HomeTech.fm - Episode 223 - It's Complicated...

Episode Date: August 24, 2018

On this week's episode of HomeTech: the week's biggest home tech headlines, including:Netflix finalizes their purge of user reviewsNetflix testing ads for binge-watchersNew and surprising stats on streaming-TV adoption...Apple gaining a (small but important) foothold in the smart speaker marketIKEA expands Tradfri line to include a $10 smart plugAmazon is working on a local DVR "bolt on" for Fire-TVConnected camera replays are coming to select Echo, Fire devicesCortana and Alexa can now play niceCE Pro gets acquired by Emerald ExpositionsA fantastic look at the professionally-connected smart homeAnd much 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. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 24th. Oh my God. From Sarasota, Florida, I am Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How are you doing, Seth? Jason, I can't believe it's already the end of August. I don't even know what happened to the beginning of August. I don't even know what happened to the beginning of August. I know. The countdown is on. The countdown is on.

We're like two weeks from Cedia as we're sitting here and recording. So by the time this airs, we'll be like a week and a half. So getting really close. Excited for that. Scary. I'm guessing you're all ready to go. Are you working the floor this year? Yeah, totally.

Yep, I'm working the floor this year i uh yeah totally yep i'm working the floor and i am actually co-presenting in three different workshops on tuesday and wednesday the service workshop so if any home technology professionals are listening to the show we definitely would love to have you just go on the cda training site and search uh for serviceology we've got three different workshops we're doing there. So I will be busy, busy, busy, but, uh, definitely hoping to have some time to enjoy the, the, uh, show floor. And I think later in the week, things will lighten up for me a little bit and I'll hopefully have a, you know, a little bit of time to relax and go connect with, with some old friends. Excellent. Well, we're looking forward to it. I know one of those connections is going to be on Friday or Thursday at 5.30 for the Home Tech Happy Hour, right? So you'll be there, right?

That's right. I'll be there. That's right. I will absolutely be there. All three of my workshops will be done at that point. So I'll be ready to relax a little bit and have some fun. So I'm looking forward to that. And we'll talk in a little bit more detail if you're not familiar with that, uh, home tech happy hour here a little bit later in the show. Yep. Well, Jason, this, this week I was, I was actually, I went to the Facebook website. I don't know if you've ever heard of this Facebook and I saw a picture that you had posted the Facebook. Yeah. I saw a picture that you had posted and, uh, man, you look, you look like you've been busy. Yeah, you know, I had a busy weekend, big project

we're very excited about. This has nothing to do, by the way, with home technology. So I will keep this short and sweet, I promise. But as listeners to the show are likely aware, my wife and I have two young kids. We've got a daughter who's going to turn four here this fall and a son who just turned two. And so we had the backyard redone and we just got a brand new swing set that we ordered and it arrived last week. And so I had some help from a neighbor who came over on Saturday and helped me get this thing put together. And that took, you know, the two of us a solid eight hours. And then it took me solo, like another like a solid, another solid eight or nine hours on Sunday, uh, to get this thing built. But we've got a, a legitimate play set in our backyard now.

And the kids are, are super excited about it. And I'm just happy that it's done. Yeah. I legitimate doesn't begin to describe how giant this thing is. Like, uh, but you know, yeah, I took a look at it and I'm like, okay, now that you got that up and you know, it's, it's time to retrofit and the outdoor speakers, you know, you got to get that out there. There's home, get some strip lighting on the, uh, on the play set, you know, like there's a lot we could do with that. There's that new Phillips, uh, huge, uh, the, the rope light stuff that you could, you could run that out there, give them a spaceship to climb up into. We're going to make it happen. But yeah,

we're pretty excited. And I'm doing my best to not think about the day like seven or eight years from now when I've got to go out there and try to figure out how I'm going to get that thing out of my backyard. I think you keep it there. You're committed. That's going to have to stay. Yeah, at this point, we're locked in. Exactly. All right. Well, what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. Netflix has officially done purging user reviews. A decade's worth of comments, praising, and excoriating shows all gone. Under the question, how do I post reviews on Netflix?

