HomeTech.fm - Episode 234 - Getting to Know Caavo with Ashish Aggarwal

Episode Date: November 16, 2018

On this week’s episode of HomeTech: We are joined by Ashish Aggarwal, Co-Founder of Caavo. Ashish discusses the company’s novel approach to simplifying the TV-viewing experience. Caavo is an innovative and affordable product which solves a growing challenge for viewers today—the cumbersome and complicated experience of accessing content across multiple apps and disparate devices. Tune in to learn more!

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, November 16th from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. From Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. Seth, how you doing? Good, man. Good. It's Wednesday. I can't believe it's Wednesday. The week is already like, I can't. It's flying the week is already I can't it's flying by as always

it's hump day and I yeah I can't believe it so this will actually be Friday when this airs and I'm excited for this one we had Ashish Agarwal on who is the co-founder of Kavo and

this is an interview we've been working to line up for quite a while. Kavo, anyone who listens to the show or follows the tech press is probably familiar with. A very cool device that sort of aggregates different devices, including streaming and set-top boxes and gaming consoles. And you plug them in and it does a control and universal search for content across multiple devices. And Ashish was kind enough to come on and join us during a very busy time. They just launched their control center not too long ago and sealed a big deal with Best Buy recently. So things are going great for Kavo. And I really enjoyed learning more about the product.

I know you've got one in your home now, Seth, and I'm not sure how far along you are in that journey in terms of using the device and sort of getting used to it, but really enjoyed speaking with Ashish and learning more about it. Yeah, no, it was a good interview. And it, well, we talked to him for quite a while. So I think what we should do now is just jump right into Home Tech Headlines and then get to the interview. Let's do it. Yep. Stay tuned for that.

And let's hit some headlines here. We now have pricing on Ikea's Trod Free Blinds. According to tech blog Technique Can. That was good. It's a very Swedish. Yeah. Everything is in Swedish there. The rolling shades can be picked up in two different options.

It seems from what I got from the translation-ish that they're sheer and blackout, and the pricing will start at $99 or 99 euro, which is about $115 for the smaller size shade and run up to about 139 euro or about $160 for the largest size. That is pretty competitive. Yeah, those are some low price points and definitely worth taking a hard look at if you're in the market for motorized blinds. Trod free from Ikea.

Got a pretty compelling offering there. Shifting gears here to the streaming market, we now have a name and a release window for Disney's upcoming streaming platform. It will be called Disney Plus and is slated to launch in late 2019. The new service will offer a number of exclusive original shows and movies and will also incidentally result in Netflix losing a bunch of content, namely everything Star Wars, Pixar, or Marvel. They missed. They should have called it Disney Vault.

I don't know why they didn't. Disney Plus. They missed. Come on. Yeah, Disney Vault. I don't know why they didn't. Disney Plus. They missed. Come on. Yeah, missed. Swing and a miss. AT&T offered some more details about a new streaming set-top box while also spilling out how it will eventually end its satellite service and cut costs.

AT&T CFO John Stevens spoke Wednesday morning. It's a device that allows us to deliver a self-install box. This allows the customer to use their own broadband and they get a full service premium package that we would normally deliver off satellite over our IP-based U-verse service. Very interesting. Yeah, yeah. He made these comments apparently at a conference, and I think it makes sense. I think it's a lot of money for them to support those legacy satellite boxes, and things are all moving to the network anyways. So interesting to see AT&T and DirecTV moving in that direction as well. TiVo just introduced a new six-tuner, one-terabyte bolt DVR to the consumer market. This $300 unit is designed

solely for cable customers who are dissatisfied with their providers current hardware options. And this comes on the heels, I think of a of a similar three terabyte unit. So $300 bringing the price point down on this one a little bit and a good option if you're a cable subscriber, but perhaps not happy with the hardware you've got in your home and speaking of hardware t-mobile another uh another what do they call these things vmp mp mp3 vpd yeah something uh t-mobile is upcoming tv service may just t-mobile's upcoming tv service may just be around the corner. If a new FCC filing is any indication, a set-top box likely built for the service surfaced on a filing made by Koana Media. Thanks, Jason.

A company that previously built set-top boxes for T-Mobile's Layer 3 TV subsidiary. The box is being called the T-Mobile Mini, and information about the exact functionality of the device is sparse, but photos show that it features HDMI pass-through, which may be used to incorporate third-party streaming devices or game consoles without the need to switch back and forth between different TV inputs. Very interesting. And I feel like every week there's just more and more conversations and stories about streaming media and that whole landscape continues to evolve very, very rapidly, which of course segues nicely into our interview, which we're going to get into here in a moment. Again, we had Ashishan, co-founder of Kavo. Really neat device. If you're not familiar with

it, definitely stay tuned for that and learn about what they're doing, a really unique approach to the market. If you're interested in any links to the topics we've discussed here in our quick news section tonight, those can be found in our show notes as well as other information about the show, of course, at hometech.fm. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll send you show reminders and occasional updates about all of the great things going on here in the world of home tech. All right. And so without any further ado, let's go ahead and jump into our interview with Ashish Agarwal, co-founder of Kavo. And we'll come back out after the interview and offer a few of our thoughts of our own.

