Why are we excited about Chromecast (or Sonos)?

[brian (Brian Luczkiewicz)]

There’s a lot in this thread…but a few points:

I’m not going to rehash the discussion about UPnP. Our viewpoint has been made clear enough times by now. However, there is some ultimate consistency in our treatment of UPnP and API-only streaming services: we can’t make good product out of either, so we won’t.

Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play are non-starters, compromise or not. They do not make available an API/commercial arrangement that we are allowed to use. It’s not really interesting to mention them further.

Streaming services are about 10x as much work as something like Chromecast, and involve substantially more work on the business/relationship side, too. Once there is an order of magnitude difference, things are no longer suitable for direct comparison.

That said, we are working with another streaming service, (and doing it the right way). We are also working on mobile, a UI redesign, and a set of tightly coupled improvements related to browsing, algorithmic radio, and recommendations. And an internet radio directory, and a couple of projects related to our metadata/imagery subsystems. And some other stuff that we are not ready to talk about

We are trying to release things when they are ready. Chromecast was done so it went out this week, but most of the work done over the past 2 months (since 1.5) was not released this week, because those projects are still in progress. This is in contrast to how we used to handle major releases, at least up to 1.3, where we’d pretty much wait till everything was done and do a huge synchronous release, then start from 0 working on the next one.

As for the market value of Chromecast, it’s hard to say. Certainly I’m not the target market, so personal experience doesn’t help.

But is the endpoint really the barrier to entry into Roon? And are chromecast users likely to be jumping to pay for a Roon setup? I’m not so sure.

It is one of the highest value/effort features that we have ever released. The base cost of a turnkey Roon zone is now $35, or $50 with ethernet. Less than $100 for a speaker, and $300 for a decent sounding speaker. Roon just became viable for a whole new class of users and dealers/installers.

$35/zone for something that can be driven from Roon, and also from most any app on the phone of your guests/spouse/children. Plus, it can drive a TV, too, and supports convenience switching with TV’s/AVR’s, so it is brain-dead-simple and unobtrusive.

For some classes of installations it will be game-changing. It’s an incredibly lightweight, cost-effective, and flexible solution for lighting up a bunch of rooms in a house, while providing good usability for “pedestrians” and the music-lovers in the household at the same time.

Google did a great job designing an interesting, flexible, and powerful platform. We are happy to support it. It goes places where high-end products running RAAT firmware cannot go.

So I can perhaps see why each time a new piece of hardware supported gets added, or specifics like MQA say, questions pop up about why this is more important than other ‘more pressing’ aspects of the Roon ecosystem like additional streaming options.

Of course implementing other streaming services or making Roon truly mobile are big projects and may well be happening in tandem in the background, but since they’re not spoken about much it gives the impression they’re lower priority than things like adding cheap endpoints. A slightly confusing situation?

That’s exactly what’s happening. Chromecast is a significantly smaller project than another streaming service, or mobile support. Work is happening in parallel.

We’ve been working on another streaming service in some capacity since about the beginning of this year. Much of that work is business development, another decent chunk is technical infrastructure/scaling work to cope with increasing the size of our data set.

Mobile has been in some stage of work for longer. It’s more than a technical/product improvement. It also requires careful consideration for pretty much every department in the company. We made some major progress earlier this year in terms of defining what mobile is going to mean and how it’s going to work architecturally. This took weeks of discussion/debate and many design iterations, but we are fairly confident in the plan now. That allowed us to map out a series of infrastructure projects that are needed to get there, and that work is in progress now.

Thing is–that project is going to take a while. It’s not reasonable for us to make zero software updates in the mean time while we go in a hole and work on mobile. We can’t afford to be so narrow. So stuff like MQA, and Chromecast, and other medium sized features like them are going to be released in the mean time. There are enough people working on Roon now that keeping multiple balls in the air is possible.

The waveform doesn’t really work for high dynamic classical and the artist art feature rubs your face in roon’s general weaknesses in this area.

Astute observations. Both of these issues are being worked on, but since they aren’t specific to Chromecast, we didn’t see fit to hold the feature back over them…