The Services Help Center now says, Netflix customers were able to leave reviews on Netflix until mid-2018 when reviews were removed due to declining use to learn how netflix suggests tv shows and movies we think you'll love visit our ratings and recommendations article there you go too bad netflix has also confirmed a major change to its video streaming service effective as of this week for a couple of users, video ads for other Netflix series between episodes. The news emerged from user reports, particularly on the primary Netflix Reddit community, in which users claim that ads for entirely different series would play between the episodes of a given show's binging so if you're sitting there uh netflixing and chilling and watching uh you know altered carbon you may see uh something else pop up for i'm trying to remember that's right

or something i don't know but uh anyway uh in response i guess it had to be a netflix another netflix show for this to happen uh in response to the online outcry which has largely been negative of course and a netflix spokesperson indicated that the company was mindful of, quote, chatter on social channels. I love how they put that in quotes. Yeah. But it's focused far more on how users will interact with these new video ads. In other words, if the users engage with these promotions,

Netflix will likely roll them out to many, many, many more people. Mm-hmm. A little testing going on. Yeah. So basically Netflix is saying, know we hear we hear the trolls and we're basically not going to listen to them and we're going to put these ads in here anyways uh hey you know more power to them we'll see how it works according to newly released analytics from the media pros at comscore a number the number of homes that own streaming tv services has spiked by 58 in the last year the total number 4.9 million is a whole five percent of u.s households that choose to stream over wi-fi based services without the bells and whistles

of traditional pay tv paid tv uh this was a really interesting, I want to just do a quick follow-up point on this one because the number jumped out at me as actually low. I would have guessed that the number of homes was higher than 5% at this point. So reading the story, what was weird to me and what I don't get is that it says ComScore specifically looked at, quote, pure play systems, meaning streamers that don't offer their own original shows the same way that other services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime do. Right now, these players include Sling, along with DirecTV Now, PlayStation View, YouTube TV, and others. A full 10% of streaming time nationwide comes from these services in past April, according to Comscore. So I'm reading this and I'm thinking, why wouldn't this include Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime? That doesn't make sense to me.

So a little bit confusing, but I guess the main story here is that there's growth. That's not going to surprise anybody. Again, I thinkling, PlayStation View, and YouTube TV. Those are the kinds of services that are offering direct competition with a cable service. So if you wanted to get ESPN and ABC and network services and that kind of thing, you would subscribe to those and you'd still be able to get 30. I think most of the packages had like 30 channels or something like that that you could get maybe more um but they were all floating around that 30 mark so maybe that's what they're trying to like dig down and measure and get get netflix hulu and amazon prime out of the way because those are completely

different services yeah good call yeah i think they're they're you're probably right they're trying to compare more of the direct competitors to cable. A recent report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners indicates that Apple has established a foothold in the U.S. smart speaker market, nabbing a 6% share. Amazon still dominates the market with a staggering 70% share, followed by Google at 24%. Apple remains an underdog of course but its tiny share generates

higher revenue per device than amazon's and google's devices and the mac maker can also use home pods to tether more users to paid subscription services such as apple music 70 crazy yeah yeah no kidding uh well speaking, a little follow-up story here. Last year, IKEA rolled out HomeKit support to its trod-free smart lighting products, and now the Swedish company is seemingly looking to further expand its HomeKit offerings with a new smart plug. This is where this one's going to get fun, Seth. According to a report from Swedish news outlet... Tebigger Burger, dude. Tech... Technikvik...

Technikvikkan. I don't know. Yeah. That's my best effort there. Swedish chef, exactly. IKEA is planning to launch a new smart plug in its line of products. So it looks like this is going to be cheap, $10. And we'll also, for those of you

who are feeling like having some fun with the Swedish language, we'll post a link to the Swedish version of the story, and you can knock yourself out. Yeah. Yeah. I saw this article, and it's like 149 kronor. What does that translate to? And it turns out it was like 10 or 15 bucks. 10 bucks. Yeah, that's incredibly inexpensive, especially for a HomeKit product. Yeah.

Amazon is working on a new device to record live television in a bid to compete in a market dominated by TiVo. A source told Bloomberg, the e-commerce Titans Lab 126 R&D division is reportedly building the DVR, which is internally called Frank, and will connect to Amazon's Fire TV box. I used to have a cat called Frank. It wasn't a very good cat.

