Logitech drops Revue, says early Google TV intro a 'mistake'

[toby10]

I still think the main problem is the software.....

If you mean LMS that is completely unrelated to the failure of the Revue. Revue has been out for over a year, only now is LMS a part of the defunct Revue.

I'd bet the vast majority of Revue and Roku type buyers never even use the "server" aspects of these boxes. Maybe a slightly higher number of users might try playing some of their mp3's on them, but the pics & video section are largely not utilized in regards to ones own collection. Of the four Roku players currently available only one (the $99 unit) even has a USB port. People mostly buy these for the content, server aspects go widely unused.

In this consumer hardware category, content is everything, and the Revue had next to no content. Even if GoogleTV actually worked as expected it would still relegate the Revue into the "why buy a Revue when a Roku box at half the price has 100 times more content" category.

I'd assume they were planning to add more content, guess we'll never know. But they made no effort to add much (any?) content while they were waiting for GoogleTV to get their act together.

[widman]

If you read through the original transcript, it seems like Logitech is still interested in the Squeezebox line:


"We also have the Squeezebox product line we have actually seen a significant growth in Europe especially to our partnership and service providers but it is also growing worldwide"

"Internet radio, cloud services I will talk about that in a second is also going to have a very significant impact. The chart is actually a very interesting chart. This is our Squeezebox users and the role that every device plays – what users use during the day and which devices are used at different points of the day. And the black kind of represents how people use the Squeezebox during the day and how they listen – how much time they are using the Squeezebox for at that point of the day. And one of the primary use cases – as you see it is pretty dominant and one of the primary use cases is listening to cloud music"


They are still seeing growth in the Squeezebox market and the fact that they mention this seems to bode well for continued development of the Squeezebox line.

There is also a mention of shifting focus from audio to music which seems to indicate they want to be more involved in the software/storage side of things as opposed to strictly hardware. I'm not sure if this is good or bad in the long run, but hopefully it means squeezebox.com will be around for a while.

pete

[vrette]

Since the Revue is going away (and I unfortunately have one), maybe Logitech could drop the whole LMS thing, and move back to an audio only server solution? No point in serving up video and pictures to the Squeezebox line, and there are already a lot of DLNA servers out there. Also, no need to spend time and resources on a video and picture LMS that almost no one will use.

[Mnyb]

Since the Revue is going away (and I unfortunately have one), maybe Logitech could drop the whole LMS thing, and move back to an audio only server solution? No point in serving up video and pictures to the Squeezebox line, and there are already a lot of DLNA servers out there. Also, no need to spend time and resources on a video and picture LMS that almost no one will use.

+1

I think it is easy to remove, as it can be turned off very easilly at startup, it runs on the Touch but without video/picture capacity .

keep the multiple folder capacity then something was gained by this exercise .

dlna can be turned off too.

You can do all this with todays LMS too.

[nicolas75]

If you mean LMS that is completely unrelated to the failure of the Revue. Revue has been out for over a year, only now is LMS a part of the defunct Revue.

As far as I understood, the revue disaster was a software disaster, before an "available content" disaster (even if available content is a problem).
The CEO confirmed the software was not what customers expected.

This was true for the original revue software (not LMS).

The new LMS may be better, but it wouldn't have saved the revue anyway.
SBS, LMS, is not reliable enough for the target audience.
Most people having tried to make a living selling Squeeboxes (not tech fans always saying that most problems are customers fault) will probably confirm.
This is good for geeks or tech fans, not for others.

[nicolas75]

If you read through the original transcript, it seems like Logitech is still interested in the Squeezebox line:


"We also have the Squeezebox product line we have actually seen a significant growth in Europe especially to our partnership and service providers but it is also growing worldwide"

"Internet radio, cloud services I will talk about that in a second is also going to have a very significant impact. The chart is actually a very interesting chart. This is our Squeezebox users and the role that every device plays – what users use during the day and which devices are used at different points of the day. And the black kind of represents how people use the Squeezebox during the day and how they listen – how much time they are using the Squeezebox for at that point of the day. And one of the primary use cases – as you see it is pretty dominant and one of the primary use cases is listening to cloud music"


They are still seeing growth in the Squeezebox market and the fact that they mention this seems to bode well for continued development of the Squeezebox line.

There is also a mention of shifting focus from audio to music which seems to indicate they want to be more involved in the software/storage side of things as opposed to strictly hardware. I'm not sure if this is good or bad in the long run, but hopefully it means squeezebox.com will be around for a while.

pete

Actually CEO seems to get things right, that is good news.
He also speaks about people looking for higher audio quality.
We can hope they really focus on user friendly systems.
But if they focus only on cloud music, what will happen for user friendly access for our own flac libraries ?

[Mark Miksis]

This is all very interesting. I also saw the 10-Q on Monday which said there will be no Revue successor. IMO, the weakest part of the the Revue is the Media Player, which I assume was done by Logitech.

This whole thing does make me wonder why they chose to invest in adding LMS features to SBS.

[toby10]

As far as I understood, the revue disaster was a software disaster, before an "available content" disaster (even if available content is a problem).......

Lack of content is a HUGE problem. If GoogleTV had succeeded we likely wouldn't even be having this discussion because the Revue would have it's promised (albeit limited) content. The Revue's software issues may have further hampered adding other content, I dunno. Again, I can only point you back, yet again, to the Revue's main competitor of the Roku and their very large and growing content offerings.

You can have the very best hardware with the very best software, but without content you have no footing in this market.

Take away the "content" of SB players (Pandora, Rhapsody, Mog, whatever) and you have a very good but very limited music player. Content is what has largely driven SB hardware sales. The single biggest selling SB player is the Radio and I assure you most are buying those for the online content.

[toby10]

If you read through the original transcript, it seems like Logitech is still interested in the Squeezebox line:....

Very good news indeed. THAT is what I wanted to hear!
Thanks for that portion of the transcript.

[nicolas75]

If GoogleTV had succeeded we likely wouldn't even be having this discussion because the Revue would have it's promised (albeit limited) content. The Revue's software issues may have further hampered adding other content, I dunno.

No, revue would have failed, because almost no customer in this market would accept to use unreliable beta software.
They would have turned to revue competition.