HomeTech.fm - Episode 219 - "Smart Home is a Tough Space"

Episode Date: July 13, 2018

On this week's episode of HomeTech: We share our thoughts on the recently announced Sonos IPO, highlighting both the challenges and opportunities ahead for the one time undisputed king of streaming audio in the home. That, plus the latest home tech headlines, including...BeON Home closes its doorsNetflix kills user reviews, begins testing a higher-priced "Ultra" tier, and prepares to spend a whopping $13 billion on original contentSamsung announces new range of 8K TVs (no, that's not a typo)AirPlay2 is now available on SonosAnd more...Fan of the show? Want to support our efforts? Please consider becoming a Patron!

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by listeners like you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm slash support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, the 13th of July, 2018. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How you doing, Seth? Doing well, Jason. I guess we almost had too much pre-show conversation about the World Cup semifinals, but good game today. And I saw you were in the Slack channel as well. I was in there today watching the game and watching the reactions that were happening there in the hub. What do you think? Well, first of all, I'm assuming you weren't watching on YouTube TV. Nope.

Went down again, I guess, apparently. So not a good streaming experience so far for the World Cup. But yeah, I've been keeping it on. You know, we're not a sports show here, but I definitely have been having some fun watching the World Cup. And certainly not a big soccer or football fan for those of you across the pond. But it's a lot of fun. It's been a great World Cup. There's been a lot of really good games.

And I wanted to tell you, Seth, as it relates to home technology, that over the weekend, I actually DVR'd because I was going to be out and I wanted to watch the game. So I watched one of the games. I forget which one it was, but I watched it time delayed. And I used my Tableau. So I DVR'd it over the air and put the Tableau through its paces and it worked flawlessly. So I've got that up and running and I'm happy to say that so far so good. And it hasn't botched a single episode of general hospital. So, so far it's passing the soap opera test. So, so far you're getting, you have to get this built-up trial run here.

This body of evidence. Yes, yes. So look, we can go back and watch 30 days of General Hospital with this setup I have. And yeah, that's... I really got to prove it. And you know what I've realized is that I can't break her habit. She's still using the DirecTV DVR, but I, at least now that I know things work, I'm getting ready to just make the leap. And, uh, you know, I know

that I've, I've cleared the, I've cleared the major hurdle that I needed to clear. So the, it's all downhill from here. Interesting. Well, I did not, I, after we talked last week, I got online and started looking around and it does, it did appear that not the last week that we were talking, but now this week with the semifinals, they're actually broadcasting them on Fox here so I could watch them. So those I switched over and did with the over the air antenna and got to see the horrible network coverage, American network coverage that you get on Fox. But I got to say say it didn't go down and it was it was a nice experience like i i uh i have that antenna hooked up it feeds directly into that um that

whatever it's called the streaming device uh that i have and converts it over to channels uh for me on my apple tv and converts it over to plex I tried watching on Plex and then I came out to the garage and the little Plex server was just like on fire. So something like the audio and video were choppy through Plex. So something, something weird was going on there. I don't, I don't really know what was going on. So I turned it on to channels on another Apple TV and the video was crystal clear. Perfect. There was no weird artifacts in the audio so maybe the uh the plex dvr slash tuner thing isn't isn't really as good as uh as i was hoping but um the channel thing worked great so i was really happy with that all right well moving in the right direction yeah yeah one one one step what are they one step forward two steps back but yeah uh at least at

least i got to see some of the games and i i think that uh definitely be able to see the next there's only two more right so you have the uh the final and then the well no the yeah the final the semi-finals are done now um so the finals are going to be i believe this weekend in uh france and croatia so we'll look forward to that but uh enough about sports seth what do you say we move on here to some home technology talk? And we wanted to actually mention Cedia really quickly. That's coming up here a little bit less than two months, so not too far away. That's going to fly by in a hurry. And we wanted to put out a little teaser there for Home Tech Happy Hour.

I don't know, Seth, do we have any of the details sort of ironed out yet or a general idea? Or are we looking, I think last year we may have even put out like a little form or something right yeah last year i think we did a survey on what day would be best and i think the the um the 13th uh the thursday of that week was was the best i think we're going to do the same thing uh this year so it'll be thursday around five and then um i don't know where it's going to be yet probably if everybody's not opposed we'll do it again at the irish restaurant and yeah it was great yeah that that that place uh gave us like the entire upper floor to kind of work with oh nice and picture pictures in the

live chat sorry i interrupted you there hey there we go um, I will go ahead and enable the hometech.fm slash, what is it, happy hour, I think is what we did? Yep. Yeah, so hometech.fm slash happy hour. There's a bunch of pictures from last year. And our sponsor there, Richard Berry over at iHummingbird, a really cool company here in Florida. But he was there. Jason, you were there. A bunch of Richards were there.