Yeah, this one's interesting. It looks like, you know, as it's currently planned, it would let you record live TV and stream stream it to your phone although it sounds like that's a little bit up in the air and then obviously storing data locally something these boxes don't currently have the ability to do so definitely have to keep an eye on that one yep speaking of amazon as of this week amazon alexa devices with displays can play video stream recaps from select smart home cameras this was announced by amazon alexa customers in the u.s uh u.s specific it sounds like who have home security cameras from ring august arlo cloud cam and logitech can now view camera history feeds on echo show echo spot fire tv and fire tablets it's a uh that's a killer feature uh of these camera history feeds on Echo Show, Echo Spot, Fire TV, and Fire Tablets.

That's a killer feature of these little panels that I really haven't gotten into. But I can think of a million and one times that I had to retrofit a video intercom in to go from the door to the kitchen. And you'd have to use this really old technology. And now, and now here we are in 2018, uh, you can get a, you know, a ring doorbell or, uh, August or Arlo stick it up on the, on the, on the, uh, on the wall there, and then, uh, put one of these echo tablets in and you've got a video intercom right out to the front door. So that's great. Pretty, pretty neat. It says, uh, the command is something like, uh, Alexa show the event that just happened at the front door. So there you have it.

Plus, Seth, you now have an extra A word to bleep out in post. Nope. Not doing it. Not doing it. Not giving up. Protesting. Alexa, yeah, well, I mean, you can tell we pulled these from stories, and they can't even write the stories right now. Yeah. stories and they can't even write the stories right yeah alexa and cortana aren't making music

together yet but the two digital assistants made their first integrated appearance in a public preview announced simultaneously simultaneously on august 15th on amazon and microsoft blogs each device's access to the other assistants full capabilities and feature sets will come in time and will grow both companies asserted. During the public preview, which is available to U.S. customers only, Cortana's and Alexa's cross-platform capabilities are limited to basic skills. Yeah, I got to say this one's a little bit of a head scratcher to me. I'm trying to think of the use case, but I suppose if you've got each of these devices, you'll find a way to make them work together. This, by the way, was originally announced a year ago, and I know we've talked about this before.

And so it sounds like it is just now finally coming to fruition. I'd like to see the cooperation and integration between the two. I mean, you would hope that you'd see that happen between the other two platforms that you know exist like apple and google but yeah one can only hope yeah i mean there's a quote in the story the collaboration uh reflects our belief that when people and technology work together everybody wins so certainly a feel-good sentiment there and and i'm a fan of of seeing this again i'm just trying to think of what the specific use cases are, but I'm sure they're out there and hopefully some people will get some enjoyment out of that. So moving on, CE Pro, the leading trade publication in the smart home industry, has been acquired by Emerald Expositions, the trade show and media company that acquired

Cedia Expo last year. Emerald is also buying the rest of EH Media's Connected Brands group, which includes commercial integrator, security sales and integration, and related events and brands. So this one for the industry folks is definitely big, big news. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this, the EECS, is that how you say it? Emerald Expositions is really coming into its own here in our industry. I wonder what the end goal is for them. Will Cedia eventually become rebranded and renamed into more of a home technology show that's just kind of open for everything? I don't know.

Things are changing. This stuff has got to change too, like the trade shows and everything. I think you're seeing that. But this should be interesting to see how this plays out too because this is kind of like the main, this is CE Pro. It's also a commercial integrator,

security sales integration, like you said. That's like the main news and everything that goes into our industry comes from those, those publications. So very, very interesting. Yeah, they're definitely the big dog. And so it was, uh, like I said, for industry folks, I know it was one of those things I saw come across my inbox and clicked on right away to get the scoop, uh, big news. So I guess, you know, congrats. I'm assuming this is great news to the team at CE Pro. I know Julie, I would say, fairly well and work with Jason fairly closely. And, you know, everyone I've interacted with at CE Pro has always been great to work with.

And they've been around for a long time and working hard to build up that publication. So I'm super happy for them and can only hope that the quality of the publication continues to be what it's always been. It's a fantastic resource for the industry. Easy Low, a global innovator and developer of smart home automation solutions, today announced the acquisition of California-based company Myos, a leading smart home services platform provider with an established history in the IoT market. Myos are the people behind the Vera home automation platform, which a couple of our,

I know TJ was looking into it. I've used them. A couple of people use it quite a bit out there. Pretty cool product. This is pretty interesting. I wonder what this means for that product and for the industry. Yeah, I'm with you.