Hey, Ashish, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm doing fine, Jason and Seth. It's great to be on the show. Great to be talking to you guys. Yeah, we're excited to have you. I'm sure it's a busy time and we've been coordinating for a little while to try and get you on. So we're happy to have you here. Appreciate you taking some time out of what I'm sure is a very, very busy schedule. We're going to jump in and talk all about Kavo here tonight and talk about your background and the home technology scene at large, of course. But let's start with your background. And for the benefit of our listeners, why don't you give us just a quick

personal introduction and talk about some of your history here in the industry? Yeah. Since we're going to talk more about Kavo as a product, I really want the focus to be there, but happy to jump into background because I've always believed what you create is far more interesting than who you are. But just as a history, I've always been into tech. To me, my pride is when most people say a problem can't be solved, I figure out how to solve it. And hopefully it's meaningful. Background wise, I've always been a good student. I did my PhD completely funded, scholarship and everything from Santa Barbara.

Some best professors in the world. I was always into audio. I had a couple of patents in MP3 and AAC world. And then after school, I joined a startup that actually built the iPod for Apple. It was called Portal Player. Not very well known because Apple kept it as a really great secret. But a lot of people do know it. Had a nice career run, got married, moved down south and joined Harman, another audio company.

But I still remember, like as a story, I still remember I came from signal processing. To me, there was never an analog signal ever existing. Like I'm not that old. When I went to Harman, people always spoke about analog and speakers. I'm like, what is this world? Like we have 200 engineers doing speaker design and we have three that are writing software, right? And that was my initiation into like custom install,

the AVR world, the complexities around it, right? Before that, I was an iPod guy, right? Look at a millennial, right? You have your phone, you have your headphones, you have your content, you're good to go. Right. But then you go into this world where it's nice high end complexities around setup, quality of video, audio devices. That's the world I grew up in. And really thankful to Gina Harmon for giving me the opportunities I had at Harman. And after that, I did my first startup, which essentially revolved around how to take devices and synchronize them. And I applied that fundamental theory to speakers. So I created a 3D sound space in which wireless speakers were synchronized to picoseconds so that they could create an amazing sound field right and what i had as part of that

was also an hdmi switch that would control the devices at that point i met blake and blake and andrew um blake ricorian is a co-founder of sling um he saw that product he first played the doom 3 game which we which i was rendering for the first time ever in 128 object format audio, which, you know, even now people haven't done it. Like, oh my goodness, this is great. But he said, there's a bigger picture here, which is if you can control the devices, right, I think we should be going down that path. And I said, yes, my business plan was all around that. I think it needs a lot of energy investment. And he said, I'm happy to do it as long as you can prove it to me that you can solve the problem. Because there are bones and bodies along the way.

I can count 20 other companies that have tried to solve this problem and have failed. And I think the real big difference and the harder way to do it is actually be closer to the device than to be to the person controlling the device. Every other remote control vendor has always been only with the user, not close to device. So we said we have to know the state of the device in order to meaningfully control it. And that you can't do sitting at your couch. You have to be next to the device. So we had to make an HDMI. That was the genesis of the whole thought, right? So yeah, so that's how we are. Yeah, no, that's really, really interesting perspective. I'd never thought of it in those

terms, but that makes a lot of sense. For the benefit of anybody listening who may not be familiar with Kavo, because obviously that last comment you made was a reference to your latest venture, which is Kavo, and we're going to talk quite a bit about that. Give the quick elevator pitch version, a couple minutes or less. What is Kavo? What makes it special? So the largest and the best glass in your house is your TV. And the complexity around consumption of devices and content around your TV is so large that it is the most underutilized screen in your home. It is also the only device that's a shared experience in your home as opposed to your phones in your laptop. How to make that device really be an interesting member in your family is what Kaavo is about. So what Kaavo does is it allows you to seamlessly connect and control all the devices that are connected to TV, search across content landscape and launch those content pieces across the various devices that you may have connected. And this is not just, we made this device essentially where it's a man's world.

We still see that, not to be sexist, but it is the man of the house that installs typically products like this. And everybody else struggles to use it. Everybody else in the home has to live up with it. We made a product where if you as a man of the house, and hopefully we're going to change that equation soon, install it, your three-year-old to your eight-year-old, and I have exact examples, my three-year-old son to my eight-year-old mom, all use Kaavo without now hurling the remote back at me. Two years ago, they used to, but they don't do it.