Yeah, we had a lot of Richards. three richards i think three yeah yeah so um go over there check that out and i will be hopefully by friday posting some information on at least preliminarily what we'll be doing uh and you can sign up uh for the happy hour for cd at 2018 so yeah check that out home tech.fm happy hour yeah and one of the richards who was there is is with us in the live chat room tonight and giving some good feedback on the venue so i think we'll we'll take that as an endorsement and say if it's not broke don't fix it great absolutely what do you say we jump into some Home Tech headlines? Let's do it. Trying to edit this page and talk at the same time. Not working. Not working. HomeTech.fm slash happy hour.

Go ahead. All right. Smart home system manufacturer Beyond Home has closed its operations and halted production of its smart light bulbs. The company's CEO and co-founder, Alexei Erchak, who we had on the show a while back, I don't remember what episode, but a long time ago we had Alexi on, said, we developed a nice product that fit a need and that our customers enjoyed.

However, we were unable to raise the necessary capital to scale and expand our product line. Smart home is a tough space, end quote. Beyond's LED bulbs, which were bundled in a package of three for $199, had learning features, which enabled them to learn and replay lighting patterns automatically to mimic the homeowner being home, which gave it a nice security add-on and made, again, gave you that simulated occupancy. Yep. Jason, your memory is way better than

mine right now. That was way back, episode 75. Yeah. Wow. That was quite a while ago. Yeah. Excellent. I thought it was a cool product. I never got to use it myself, but I was bummed to see that they're shutting it down.

Yeah. I mean, I think his letter there, the last sentence there in the letter, smart home is a tough space. That is true. Sums it up. Yeah. We've seen companies come and go and even really cool products come and go. And sometimes that just happens. Netflix has recently notified users that written user reviews will be going away.

I didn't even know they existed. This following Netflix's removal of the five-star rating system earlier this year. In an email notifying users who had recently left a review, Netflix blamed the change on declining usage. According to CNET, while Netflix plans to stop accepting reviews as of July 30th, they will be readable, I guess on the website, until mid-August. I haven't seen a review on Netflix in years. And I guess that's just because I use the Apple TV app and they aren't there. Where are they? I don't know. Yeah, it sounds like

something they've been putting in the background a little bit. And presumably they're, who knows? They blame it on declining usage, but there could be any number of reasons. The story I read cited potentially them not wanting people to disparage their original content or when they remove third-party content. And they're a pretty private company when it comes to numbers, and I think that plays in their advantage. So when you're Netflix, you get to do what you want. That's the moral of the story. Speaking of Netflix, their next move could be to launch a new higher-priced plan. An Ultra tier has shown up for some users in Europe. This tier includes 4K HDR and a maximum of four streams.

A Netflix spokesperson confirmed the test to CNET and said that, quote, In this case, we are testing slightly different price points and features to better understand how consumers value Netflix. Cordcutting.com found that the changes applied in other European countries as well, including Germany. Very interesting. There's a lot of Netflix news this week, Jason, because not only do we have the reviews going away and this new HDR tier coming in, Netflix, now I need you sitting down. It looks like you're sitting down. I'm sitting. Netflix is spending significantly more than we thought on their TV shows and in-house movies. That number is $13 billion.

Wow. Incredible. I'm going to insert that Dr. Evil sound there. That's exactly what I was going to suggest. The projection, this comes from The Economist, the projection greatly exceeds the $8 billion figure that has been widely reported. This compares to just $2.5 billion for HBO,

the $1 billion that we've heard rumored from Apple. The content company Netflix has publicly identified as its chief competition. Sorry, I read that later. But $2.5 billion from HBO, which is its chief competition. Sorry, I read that later, but $2.5 billion from HBO, which is their chief competition, and the $1 billion that we've heard from Apple TV. I mean, I thought $1 billion is a lot for Apple, but heck, $13 billion. You know what's more than $1 billion, Jason? $13 billion. Yeah, you're definitely going gonna have to queue up the what's it dr evil yep

samsung has revealed at the current 2018 q led and advanced display in los angeles that it is going to be releasing not one but two new ranges of tvs with 8k resolutions in the next few months details on the two ranges are pretty sparse so far it seems that the tv brand is holding back full details for the ifa technology show taking place in berlin from uh starting on august 29th so pretty interesting we haven't even gotten uh haven't even gotten 4k right but here comes 8k here comes the eight these companies and their numbers man they just want the bigger numbers that's it yeah wow well speaking of numbers Jason, I have a number for you. The number is two.