I read this story initially and I had to remind myself who, I don't know if it's MyOS or Mios, spelled M-I-O-S. It took me a minute. That name was super familiar to me, but it took me a minute to connect those dots and remember exactly who that was. And I have to admit, and I don't know, Seth, if I should be embarrassed about this, I've never heard of EZLO, E-Z-L-O, but, you know, click through their website. They appear to be a Z-Wave brand.

There's some verbiage on their website specific to attending Cedia this year, so they are going to be there, and maybe we'll have to, you know, make some time to stop by their booth and get a better sense for who they are and what, you know, what this story really means. I know that, that Vera is a really, I think a fairly popular product out there, particularly in the DIY space. And, and so with, I'm with you, Seth, I'm a little bit curious to know exactly what this story will translate to. Yep. All right,

moving on. Great call, a provider of mobile phone and connected health services to seniors. This is the company behind Jitterbug, the Jitterbug phone. You got to know that. You live in Florida. Oh, God, I know about those. I'm going to, yeah. You probably know Great Call pretty well, too, I would imagine. Yeah. So anyways, they were acquired by Best Buy for $800 million in cash. This is the second time, it looks like like Great Call has changed ownership in the last 14 months. So that's a little bit interesting. Not sure what's going on there. But it furthers Best Buy's retail strategy of selling more health and wellness products and positions Best Buy to increase RMR via the monthly services Great Call currently offers. I think I remember reading in the story that they had like 900,000 monthly subscribers. So that's a pretty healthy chunk of recurring monthly revenue. I don't know what those monthly contracts go for, but I know a lot of people are trying to get into the recurring monthly revenue game and Best Buy

appears to not be an exception to that right and it's interesting to see like a giant retailer like best buy kind of make this move um right to get something like this this is uh this is home home health and wellness i mean that's that's that's gonna supposedly supposedly a big market in the future yeah it's always been like you have your your doubts about it right well to me it's always been like oh you have your, your doubts about it, right? Well, to me, it's always been like, Oh, it's going to be huge next year. And then it never happens. It's like Linux on the desktop, you know, Oh, it's the year of Linux on the desktop. And like, you know, that it's kind of like a joke that, you know, it just never comes to fruition. I don't know. Like, yeah, I'm still waiting for that big push into, into home health and wellness monitoring and technology. And I just haven't seen it.

Yeah, I wonder if it's going to come as younger, like millennials and older millennials on that edge of the generation who have grown up with technology and are comfortable with it, have aging parents who actually start to need more of these wellness solutions in the home and aging in place and things like that. I think that's potentially where the confluence is. I know every time I read about it, the numbers look very, from a business opportunity perspective, the numbers look very juicy, obviously, because of the number of aging seniors we have in our population now,

aging Gen Xers, I should say. So I I'm with you. It's, it's, it's something I always read about and I'm intrigued, intrigued to see how that market develops, but we just haven't really seen it become the mainstay that I think a lot of people believe it could be in, uh, in our, in our corner of the smart home here. Right. And maybe, maybe one day, I don't know. It's i'll keep holding my breath i guess mindful watching right yeah right right all right jason uh hey did you did you know that it's complicated to connect uh no no it's complicated everything's wireless now right right yeah it's uh it's wireless you don't even need uh you know you could just set it up with an iPad. Boom, you're done.

It's easy. It's cheap, wireless, you know. It's all DIY. Yep, cheap, fast, and wireless, right? That's right. That's what they say. Yeah. So you're obviously being a little facetious there,

and we are wanting to talk for a few minutes here about a great story and accompanying video that came across The Verge this week. And we've had a few opportunities in the, I guess what I would call the mainstream tech press. Over the last couple of months, digital trends comes to mind. They've been doing some stories that feature like higher end connected home, control for connected homes. And we had one about Savant, if you recall that, a few weeks ago. And it looks like The Verge also now has a series that I wasn't super familiar with before, so I'm not sure exactly what they were doing with this series prior to this story. But I think it's called, I'm trying to scan through the story here, like The Future Home or something like that.

