and becoming clearer daily. Devices that are all in one streamers with local libraries support are more prevalent and higher quality almost monthly it seems. HiFi Rose, Eversolo, Lumin of course and the list goes on. Products like Roon and Audirvāna are in a shrinking market, demographics don’t lie.
I hope Harman ports Roon to the PowerPC platform. I have an iMac G4 that would be awesome as a Roon Remote.
All kidding aside… Big congrats to the Roon team. That must be a tremendous weight off and I hope you can get back to focusing on what was important from the start. Harman has a mixed track record but the press release and news of their support for lifetime is super encouraging. I look forward to the things Roon by Harman can bring to market.
My only pre-acquisition regret is I never met Roon at a show. I know Roon participated in various shows early on. Maybe we’ll see Roon by Harman all over hifi shows now that there is a new marketing budget? Just don’t get too full of yourselves and put an obnoxious X on the top of your building 
Anyway, will be great meeting the new team. Cheers to all of you!
Now back to the music…
Asking @danny and others: Wondering what is the vision for the near future in terms of focus topics, development, etc?
Look forward to a Roon app on my Samsung TV in the not to far distant future then
Boxee (with a similar following ro Roon) → Samsung → RIP
I was in a minuscule minority, but, I loved my Boxee Box LOL
Me too. Hopefully the Roon integration will improve. The 10 second cut off from the start when I choose something to play on my AVR30 is annoying. Naim did this perfectly, hopefully this will improve for Arcam.
I saw this other thread and thought it was about the acquisition. Exit strategy! 
Yes, I have always suggested to never buy hardware on what it might do in the future. The current acquisition announcement has no influence on this response as I would have said the same last week.
I just hope it doesn’t go the way of SLIM Devices (as mentioned above)
Grab the two handles above your headrest and pull😉
Harman International’s estimated annual revenue in 2022 was $8.9 billion.
Bigger than I expected…
I could switch over to Apple Music right now without skipping a beat. The only time I look at metadata is when I’m listening at my computer anyway. I think I can find Wikipedia and Musicbrainz on my own and as for the reviews, meh.
They bought RAAT… the question is why? Only time will tell.
Then you probably don’t realize how big of a player they are in the automotive market, major league size players with an outstanding market share.
Yep, Harman Kardon Sound Systems in BMW, they really suck for what they cost…