Okay. And there's some words in front of it. AirPlay 2. All right. Finally comes to the Sonos systems with a new update to their software rolling out today. The new feature will only be compatible with Sonos One, Beam, Playbase, and the older Play 5, or the newer Play 5, I guess. But if you have any one of those devices, you can use it to listen to AirPlay through the rest of the system,

even if the other players are older. Yeah. So, unfortunately, everything they listed there, I don't own a single one of those. So I'm kind of disappointed in that, but I'm glad to see Airplay is finally coming through to Sonos. And we've got Richard over in the chat saying it works well with the Sonos One so far. I don't know. I'm looking at the press release they had, and this was in here. It said, after you've started the music with Siri, you can let Alexa adjust the volume or skip to the next song. And I'm like, that's really strange.

Okay. I get to use two voice assistants with you. It's a brave new world. Richard's saying in the chat room it comes at a cost he's saying you can no longer have lock screen control of sonos on your ios devices interesting i wonder why that is i don't know for richard if you can elaborate on that a little bit but that's good to know definitely some advice from uh from a that's the kind of thing you don't find out unless you're a first-hand user typically right so we we appreciate that i i wonder if um there aren't some more features coming in

later on with apple and siri and that kind of thing that we just we're not either not seeing or they're not announcing we're not hearing anything about um that's that's really that's really weird that you wouldn't get to be able to control the music on your lock screen. I'm just laughing. Richard says, no idea why. They have an explainer page without an explanation. Well, there you go. It could be that there's some other features coming later this year.

Some things defy explanation, Richard. Right, right. There was also some discussion on various integrator boards today about Sonos breaking some integrations with this update and cutting off some of the... Yeah, well... That never happens. After digging around a little bit, it turns out the only company, I guess,

that was having problems with this was Crestron. So I updated mine, four works i heard on the hub uh chris gamble reported back said that uh the harmony works fine so um i i'm not sure what was going on with the crestron systems out there but it sounds like it was a kind of a big pain point because as you know crestron you have it's a compiled system you have to update the drivers and then compile that and load that code into the processors. And that's typically not easy to do. Sometimes it requires you to get out there on site and do it. So that's tough for those guys in the industry that have to get out and do that.

It really sucks. I feel for them. Yeah. Huh. Well, Cody them. Yeah. Huh. Well, Cody just included a link here. We'll stay on this theme for one more second. It says, Sonos app controls no longer appear on your lock screen. This is from, it looks like, their community, Sonos community.

After updating to 9.0 on iOS, I'm getting the message, Sonos app no longer appear on your lock screen. Best answer. It will no longer be possible to control your Sonos system from the lock screen of your iPhone or iPad, including use of hard volume buttons from the lock screen. If you have an Apple TV or other AirPlay capable non-Sonos device in your household with AirPlay enabled, it is still possible to use hard volume buttons from the Sonos app. Yeah, that's definitely an explanation that explains nothing. Yeah, no, I mean, that's very poor because the lock screen control is, I mean, I use that every day when I'm playing music.

So I don't know. Yeah, that is annoying for sure. Come on, Sonos. Don't break things. Make it better. Yeah, that is annoying for sure. Come on, Sonos. Don't break things. Make it better. Make it work. Oh, man. Well, speaking of Sonos, we're going to stay on Sonos here for a few more minutes.

That is really the big home tech news of the week is Sonos' IPO. There was not, I guess, quite as much fanfare about this as you might expect, at least according to Engadget. They say with little fanfare, smart speaker company Sonos just announced its plan is to go public to raise a $100 million IPO. This, I guess, is estimated as a placeholder. So they filed their S1 form through the SEC, and they're off to become a public company. You got to start shopping it around. Yeah. Yeah, this is not a, not a huge surprise, right? I mean,

there's been speculation about this going on for, for quite a while. And in fact, we talked about it on the show a few weeks ago, they laid off like, I think it was 6% of their workforce or something like that. And, and it was pretty clear at the time, given all of the other speculation that was going on, that that was a move designed to cut costs and bolster the bottom line, probably in preparation for this IPO. And so that appears to be the case.