We'll have a link to it. Home of the Future. Home of the Future. There you go. Thank you. And we'll have a link to this in the show notes at hometech.fm slash 223, but a pretty cool, especially the video, the story, I didn't think there was a ton of meat on, but pretty cool actually to go check out this video. If you're in the professional space and you want to see how the, you know, the how the professional connected home gets covered in,

I guess, again, the mainstream press, go check this out. And if you're not sure, if you're listening to the show and you're not totally aware of what a professionally connected home looks like as compared to something like a series of HomeKit gadgets and smart speakers, what's different about the, the professional connected home. This is a great video. It's about eight minutes long and I think really does a great job of, of showing what, uh, you know, what these homes are capable of. Yeah. I, I, I watched this and I think it's a great primer of, uh, of the smart home. Like in the smart home, I think they say this a number of times, like this is the smart home that exists today.

And it looks like a fairly basic setup. It looks like maybe a couple of zones of audio, like inside and outside. It looks like a smaller house. It looks like they have Lutron. I can see a couple of Roku players in there maybe, PlayStation 4. So it looks like maybe they're doing a lot of streaming in this house.

And there's some decent network gear. There's Luxul. It looks like there's an orbi up there and and a couple of sonos players so uh lots of streaming going on lots of networking going on in there uh but they they basically kind of go over uh you know why they had to why they wire it looks like they retrofitted the entire house to do all this stuff um they wired it all it all up. They, they went over, they go over in this, you know, why it's important to put wires in the wall. Like they go over, you know, why, uh, why it's important that, uh, that you have, uh, devices that have an open API and what exactly an API open API means like that. These are all like things that I think you and I, Jason and people that listen to the show may take for granted. But, um, if you're, you know, just an everyday Joe out there looking into getting a smart home and trying to figure out where to start, like some of this stuff may be a little bit more difficult and hard to comprehend and understand unless you're you're dealing with it every single day.

And I thought the way this was produced and set up and played out, man, it is an excellent, excellent primer. There's nothing I didn't see like anything wrong with what they said about about this. Like they gave you the way a good way to go DIY and they gave you a good way to go with an integrator. And yeah, I think this is probably one of the best the best videos I've seen in a very long time about a smart home. Yeah, I agree. I thought it was very well done. And I think you made a good point there in terms of a great target audience for this video might be somebody out there who's getting ready to do a remodel or building a new home or just thinking about adding some technology to an existing home. And like, if you're trying to figure out, okay, I hear about all this DIY stuff and I hear about HomeKit and Alexa and Google Home and Phillips Hue and Nest

and all these other brands and like all of the great things that you can do with all of those. And you can, like they're fantastic products. They're very affordable and they're a great option for a lot of people. But depending on what you're trying to do, there's a very real possibility that they might not be the right solution for the project that you're doing. And you may actually be better off making a bigger investment

in a professionally installed system that's gonna give you more seamless control over things like audio video, for example. And so watching a video like this, I think gives you that great primer. Like you said, Seth, a quick overview of what it really means to have one of these systems, having wires in the wall.

Why is that important? Still, yes, believe it or not, it's not all wireless. And so a great video to watch if you're in that camp. And like you said, just well-produced. And I'm always a fan. It seems like we're in that, uh, you know, in that camp. And like you said, just well-produced and I'm always a fan. It seems like we're seeing a little bit more of this now. Uh, just, just this year, right? I can't, I can't recall a single time in the four years doing the show prior to the last few months that we, we saw out outlets like the verge and digital trends covering the professional space the way that they are now and

i'm a huge fan i think it's great yeah so i i i watch this i'm kind of looking at the rack here um and i'm like adding stuff up what do you think this thing costs in your head i i this this is a it's a two-zone system but man they've got some things that could be pretty expensive uh in the yeah i mean it's really it's hard to say um but you know it's it's a 10 you know in the tens tens of thousands oh i yeah i would say tens of that easily over 30 for like everything that got done i would say easily over 30 and they didn't put that on on the article but i i think that i mean just looking at it looking at the zones looking at the equipment they used uh some of the things i don't know pricing for some of the stuff i have in my head like they did they did retrofit a bunch of wiring and i mean they have that video so i

know that there's labor involved um you know that that that's uh you've got to think about all that so i'd say probably north of 30 yeah i think that's a great guess it's it's certainly not a six-figure project but uh it's probably not high uh tens but i would say probably if i had to guess yeah 30 40 at the high end maybe somewhere in there 25 30 like so it's somewhere in that range and i know we're painting with broad strokes there but it at least gives a a general sense like yeah it is an investment and a lot of what you're investing in is the, the infrastructure, this equipment is going to have to be replaced and updated over time. And, you know, it's not going to have to be replaced like next year or two years