So Kaavo is a venture which attempts, and I can hopefully claim now that it solves, for a very large percentage of people the inability to use your tv and your services and devices connected to your tv with a very seamless interface that's uh it's interesting you brought those examples up because i i have see right here i've got the uh the new control center uh remote and it's right actually sitting next to me right here um i i've set it up i've used it it, and I was having trouble identifying who the product was for. And it's interesting you say, like, okay, and Jason and I have talked about this on the show since day one, there's usually somebody that's very tech-centric in the house who gets into this technology stuff,

and they start putting light dimmers in, and they start putting other torture devices in and they start putting other torture devices in for the rest of the people in the house to try and figure out how to juggle remotes and get like that's that's me in my house clearly i'm the one messing around with the remote and then my wife gets upset because the tv doesn't work um so i i my question i guess in a roundabout way is who at the end of the day who who is Kaavo for? Who is this product made for? So, and that's an amazing question because we all come from a world where, you know,

we geek out on devices, either installers or ourselves, right? We look at Kaavo as a product made for your family, for a living room TV, which is a shared experience, a home that has people other than the person who installed it that can use and live with it. So imagine a journey of a tech device in a home. Most tech devices that we are used to live with the person who actually installs and uses the product. If it's an installer, anything that has to be changed, the installer has to be called back again.

You buy a new device, half of the times you're worried about how long it's going to take for the new device to integrate in your home. We made a product where even if it may start out by us installing the product, very clearly it should be the one that's accepted and clearly enjoyed by the rest of the family. So what is super important is that this is a family remote. This is not a remote that is only for the man's cave. So we are attempting to go down that path where eventually the wife, in fact, gives it to a husband to solve her own problem and say, look, I got your Christmas gift, right? Because it really solves my problem, not yours. That's the best gift you can give, right? Where

your husband is happy and the wife is saying it solved my problem, right?. That's the best gift you can give, right? Where your husband is happy and the wife is saying, it solved my problem, right? And really it is that target audience that we want to make sure that we can take the product to. It may start off as an enthusiast product because everybody who knows this problem is looking out for solutions like this.

But, and I can walk you through and I'm happy to walk you through every single innovation that we've done in this product to make sure that it, it takes care of that audience and a couple of features, especially. So, you know, I'm happy to talk about, I've picked up on a number of those when I was using it. Like especially like when you kind of, I don't know if what you've done with the remote, but you like hover your finger on a button or you rest your finger on a button

and the tv actually tells you what that button will do and that's we'll get to that but that's that i can see that you guys have built a lot of those features and it's actually what made me confused about who who this product was for because clearly it's marketed to me uh the the tech geek who wants a universal remote. But when I got it and started using it, it wasn't the type of product that I would expect to be using myself. The family remote that you've said kind of clears up a lot of the questions that I had as to how that would work. Yeah, but I don't think we're marketing it to you. It's just that your antennas are so tuned into a product like this

that you're getting it. Fair enough, fair enough, yeah. Yeah, it is true. And we have seen our initial demographic is all about, you know, people who have had this problem, really severe problem, and they've gone and solved it. But, you know, it's almost like a fine wine i would love for you to put it in your home okay where your other people in your home like whether

it's your parents put it in your parents house and see what reaction you get like if you have kids if you're married you have a wife or a husband, like being completely politically correct. You should like just see the reaction, right? To us, when we get that feedback saying, wow, I have solved not your problem, but your better half's problem or your children's problem or your parents' problem. I think that's when we will feel proud about ourselves. Sure, sure. That makes a lot of sense. So we've talked quite a bit conceptually, and I love the vision behind it. And I think that having that sort of North Star in terms of trying to develop a product that is useful for everybody in the house and not just the tech

geek is a great way to think about it. Because Seth and I joke on the show a lot about how many products come to market that are designed for the single male living in a high-end condo near Silicon Valley. And that's pretty much like the target market for that product. So I'd love to hear that you're thinking about, you know, more everyday users, mere mortals, as I call them, you know, people that just need something simple and reliable that works. So I love that vision. But let's talk a little bit more specifically about the device so people can get a little bit more context in case they're still not totally clear, you know, what this device is and how it might fit in to their home. I think a great place to start that is just the physical product itself.

Like when you buy one of these units, and I know you just came out with a control center, and I think you're still, I'm not sure if you still have the original model, the bigger one, so you could maybe talk about how those compare. But what's in the box? What are the basic ins and outs? And how does this fit in to the entertainment picture of a typical home? Yeah. So let's focus on control center for now. It keeps it very simple and we can tie it to the classic later on. When you open the box, what you see are really two big pieces of hardware.