Right, right. I thought the S-1 was pretty interesting. They laid out a lot of the things, like how much money they were making. And when I was going through it, I was pulling this information out and kind of just like putting it into small little bullet points but um i had a couple quick notes that i thought were were fascinating to learn about them um 60 is best i can tell i'm not a math person with uh the uh the account the dollars the adult the accountant i'm not i'm not an accountant. So, yeah, best I can tell, like, according to the numbers I looked at, 60% of their profits go to marketing and sales support,

which is pretty incredible. I mean, you've got to spend money to make money, but, man, that's a lot of money that they spend on that. Yeah, that does seem like a lot. Yeah. They've had massive, massive losses over the past few years. Things have been getting better for them, but there was millions of dollars lost each year up until the last couple quarters for some reason. I don't know where that would be. What a coincidence. Yeah. It's very

strange. One of the big bullet points I pulled out of here was that Sonos will be pushing harder for direct-to-consumer sales. They're going to be driving a lot of their sales through their website, a lot more of their sales through their website. So I know that a lot of their channel partners like Integrators and Best Buy might be not very happy with that in the future. And it's one of the things that they point out. It's like our partners are key to our success, and they may not be happy if we start doing a lot of direct-to-consumer stuff, but they are going to do it because it's outlined right there in the S1. Best Buy is 70, 70, 17% of their sales. So nearly 20% of what

Sona Springs in comes through Best Buy, which I thought was fascinating. They are going to be pushing heavily into voice and doing research into voice control for the future, which is, I know you might like Jason. Uh, and they have, they, they were, they, towards the end there, they start bragging about, you know, their numbers and, uh, their, their numbers are pretty big, 61%. So they, they have a lot of happy customers because 61% of Sonos customers buy more than one Sonos device, which is crazy, right? Like that's, that's, it's a, it's, these are not inexpensive speakers, right? But I mean, what did they start?

They started like $200. And if you go and like buy a Beats pill thing, or, you know, like a $30, $50, uh, Bluetooth speaker for your, took up to your phone. That's, that's kind of competing with this product in, in some respects, but yeah, sort of, I mean, for the very casual user, certainly. Yeah. Yeah. 19 million products in 6.9 million homes. So a lot of, a lot of Sonos out there in the world and, uh, they've been maintaining a 45% gross margin on products. So I think it's pretty healthy if they can get out there and sell them. But man, if you read through the S1, it does paint a grim picture in the risk section that they could be cut off from their voice providers at any moment with no notice.

They know they are facing intense competition from very large companies like Apple and Amazon and Google. Like that is their competition. And they're like, yeah, we thought we were doing okay, but we're the little fish in the sea right now. I mean, 19 million products sitting out there and they're the little guys because everybody else has these massive, massive unending budgets to throw money into, right?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and Greg in the chat room is saying something about only one supplier. Yeah, yeah. That was a big thing I saw, too. They only have one manufacturing partner overseas. And if anything happens to them, if they run a backlog on anything, that will cause them to lose sales. And it, and it has in the past too. Like, I don't know why they haven't learned in this lesson, because if you're a dealer, you remember trying to buy those subwoofers from Sonos for like months and they never had any

stock and you'd go to Best Buy and Best Buy, you know, 17% of their sales, they would, they would have, they would have stock, but dealers could not get them for months and months and months. And that's because their manufacturer ran into a manufacturing issue and they had to wait for the slow boat to come over with subwoofers on it. So that's tough. That's real tough. doing an IPO, right? And going public, you've got to air some of that dirty laundry, some of that dirty laundry, so to speak. This is probably something they've, they've been painfully aware of internally. And it sounds like dealers have as well. I can recall what you were saying, Seth and, and Greg in the chat room, who I know is also a home tech pro and presumably a sell some Sonos says they're always out of at least one thing. Like, they've always got one thing out of stock. And so, you know, I guess they've got more of a reputation for that than I necessarily appreciate it. I certainly didn't realize that they had only that one supplier. I guess at least grabbed the most headlines, right, was the argument about voice control and how the S1 really highlights just how reliant Sonos is right now when it comes to voice control on Alexa.

And they've got Google Home coming, so at least they've got a bit of a backup there. But it does point out that, let's see, what does it say? There was a particular quote here. The company notes that Alexa could disable the integration on the Beam in one unlimited notice. They could also start charging for it. These things grab headlines, right? I don't know. It's hard to say. Amazon, I know, is big on Alexa everywhere. They have a vested interest in having Alexa in as many devices as possible. Sonos is a little bit of a weird case, right? Because they are a bit of a competitor

in the smart speaker space. They're different products and they do slightly different things, but the core product offering is very much the same. And so it is interesting to speculate. I certainly think that if I were sitting around the executive table at Sonos and had some say there, that would definitely be an area that it makes a lot of sense for the company to continue to develop and figure out what is their long-term play with voice control.