or even three years from now necessarily, but, um, you know, it's going to have to be maintained and supported and serviced, and you're going to need a professional to, you know, keep it all up to date and keep it running. So yeah, it's a totally different ballgame. Budgetarily, it's a totally different ballgame from doing something like a really basic HomeKit setup, but it's also going to be far more functional at this point. Now, who knows in five or 10 years where the smart home is going to be as it pertains to solutions like HomeKit, but I think those companies have a long ways to go. And I'm not, I'm not convinced that they're ever necessarily going to get to the point of what a fully

integrated home using solutions like Control4, or I think in this case, it was RTI. You know, I can see Lutron in there. Um, and these are, these are mainstays in the, in the professionally connected home and they're very sophisticated and very powerful and can do quite a bit. Right. Right. Yeah. And I mean that there's a non-trivial piece there that, that episode and the crown amp that's there, uh, that tells me there's a decent outside speaker setup outside with you know the varied subwoofer and everything so like it's there's some labor that went into the job and it could be over 40 i mean especially depending on the market that it's in yeah i'm thinking about

it like there's there's a lot that went into this job that you you don't see and i think that shows in the video if you watch it like you don't see the wires running around you know on the wall you don't see the power cable going down underneath the tv right um everything's hidden away and i think that that point's very well made like this is this is why we do it this way so you don't end up with this random wire that you have to get from point a to point b like it's it's all thought out ahead of and planned ahead of and um this is how it gets set up and deployed and and at the end of the day you can move into your house and put this nice furniture in with the little man doing the karate chop on top of the rack and,

and, uh, you know, your weird artwork and you don't have to worry about the technology. It just works. It's sitting in there and somebody else has to make sure that it's up and going. Right. Last thing I'll say about the story. If I was the integrator who did this project, I would be really bummed about one thing and that is this this nice beautiful hero image that they've got on the story that does a fantastic job of of highlighting the rack and it all looks beautiful and then you look underneath and what do you see living room yeah i see some coax into there you got just the you know the little bundle of extra cables that were pulled but didn't get used and they're white so they

really stick out and there you can see the labels on the end there and it's just like you know not a big deal they're clean you can tell they managed them and they labeled them and that's great but i would not want to i would not have wanted those in the shot yeah i mean i don't know the time constraints they had it looks like i saw some of the rack wiring that they did and you can kind of see some through one of the shelves like there's going to be a cable box or something that goes on that 2RU shelf there under the RTI processor. Something's missing there, because you can see cables coming to it that aren't hooked up.

But, like, I don't know. Like, it's on par with what I would say an average job would be, I'd say. But, yeah, if you're going to have it on the front page of The Verge or whatever, you might want to tuck those up a little bit better make sure they're off the floor yeah tie them off back there you know it's it's not a knock on them like i've been around these sort of photo shoots and video shoots and i know how they go i so and like i said you can tell they're they're cleanly managed so it's not a mess but hey every everything's labeled cleanly yeah it just jumps out everything's level yeah yeah i mean this is it it only jumps out of you because everything else is done so clean well and i'm a i'm a former integrator so i look at stuff like that right

exactly anyways great story so definitely go check it out we'll include a link to it in the show notes once again at hometech.fm slash 223. We'll also include links to all of the topics we have discussed here in our episode. Once again, hometech.fm slash 223. And while you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter where we'll send you weekly show reminders

and let you know what's going on here at the podcast. So one last time, that link is hometech.fm slash 223. Don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday, starting at 7, 730 Eastern, the one true time zone. To find out more, go to hometech.fm slash live. Eeks. All right, Seth. Well, we've got a, we've got a sort of a pick of the week. It's not, not necessarily a pick, but definitely a visual here that I thought was pretty creative. TVtemplate.com. I'm not sure where you found this one, Seth, but it is an interesting product.

They've been floating around. I think they're going to be at Cedia this year. I thought I saw them either in Innovation Alley back in the back there or in one of the booths kind of in that area but I saw them there and then I've been seeing people talk about them I think it popped up in the hub during this last week and then I saw a post on the control for dealer forums a private private forum that somebody was saying they went on Amazon and bought these I'm looking at them on Amazon that looks like they're $44 for a set of six TV size posters. And what you do is you perfectly visualize what an 85, a 75, 65, 55, 49, and 40 inch TV will look like on your wall before you buy the TV.

