Logitech Revue

» see logitech.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the logitech revue was a tv-shaped problem looking for a tv-shaped audience and finding instead a wall of licensing lawyers. logitech shipped it on october 6, 2010 at 299 dollars: a chunky black box that plugged into your tv via hdmi and ran google tv on an intel atom, with a wireless keyboard in your lap so you could browse the web from the couch. the pitch was clean. your tv was a big screen and the revue would put your computer on it.

the answer to that pitch was that the people who owned what you actually wanted to watch did not want this. by january the major us tv networks had all blocked the revue's chrome browser. cbs, abc, fox, nbc, hulu, viacom each cut the box off by user-agent within weeks. they did this not because the revue was technically dangerous but because their content deals were geographic and device-specific, and the revue threatened to make those distinctions invisible. dish network was the one major partner that did not run away.

by mid-2011 logitech had sold roughly 165,000 units against a 350,000 forecast and was sitting on inventory it could not move. the price went from 299 dollars to 249, then to 99 by summer. a 34 million dollar charge to cost of goods sold followed. the ceo resigned. the sec later went after the ex-cfo for the way the revue inventory had been accounted for in the run-up, and logitech eventually paid 7.5 million dollars to settle the case.

~ the dossier ~

~ the honest distance ~

logitech revue was a region-only failure at the licensing layer. it was sold in north america and the uk; the geo-blocks that broke it would not have applied the same way in turkey because turkish tv was a different licensing universe to begin with. but no turkish reseller picked the box up, and the apps that would have made it useful from ankara would have been blocked by the apps themselves anyway. so the revue sat on a us shelf in a market i was not in, blocked from content i could not have gotten through it.

~ what it became ~

google did not give up on the idea, only on the brand. google tv 1st gen rolled out a second hardware wave in 2012 (vizio, hisense, lg co-stream boxes), got rebuilt around android in 2013, then was renamed android tv in june 2014 and aimed at oems instead of consumers. logitech never returned to set-tops. the cleanest legacy of the revue is that every smart tv now ships with the streaming apps the revue had to beg for, except those apps now ship as native integrations because the tv brand itself signed the licensing deal that the revue's chrome browser was trying to route around.

~ what got buried with it ~

the revue arrived at the wrong moment in tv-internet history. roku was already cheaper and only did the streaming. apple tv was about to drop to 99 dollars and only did streaming too. the revue was the only box that tried to do everything a computer did on a tv, and "everything a computer did on a tv" turned out to be a much smaller market than google had assumed. the revue's failure is what made roku and apple tv look obviously correct for the next decade.

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