Month: September 2019

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  Roku's new Wireless Soundbar and Wireless Subwoofer. [credit: Valentina Palladino ]

Last year, Roku came out with wireless TV speakers so Roku TV users who wanted a better audio experience for their at-home movie marathons could have it. But the speaker duo only works with Roku TVs, severely limiting the number of people who could use one.

The company's latest audio endeavor is more democratic, and it offers more value. The new Roku Smart Soundbar is exactly what it sounds like—a soundbar that replaces your dull, built-in TV speakers with a higher-quality audio experience. It also has the technology of a Roku Ultra inside, so it acts as both an audio device and a streaming device that serves up 4K content and can do everything a regular Roku set-top box, stick, or TV could do.

But the best thing about the Roku Smart Soundbar is that it works with almost any television. It connects to your TV using either an HDMI ARC port or an optical audio port, both of which are commonplace on the newest TVs and TVs that are many years old. Once plugged in and set up (the setup process is just like that of a Roku streaming device), you can use the included voice remove to navigate Roku OS just like you would if you were using any other Roku device.

Enlarge / Artist's impression of the datacenter as a service. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

For the past decade, information technology and cloud computing vendors have increasingly pushed the virtualization and abstraction of every possible part of IT infrastructure further and further, turning what used to be things you bought and paid for into services that you subscribe to. First there was software as a service, and then compute and infrastructure as a service, then platforms as a service, and now even storage and databases as a service. The "private cloud" brought the same models into enterprise data centers. And the "hybrid cloud" blew the data center walls out and mixed everything together. But managing each decoupled element of this brave new world of randomly distributed infrastructure has become increasingly complex. Arguably, it hasn't really changed the business of running enterprise IT as much as it has made things complex in new ways.

But what if there was an "as a service" to fix that, too?

Today's leading edge of enterprise IT pushes further toward automated deployment of everything from bare-metal servers to "containerized" workloads, juggling the networking and storage and system-management support through one portal or another, even internally, and cloud providers have started to drop not-so-little outposts of their infrastructure into their biggest customers' data centers. Even the definition of "cloud" versus "on-premises" has gotten foggy, thanks to such private cloud options as Microsoft's Azure Stack and Google's Anthos that let enterprise clients move cloud resources back into local data centers.