Pretty good idea, I think. I like it. Now, I think probably the, again, the professionals in the audience are going to have a little bit of a different perspective on this than maybe the consumers or end users. I can tell you as a former integrator, there were countless times that I'd be on a job site and the house is like, you got to remember a lot of these houses at the time. Like one of the images on this website that I'm looking at here is exactly what we were dealing with, right? It's a house that's just being framed. So it's all studs. You all like some makeshift scaffolding yeah there's like scaffolding and like people framing walls and electricians running around and like the designer and the architect are there and they're like i

really need to know exactly how big of a tv to put on this wall they got tight tolerances it's not like you can just eyeball this thing and so like literally you're running around with blue tape, like trying to pull up specs on your phone to measure it out. Or like I literally even had one time where the blue tape wasn't good enough for the architect. And we were literally running around the job site, finding pieces of cardboard, Seth, that we could cut out to make these sort of TV templates on the fly to go room by room. This was like a 15,000 square foot house where they were trying to figure out what size TVs to put in, you know, all 13 of the bedrooms. And it was a nightmare. And I remember thinking to myself, like, if there was just an easy way to go order templates and we could just keep a set

of these in the shop and we'd use them all the time like this question comes up all the time in the world of professional installation and so i i think it's a i think it's a great idea and uh you know i i think they'll have they'll have some success here i'm not sure about the longevity of it i i think that one of the the things here that's going to be a question mark is like i think of augmented reality and i've seen ikea has like this app now where you can see what a given couch will look like in your living room and so i have to imagine uh you know that something like that's going to exist for for tv sizes as well at some point yep no i did definitely definitely good definitely could definitely might not saying I haven't been working on something like that, but yeah.

Oh yeah. T and you up there, huh? All right. Seth's got something in the works. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we'll see. We'll see what happens if I, if I get to it, it's one of those things, like it's been a back burner project for about five years now. Yeah. You know what else? Yeah. You know what else? I, I, sorry to interrupt you there. What I, what I wonder about, and I, and I'm, I'm a total dunce when it comes to this stuff. So I have no idea, like size wise, if like with 3d printing, like when 3d printers become more common, like what if you just had like a 3d printer template where it was like, print me the Sony XBR, print me a plastic template of the Sony

XBR 75, you know, 9,500 F right. Like that could happen too. I'm not sure, but I think in the meantime, like these, this, this is a nice little product and probably I would imagine relatively easy to, to produce. And so I think it's cool. I hope they have success with it. Yeah. For, I mean, for $44 too, you get this set. It looks like it comes in a big tube, to produce and so i think it's cool i hope they have success with it yeah for i mean for 44 too you get this set it looks like it comes in a big tube you know and and just grab that grab some some tape or nails and and and stab it into the wall or onto the studs and um you're good to go like that's that's uh for the time being this is probably one of the best ways i've seen to do this uh and and maybe in the future like you said there'll be some kind of, you know, some augmented reality that would take, take over. I don't know

how it worked well on like the stud frame there, but you know, uh, it would definitely, definitely be able to find the plane on a drywall, but, um, I don't know this, this, this seems for $44. It seems like a no brainer if you're in the sales field to have um to get out there and put it in yep well like i said i think it's a an interesting looking product and and i i wish these guys success i think it fills a nice a nice little need in the market uh nothing in the mail back this week uh but if you have any feedback questions comments pics of the week or great ideas uh for a show give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the form. Absolutely. And like we do every week, we want to give a big, big thank you to everybody who

supports our show, but especially to those of you who are able to financially contribute to our efforts through our Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support. And that's where you can learn how you can support our efforts here at Home Tech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over $5 will give you a big shout out on air, but every single pledge will give you an invite to our private Slack channel, The Hub, where you can join other supporters of the show every day for the Inside Baseball conversation about all things home technology. Yep, absolutely. And if you'd like to support the show but can't do it financially, we completely understand. If you can help the show out by giving a five-star review on iTunes or the podcast app of your choice that you use, five stars, you know, that'd be great. That's the going price these days, I hear.

