Last week, Roku boldly entered the Smart Home space with an initial product offering “developed in partnership with Wyze.” And, boy, do the business considerations and implications fascinate me. We’ll never have a full accounting of the relationship (although I’m quite looking forward to Roku’s quarterly securities call), so I’ll just go ahead and assume both companies are motivated by fear. Beyond that bit of speculative commentary, I can 100% confirm the Roku Smart Home Indoor Camera is a rebadged Wyze Cam v3 and the Roku Smart Home iPhone and Android mobile apps are similarly (streamlined) Wyze retrofits.
Cats and dogs living together! pic.twitter.com/pcQ9pqgehb
— Dave Zatz (@davezatz) October 12, 2022
The regulatory details do not lie and are largely duplicated between cameras – including the FCC (US) and IC (Canada) IDs listed on the Roku Cam label that end… “WYZEC3”. Even the USB power bricks feature the same model number. From the original FCC filing and recently uncovered shipping manifests, we know Hualai is the shared manufacturer… although both companies, in some cases anyway, appear to be receiving independent hardware shipments (which speaks to funding). Indeed, my Roku smart cam was dispatched by a California-based Roku distributor.
Beyond the internals, there are some slight exterior differences. Obviously, there’s the “ROKU” branding up top. But, also, the Wyze ventilation/speaker pinholes no longer help form the company’s W and are replaced by a nondescript squircle. The microUSB power pigtail lengths differ, but that could speak more to my Wyze cam’s manufacturing run (which isn’t recent).
Such innovation!!
Unusual partnership. We should as Dave Crosby how this came about.
My kids grew up listening to his daughter Claire sing on YouTube.