It doesn't seem like they're in a great position right now, relying exclusively on third-party integrations, but who knows? They're able to get a variety of those integrations out there, and then it may not necessarily be, again, in Amazon's interest to pull that integration. So there's a lot of layers to that. But again, it comes back to that. They've got an S1 out there now, and they've got to air some of that dirty laundry and make sure to clearly spell out what some of those risks are if you're considering investing. Yeah. And I mean, this is kind of—I think a lot of companies were caught flat-footed by the success of the Amazon Echo platform, right?

Because, I mean, you've seen Apple play catch-up. You've seen Google play catch-up for sure. And Sonos was kind of like, yeah, we're smart speakers. We don't really do that. And I think that they probably realized much too late that voice was going to be a big thing. And you've seen them start to make that push into voice just recently. I mean, it hasn't been like with the last year or so that we start to see the Sonos One come out, the Beam come out. These are really their only voice enabled products. And, um, I'm glad the S1 says that, uh, Google assistant is available or

will is planned for 2018 because that's, that's at least, you know, it's almost like a backup, right? Like it's, if Amazon cuts off or, uh, starts requiring licensing, maybe they go to Google and start using Google a little bit more. Google's never going to charge. Well, I'm not going to say never, but they may never charge a license because, you know, they like getting all that sweet, sweet, sweet customer data. So, you know, stillness may just have to. I don't know. I would rather use Google than Amazon most of the time. I actually enjoy using the Google Assistant.

And the Echo does its thing. It does kitchen timers really well. Yeah. But it's like, how long do I give it a pass for that? And again, mine is hard on hearing now for some reason. It's gotten old. Weird. One of the things that they outlined at the very bottom,

it was in the wrist section of the S1, but they said there would be an increased pace of new products coming, and the success of their company basically is predetermined by if they have success in selling those new products and getting them out to market. Right. So that's very interesting because we're going to see new play bars. We're going to see new devices come from Sonos. Heck, maybe one day we'll actually see that outdoor speaker from Sonos. Right. Like that would that'd be great. I'm not going to hold my breath. Right. I mean, if you if you started holding your breath the first time you heard of that, you would have been you would have probably been in Los Angeles laying on the street somewhere because Cause that, that six feet under years ago, man, that they were, they were saying that was going to come out. So, um, I'm really hopeful that this helps get some extra money. Like they're only asking for a hundred million dollars, which I,

you know, it's not $13 billion as we know, but, um, maybe they can make that money go, you know, a lot longer than I think. Um, a100 million, that's a decent amount of money, but I'm not sure how you take on a billion-dollar company with $100 million IPO. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I mean, $100 million sounds like a big number, but, you know, they're a pretty big ship, and you've got to imagine that money, depending on what their spending looks like, and if they're planning to do a lot of new product and R&D into voice control and who knows what else. Marketing, Jason, clearly marketing. 60% of it's going to go to marketing and sales. That's an interesting number. Clearly, they were intent on reinvesting money into the company, right? And continuing to grow. And, um, I, I don't know. I, I'm not an executive. I've, I've never really played a part in managing

budgets anywhere close to what, what these companies are, but, um, yeah, it does strike me as a, a big number. All right. Well, I think that pretty much does it for news this week. All of the links and topics that we've discussed can be found at our show notes. Those are at hometech.fm slash 219. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter to receive show reminders and more. You'll see the form on the right-hand side of the website. Don't forget to join us in the chat room live Wednesday starting somewhere between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. Eastern, the one true

time zone. Find out more at hometech.fm slash live. We also have great music. Don't let anybody tell you anything else. Great music tonight. The best music. It's, you know, they come for the show, but they stay for the music. I don't think they would stand for the music. Well, we have a lot of fun with it pick of the week pick of the week uh jason i don't know how big of a i got made fun of for not getting a record player joke earlier tonight so i'm gonna go way back in time and jason have you ever seen the movie dune dune no i don't think i have oh okay well you might you might miss this one, but there's a little thing in Dune that's called the pain box,

and you have to stick your hand in it. It causes a lot of pain, and it's a test that has to happen. So click the peak of the week there. This is a tweet from... I mean, I haven't seen the movie, but that's kind of funny. Yeah, so this is a tweet from, uh, I mean, I haven't seen the movie, but that's kind of funny. Yeah.

