The market for peripheral speakers that connect directly to smart TVs via Bluetooth, which still feels kind of newish, has already peaked, according to Hub Entertainment’s latest Evolution of the Smart TV Set report, which surveyed 2,504 U.S. consumers in May.

Hub said only 30% of U.S. smart TV owners have a smart speaker device connected to their set, “down significantly from 2021.” 

As this graphic from Hub's report shows, smart speaker penetration hasn’t really moved all that much in three years (although voice remote usage does seem to be on the uptake).

Globally, the “smart speaker” market is led and defined by Amazon’s Alexa and Google Voice-powered gadgets. But vendors including Roku and Vizio moved aggressively into a sub category of the market four years ago with peripheral speaker devices designed to be connected directly to smart TVs via Bluetooth.

And it’s that latter category we're kicking the tires on here — the Hub survey, smallish as it is, indicates these devices haven't reached mass appeal and that’s a bit counterintuitive, based on other survey results.  

With 47% of survey respondents saying they use their smart TVs to stream music (up from 27% in 2020), it would seem these Dolby 5.1-capable gadgets would have captured greater market demand by now. 

Overall, the report said smart TV penetration is closing in, but hasn’t arrived yet, upon saturation of the U.S. market, with 74% of homes now equipped with such a device, up from 61% in three years.

Sixty-four percent of those homes use their smart TV to stream video, up from 47% in 2020. 

Hub also said that 40% of U.S. smart TV's are controlled by the Roku operating system — a leading market-share statistic that hasn’t changed much over the past several years.

The research company said that “overall familiarity” with runner-up brand Amazon Fire TV is about two-thirds of that of Roku.

Forging a deeper connection to video-enabled smart home hubs, BET Networks has recently introduced “BET Breaks” on Amazon’s Echo Show and Echo Spot devices.

The video-optimized version of BET’s flash briefing for those devices stream video highlights about what’s trending in Black and pop culture, including breaking news, the network said.

The BET Breaks Alexa flash briefing is currently offered in the U.S., Australia, Canada and the U.K.

“We’re excited to continue working with Amazon’s Alexa and expanding our ongoing efforts to offer fans even more multiplatform opportunities to access BET premium original digital content, whenever, wherever and on whatever devices they want.” Bobby Singh, head of digital at BET Networks, said in a statement.

On the heels of grand plans about smart home automation announced at CES, Comcast said it has added new voice commands to its X1 voice remote that enable customers to command and control several devices that work with the Xfinity Home service.

RELATED: CES 2018: Comcast Scales Home Automation Services to 15M Subs

In this phase of the program and next level of integration with IoT devices, Comcast has added a series of new voice commands that, for example, will enable customers to use their X1 voice remotes to access and control the cameras and lights that are integrated with the Xfinity Home service.  

“Starting today, customers can get specific about the camera they want to look at on the TV – just say ‘Xfinity Home, show me patio camera’,” Comcast’s Bryan Kissinger explained in this blog post. “You can also use the X1 voice remote to make a certain room brighter, or dim the lights and choose a certain hue if you have the Philips Hue connected lighting system.”

Customer can also say “Xfinity Home, I’m cold” to auto-adjust the thermostat a few degrees, or tell the system to set the thermostat to a specific temperature, or ask it if the home’s security alarm is active.

“If customers have the Nest thermostat, they can even say, ‘Xfinity Home, set Nest to Eco mode’ if they are trying to conserve energy,” Kissinger added.

Update:Comcast has deployed more than 20 million X1 voice remotes. The company confirmed that the voice commands for Xfinity Home work with its newly designed X1 voice remote as well as the previous model. Both X1 voice remote models are made by Universal Electronics.

For now, six Xfinity Home device partners have been integrated into the X1 voice commands database – the Zen thermostat, Caseta/Lutron lights, GE in-wall and plug-in switches and dimmers, the Nest thermostat, Philips Hue lights, and the Sengled Element Touch light bulb.

Earlier this month, Comcast announced that it had extended home automation services to more than 15 million customers as it works toward enabling that capability across multiple services, including X1 (TV and the X1 voice remote), xFi (WiFi), Xfinity Home and Xfinity Mobile.

Comcast’s push comes as consumers continue to buy and adopt smart home hubs, digital assistants and smart speakers.

While Comcast is taking aim at this from the service provider level, several others are taking the consumer retail angle. Some examples include Google (Google Home), Amazon (Alexa-powered devices like the Echo and Echo Dot), as well as Apple, which announced this week that its HomePod would arrive in stores on Feb. 9, with online orders opening up Friday (Jan. 26) in the U.S., UK and Australia, with sales in France and Germany slated for this spring.

Fueling speculation that it’s getting ready to enter the connected speaker business, Roku recently acquired Dynastrom, a multi-room audio startup, according to Variety.

In its latest 10-Q filing, Roku disclosed that, on Sept. 6, it acquired a privately held company located in Denmark “to enhance the Company’s player product offering” for $3.5 million in cash. Roku also issued 108,332 shares to two of that company’s founders “as part of a continuing services arrangement.”

RELATED: Roku Shares Surge on Q3 Results 

Variety linked that to Denmark-based Dynastrom, citing LinkedIn data showing that its CEO and CTO and other Dynastrom employees had recently joined Roku. 

UPDATE: Anthony Wood, Roku’s CEO, confirmed the acquisition of Dynastrom during an interview on Cheddar on Friday (Nov. 10), but didn’t elaborate much on what specific plans Roku has for it.

“They’re a great team. We’re always looking for ways to build out our team, especially with consumer expertise…Audio is an important part of the TV experience.”

Dynastrom has developed AROS, an audio-streaming technology that, the company claims, uses adaptive technology that provides a high quality experience if WiFi conditions are good or bad. It also bills its solution as hardware agnostic, as its system requires only Linux.

Dynastrom’s technology “allows you to create streaming loudspeakers without the tricky and unstable characteristics of today’s systems,” the company explains in this brief video:  

Roku hasn’t detailed its plans for Dynastrom, but Varietyreported earlier that company was beefing up in the area of voice and possibly developing a new smart speaker that could compete with products such as Amazon Echo.