UPDATED: This story was updated to reflect Roku's official announcement of its smart home products.
Roku officially announced a new line of smart home products, after photos and shipping manifests featuring these gadgets were intercepted on the internet by savvy tech watchers.
On Reddit, users have found product photos for half a dozen Roku-branded smart home products, including smart light bulbs, lightstrips, electrical plugs, indoor and outdoor cameras, and a pan cam.
Roku confirmed that these “Smart Home”-branded products are exclusively available online from Walmart starting Wednesday and will be sold inside Walmart stores starting October 17.
Always-eagle-eyed tech blogger David Zatz pieced together these Reddit posts, along with data from Walmart and several shipping manifests. He determined that Roku is placing its brand name on products manufactured by smart-home hardware maker Wyze. (ZatzNotFunny.com actually uncovered two shipping manifests, which can be found here and here.)
Also read: Walmart Expands Online Shopping Relationship With Roku
The hardware seems to fit into Roku’s recent business strategy of creating a superior viewing environment for its consumers — in addition to controlling the audio with smart speakers and subwoofers, users would now have smart control of the mood lighting … and the peace of mind that comes with having the security issue solved before you tune into that new Roku Channel original series.
“We’ve been working on a whole-home operating system,” Wood told Fast Company in a recent interview. “Basically, a unified software stack that makes everything simple.” ■