So this is a tweet from someone, uh, at low ball. I think it's Laurent Ballman. Uh, it says, sorry, home Depot.

I read dune. I'm not putting my hand in the box. And they've, they've got one of these demo things where you, you check the brightness of your, or not the brightness, but the color temperature of the lights that, that you have.

And it says, place your hand in the box. And it's got a nice little diagram of a hand going there. And, um, yeah, a couple of buttons to press. Yeah. Don't, don't, if you've ever seen Dune, you don't want that to, uh, you don't want to put your hand in the box. There's, and Jason, I'll take your word for it well i put a link to the video uh we'll put links to both the video of the pain box from dune and uh and the um and link to the picture in our our show notes which will be a home tech.fm slash 219 so if you haven't seen either one check them out both but i thought it was pretty funny i i gotta say i haven't seen the movie so it's a little bit lost on me but what i can say is i i do think this is this is funny it resonates with me because i have a pretty visceral hatred for like 5 000 kelvin lighting i really do like i just think it's absolutely awful i don't know why anyone would

put it in their home ever under any circumstances it is atrocious and uh i don't know i i like it just makes me feel like i'm in a hospital or something and uh it's it is the worst and richard in the chat room agrees with me yeah i'm a soft white all the way bright white 3 000 kelvins as high as i'll go i have that in my office because i found that the soft white you, sitting in my home office was a little bit kind of lulling me to sleep. So I can live with 3000, but 5,000 like does not belong in my house ever under any circumstances. No. And, and, and you see that a lot in, I see it a lot in model homes when I'm walking through those and like just shivering, but yeah, that, that, so right there, the button, the far right button is your pain button, so you press that jason's out that's it i don't know why anyone would ever stick their hand

in there push the 5000 button and then go buy a 5000 kelvin light bulb like it makes no sense this is clearly designed to sell 27 exactly that's a great one that's funny i like i like the description uh that richard just put into the show into the the chat over there uh 5000k is the morgue look yeah if you've ever been in a hospital or morgue yeah uh exactly what it is it's terrible yeah it is terrible it's not daylight people that's that's just gross. Well, we have a consensus here. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, we all agree. If you don't agree, feel free to reach out to us at hometech.fm slash feedback.

There's a form there. Fill it out. Let us know why you like 5,000K so much. If you're operating on people or something, that's perfectly acceptable. But just let us know. Let us know. I'm dying to know if there's anyone out there who's going to advocate for it. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to hear from our listeners with anything, feedback, questions, comments, suggestions, picks of the

week, whatever it is. Again, it's feedback at hometech.fm. Feedback at hometech.fm is the email, or you can head over to our website at hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. We want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about our patron page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over $5 per month gets you a shout out on the show but every pledge gets you an automatic invite to our private slack channel uh the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for an inside baseball conversations all about the aspects of home technology and of course the world cup wow that's right and i like how you set this section up seth

because you you gave me the name and and I think that was probably deliberate. And so I'm going to do my best because I really want to get this right. We had a actually higher than a $5 pledge come in this week. Christopher, we want to thank you for your very generous. Christopher came in at the $20 level, and that is very, very generous. Christopher Subbiondo. Wow, he got it. He nailed it. I got it. Nailed it. Yes. I practiced before the show, just in case. You don't know how I reached out to Christopher

to make sure that I knew how to pronounce his name. Oh, how funny. You didn't tell me. Nope. That's great. So I got it right. Christopher, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We really appreciate it. Very generous of you. And again, if you're interested in learning more about that,

hometech.fm slash support. All right, Jason, I think that wraps up this week in home technology news. I'm going out of town, so I know we're not talking next week and maybe not the week after, but I think we're going to have a secret show that's going to pop up in between now and then.

Yeah, we're going to do our best. You've got a couple of weeks off. I'm actually out of town next week as well for an industry event that I'm really looking forward to. That'll be a lot of fun, but we are definitely going to try to make sure we get at least one show out in the next couple of weeks. We may have one of those weeks off. So be aware of that. If you're listening, we really appreciate you tuning in, and we'll look forward to catching up with you again very soon. Thanks, Seth. Have a great night.

Absolutely. Thanks, everybody, for listening, and have a great day. Have a great night. Whatever it is. Yeah, whatever it is. When you're listening, this is a podcast. Play anytime. Listen whenever you want. Good morning.