So, you know. That's it. Yeah, give us five stars. That's it. Yeah. So as we, uh, as we wind down the show here this week, we've got a couple of CDA things we want to, uh, talk about very quickly. First of all, the quicker one of the two is be sure to tune in next week. We're going to be doing our CDA preview show and, uh, that'll be a lot of fun. You know, we're, we're always tuned into Cedia and excited about what's going to be going on out there. And so we look forward to sharing our thoughts about what we're looking forward to at Cedia. And you know, if you have anything that you're looking forward to or big themes that you think will be prevalent at the show and want us to

mention those on air, take a minute to shoot us an email. Again, that's feedback at hometech.fm, feedback at hometech.fm. We would absolutely love to hear from you. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great idea. One thing I'm looking forward to, Jason, is the Hometech Happy Hour. Absolutely. That's going to be on Thursday, September 6th at 5.30 p.m. at the Field Irish Pub and Restaurant on Fifth Avenue there in San Diego. It is a short, what, couple blocks? You don't have to take an Uber or anything. Just cross the street.

Don't get hit by the train. That's right. Walk maybe a block or two, and you're there. You're done. Just come on upstairs, have a seat, and a drink. And, yeah, it's a great time, great place to be. Yeah, it's a fantastic venue. We did the same event there last year, so this will be our second annual Home Tech Happy Hour.

And it literally is like two blocks from the convention center. You just walk out, walk north on Fifth Avenue there, and it's at a place called The Field. Really cool spot right there in the heart of the Gaslamp Quarter, and a lot of good scenery, people watching. There's all kinds of restaurants and bars and stuff right there on that strip, so a really fun place to be. We're going to do that event early in the evening, again, 5.30 to 7 p.m., so we'll leave you plenty of time to go attend your big events that night. I think Control 4 is having their party that night,

and I'm sure there's probably half a dozen other big events and about a million networking dinners and things of that nature going on. So come by, show up, you know, hang out for 30 minutes, hang out for an hour and a half, whatever works. We'd love to have you there. Um, home tech.fm slash happy hour. Please do take a minute to go there to that website, home tech.fm slash happy hour and RSVP to let us know you're coming. We definitely need to have a headcount. So we would greatly appreciate that. Yep. Yeah, we don't want to get in trouble with a fire marshal, right?

That's right. That's the problem. This year, we do have a host sponsor. We'd really like to give a big shout-out and a thank you to Chaumain Software and Apps. These guys develop drivers for Control 4, Crestron, Elan, RTI, Q-SYS, and URC. And they either do it directly for manufacturers or they fund it through licensing on a per-project basis. To find out more, you can go to chowmainsoft.com.

We also have a bunch of happy hour friend options to sponsor open. And there's a couple of things. If you'd like to know how you can sponsor or help out with the festivities there at Home Tech Happy Hour, go to hometech.fm slash happy hour. Absolutely. I will echo what you said there and send a big thank you out

to Chow Main Software and Apps. We really appreciate your sponsorship. And if you do attend the event, be sure to go by and say hi to those guys. We really appreciate their generous support of the show and of this event. So with that, Seth, I think we'll wrap up. I look forward to catching up with you next week.

And then the week after that, we're going to have to figure out what the plan is out there in San Diego. Like I said at the beginning of the show, I'm going to be pretty busy, and I'm sure you are too, but we'll definitely have to try and make sure that we touch base and try to do a live show from out there in San Diego. That's always a good time. Yeah. No committing to anything right now, but we should do something like Home Tech Live from the happy hour and see how, one, if that even gets recorded.

Yeah. Yeah. But two, yeah, I think it'd be fun. So maybe we could experiment with like Facebook Live or something, right? Yeah. We haven't really done any of that in the past, and we probably should get into that. I know that several of the supporters of the show, including Chris Gamble and JJ Cannon and those guys, are all big users of Facebook Live and TJ. I see TJ on there quite a bit. So, you know, maybe we should get into that.

Maybe CD is a good time to give that a go. Not a bad idea. Not a bad idea. Well, Jason, next week, like you said, is our Cedia pre-show or whatever we're going to call it. I'm not sure. Yeah. Just we're going to sit down and take a look at what's going on at the show, what we think the big themes are going to be. And I do a little, like, pre-show discussion because that show will come out right before Cedia

and then we're there. There's no time left. This is it. There sure isn't. So that's exciting. So I look forward to connecting with you next week, Seth, and seeing you very soon out in San Diego. All right, great.

Thanks, everybody, for listening tonight and we'll talk to you next week. All right, thanks, everyone.