If you’re thinking of buying a Roku Soundbridge and want to use it with iTunes, you need to be very careful what you buy. Roku is selling the Soundbridge under the and licensed to . Only the oringinal Roku Soundbridge supports iTunes and DAAP servers, for example . Although the Pinnacle web site and their product packaging specifically state that iTunes is supported, .

What has inspired Roku to license a crippled Soundbridge under the Pinnacle brand name isn’t clear, but as the seems to be coming from the UK, European buyers need to beware of buying the crippled version. Pinnacle, like Roku, is based in California, but has a in Europe.

The reason for the lack of iTunes support is, according to Mike Kobb in Roku’s Engineering Team on May 13th, “licensing issues” and they don’t expect that Apple will grant licenses to cover the Pinnacle version:

Statement from Mike Kobb