3M and Roku just announced a partnership, shipping a mini-projector with an integrated Roku Streaming Stick:

The projector is small enough to be carried around, bright enough to project a picture 120-inch picture, and powerful enough to pack over two and a half hours of battery life–“long enough to watch just about any movie,” according to Mark Colin, 3M general manager of mobile interactive solutions.

This thing sounds even dumber than the streaming stick itself, which will only work with televisions whose HDMI ports are Mobile High Definition Link (MHL) compatible. This allows the HDMI port to feed power to the $99 (!) stick.

I don’t get the thinking here. It’s more than likely that you won’t be able to plug the streaming stick into anything other than 3M’s projector, so there’s no real value-add. The Fast Company article by Jillian Goodman linked above also drops this bit:

As far as Roku goes, they’re aiming at nothing short of being the OS of TV. “I guess I would say Roku is sort of where I thought the world had been heading for a while,” says [CEO Anthony] Wood. “It’s just taken a while to get here.”

Why not partner with actual television makers? Better, why not start by building Roku as an OS on the 3M projector?

Anyway, I still love my Roku LT. They offer the most comprehensive web-TV offering out there and I want to see them succeed. This stick just sounds like a year or more of wasted effort.

If you want to order a 3M Streaming Projector Powered by Roku, please use this link so I’ll get a few bucks. You’ll be supporting this site and independent writing.