French Middleware Firm Wants to Crack U.S. Multi-Room Streaming Market

A 10-year-old Montpellier, France-based company with roots in 3Com Palm Computing Europe and Smartcode Technologies joined the field of hopefuls aiming for a slice of multi-room audio pie owned by Sonos in the U.S. AwoX recently launched audio products aimed at doing the same thing, but its entry-level approach combines two unlikely categories: LED lighting and audio.

The AwoX StriimLIGHT SL-B10 is a 10-watt UL-approved Bluetooth speaker with an integrated 8-watt LED light bulb that promises to bring music to any room, turning “lamps, recessed fixtures, and wall lights into audio speakers,” according to company literature.

AwoX’s step-up multi-room audio product is the DLNA-based StriimLINK, a module that connects to a receiver through an optical or RCA cables, Glenn Adler, AwoX director-business development & sales for the North American Region, told Consumer Electronics Daily. The Wi-Fi and ethernet device connects to a home network and allows users to “upgrade” their home stereo by playing content from the home PC through the music system, Adler said. The upcoming StriimLINK Wi-Fi will expand the system beyond one room allowing users to create “an ecosystem of audio devices,” synchronized wirelessly, he said. The company hasn’t set the price for the Wi-Fi system, but Adler said an entry point into expandable multi-room audio will come in at a price that’s less than a comparable offering for Sonos, he said. Sonos’ entry point is $199 for its least expensive speaker plus $49 for a bridge to the router.

AwoX has its work cut out for it, hoping to penetrate the U.S. market with the speaker, the StriimLINK and an HDMI streaming media smart TV stick -- without a known brand. The LED bulb speaker made an appearance on NBC’s Today show around Christmas time, but the product didn’t have the retail presence to support the launch. StriimLIGHT has been selling in the U.S. for a month, and Adler blamed a slow start on timing, coming into the U.S. market right after Christmas and thus missing retail resets for Q4 sales. Amazon said it had 15 in stock Monday, and none had been reviewed. Authorized retailers J&R also showed the product for $99, and third-party retailer Page One Productions had knocked down the price to $84.98 through Amazon, we found.

Another challenge has been keyword optimization, Adler said. “We have to figure out how to get better keywords in place,” he said. A consumer who plugs in speaker and light bulb together will come up with quite a few other products promising the same combination of features. Adler said he bought a couple of lesser known ones, which “are not UL-approved” or FCC approved, he said. “I don’t know how these are being sold in the U.S., but this seems to be the miracle of the Internet,” he said. We found speaker light bulb products from a number of brands including Propel, GiiNii AudioBulb, and MiPow AirBulb, plus generic brands. Klipsch discontinued its LightSpeaker, according to its website.

Given the cross-category appeal, AwoX is also targeting furniture stores, lighting distributors and CE distributors, Adler said. “The home decorating market is a great place for it,” Adler said, because the speaker bulb can add music to any room without the need to run wires or disturb the décor. “Good question,” he said, when we asked whether the LED bulb speaker would be sold in general merchandise stores in the lighting or the CE aisles. He conceded it wouldn’t likely appear in both.

The company’s comfort zone is in the middleware layer of electronics, where it boasts having sold more than 100 million licenses for DLNA-based home networking and media sharing throughout the home. Adler said AwoX is a leading independent software vendor for DLNA and is active in the standards body as a permanent member of the DLNA alliance. “Pretty much anything that is DLNA-certified runs against our stack,” he said. AwoX supplies standard test devices for DLNA interoperability, he said.

Ironically, the first AwoX product to hit U.S. shores is a Bluetooth, not DLNA-based, speaker bulb. While AwoX’s long-term view focuses on leveraging its core competency in DLNA, the light bulb speaker is Bluetooth-based, a “simpler concept” that could be brought to market faster and was easier to explain to consumers, Adler said. “Bluetooth is a well-established standard for sending media around from your phone or tablet,” he said. He called the Bluetooth model a “logical product” for the foray into the U.S.

AwoX had been building products including Internet radios and set-top boxes for European telcos and “also had some interesting ideas we were looking to sell to CE vendors,” Adler said. But when the company crunched the numbers with CE companies, there was “really no margin left in the business for us,” he said. “Even though we brought the intellectual property, we brought the idea, most of the large CE companies wanted to take the idea to their contract manufacturing and do all the marketing and selling themselves -- and take all the margin.” The only way to make money, AwoX concluded, “was to build our own brand,” he said.

The Striim brand also includes the StriimSTICK ($99), which comes with a gyroscopic remote control that doesn’t rely on a smartphone app to make a TV smart, Adler said. The HDMI-based Wi-Fi stick turns a TV “into a large tablet,” he said, with point-and-click operation via the remote. It makes available Android apps and has a built-in browser, he said. Its built-in DLNA capability -- a differentiating feature, he said -- allows users to stream movies, photos and music from a PC to a TV. Users download AwoX software to the PC and tell it which folders should be exposed for accessibility by the stick. The company is billing the stick as a way to share or view content outside of the house.