by Tom McNamara
(Credit: Arnon Mungyodklang/Shutterstock)
While Spotify has seen increasingly serious competition from Apple, Pandora, and YouTube, it remains the king of the market, with an estimated 83 million subscribers as of late July. One way you stay at the top of this heap is to make sure that your service can be streamed on as many devices as possible. That worked for Pandora (Android, iOS), who recently got snapped up by Sirius XM for $3.5 billion in stock.
Spotify (Android, iOS) was available on Roku streaming devices for several years, before being removed in December last year due to "technical challenges" that were never articulated. It's no small platform, either, with a study from last year characterizing it as the biggest player in the whole home streaming device ecosystem -- and its share of the market was only growing at the time.
With rivals nipping at Spotify's heels, it's good news then that the service is finally coming back to Roku devices with version 9 of their operating system, according to the eagle-eyed release notes checkers at Engadget.
The notes read in part, "Customers with select Roku players will soon be able to discover, manage and share over 35M songs for free, or upgrade to Spotify Premium to access exclusive features including improved sound quality and ad-free listening."
In other news, Spotify has over 35 million songs in its library. This is an interesting nugget of info, since music streaming services have increasingly described themselves as having "millions" of songs without calling out specific numbers. Of course, we prefer quality over quantity, but general numbers can still be helpful when shopping for different services.
Not all Roku devices will get this update, of course. The older ones tend not to be supported. All the models that will get OS 9 are listed in the release notes. Your model should be labeled on a small sticker on the back of the unit. As for televisions that have Roku streaming tech built in, they're not getting OS 9 until next year -- but owners of TVs with OS 8.2 will still be able to add Spotify from the channel store.
Other features coming to OS 9 include voice commands for iHeartRadio, Pandora, and TuneIn; generalized voice controls like "let's see free documentaries" and "show me free comedies"; and a function called Automatic Volume Leveling, which Roku says can cut back on blaring commercials or other sudden changes in perceived loudness.
This last feature is frequently built into TVs and home theater receivers, but it's nice to have that in your streaming device as well, just in case.
Takeaways
Spotify is coming back to Roku devices with the update to OS 9. TVs with Roku built in will be able to add Spotify from the channel store if they have OS 8.2 or newer.
Roku's release notes list all the streaming boxes that will be getting updated to OS 9.
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