One is a shiny black box that has four HDMI inputs on the back and one HDMI output and some other connections, but these are the main ones. And you see a remote control. Okay. What this product is asking you to do is the devices that today you either would have connected directly to the TV or to your audio video receiver in AVR, you would unplug from those and plug it into Kavo. The first step that Kavo does

is automatically recognizes what you've connected. That itself is big. Like you no longer have to put a model number, blah, blah, blah, and try to get some IR codes and a bunch of other things. And then it goes through a series of control tests to figure out what's the best scenario for you. Given your TV setup, given your AVR, half the time CEC works, half the time CEC

doesn't work, half the time IR works, half the time IP works. We do a huge bunch of compatibility tests to figure out what's the best way to make your life the simplest you can. And in 90% cases, we just make it so simple that you never have to worry about it. In some cases, the complexity still remains high and we can solve for those in many different ways. So the first step you did is you connected all your devices, Kavo recognized it and configured it for control. That's what we call, like now you're ready to control your devices.

The next step really is about search. So the first thing Carver does is control all your devices, right? That are connected to Carver, AVR, TV, and other downstream devices. The next step is to allow users to use their voice to search disparate pieces of content, whether content lives on your live TV box, whether it lives on your OTT streaming device, or it lives in YouTube world or in Plex

world, right? We have a database on our backend to know where the content lives across what apps. Okay. We pull that pieces of content and allow you to search. And in order to do that, during setup process, you go online, you create a Carvo account, you tell Carvo that these are the services

you subscribe to. This is your live TV provider, Dish, DirecTV, Xfinity, Spectrum, and what geography you are in. So we have all the channel lineups for you. We can tune to a channel. We can launch an OTT content.

And now you're ready to use Kavo. So now that the device is set up, this process should not take you more than 20 minutes, right? Once you're set up, you use your Kavo remote, like a universal remote to control all these devices, but also use the search functions, the voice-based search functions and you could use alexa and google home and other devices to control carver as well but you use voice-based search to search or navigate content pieces and navigate the devices themselves this is what carver does for

you like very simply allows you to control devices and search content across those yeah it it when i got to the setup portion of it this is where i was kind of thrown for a loop because it since you had to i say i say that kind of referencing back to what i was talking about being confused about who the product was for um like it's it's it works in in my house on a very limited basis. I have way too much stuff running here, but the, the unplugging of things, uh, and getting extra HDMI cables to do a loop through, to go through the Cabo itself and then back out kind of, kind of threw me off, uh, threw, threw me out, like out of the loop a little

bit. I can't, I don't know how to explain that very well, but that's what made me say, wait, this isn't a product for the everyday person in the house. This is a product for the tech geek. And then I start setting it up and start using your search function. And I'm seeing it's very easy to use and go through it and play shows. And I think I did the setup a couple times. And I think you're probably right. It is around that 20 minutes or so to get everything up and going and correctly

working. I do have to say that I was pretty impressed about how you discover devices and got kind of figured out what the best way to control them was. It works very well. And that part is easy. I'd say the hardest part is actually connecting up Kavo to the rest of your gear and making sure you have enough HDMI cables and that kind of thing. That can be kind of tough. Yes, I agree.

The 20 minutes starts after you plug in the devices. And we have for the longest time thought very hard about is there an option, right? and right now there is no really good option until you plug in these devices into cavo there's no reliable way to control it we just don't like the screen which says is your tv turned on like you know we have lived with that screen for many times press help to help right it just doesn't work for your grandma it doesn't work for your kid right it just you know it has to so yes you know what what we do for example to to to to save some of this we also have a video based install uh so somebody comes on video call with you and just helps you

plug in or for 79 we can send somebody to your home if you just don't want to plug. It's not a $5,000 installer coming to your home and rewiring all of this. So today's world, if you're not sure that you want to unplug your devices, which somebody else might have connected to your TV, we can send somebody to your home for $79 and just have it rewired, right? So yes, there is that step, but I think we feel that that step is less daunting than the day-to-day use and the breakage that happens afterwards if you use some of the other devices that you're used to using today. So once you take that step, it is so much more robust because the control protocols are all

really baked in. We can test many different things. We know the state of the system and your life after that is much, much better, right? So yeah, take that initial plug. Try to make it as simple as you can. We'll jump on a video call with you or we'll send somebody to your home to get it rewired if you need to. But after that, you don't need us anymore. Yeah, I noticed that on the website that you had a couple of different installation options and I didn't quite catch that from the website, but that's pretty cool.

So if somebody wants to purchase the device and perhaps they're not super technologically savvy and maybe they think they can do it themselves, but they find themselves needing a little bit of help, you guys will actually do what, like spin up a little video call on their mobile device and sort of walk them through how to install it? That's right. Yeah. Usually just because of resource management, it takes a little bit of time to get a slot. So we're trying to see it such that if somebody is in the middle of a setup,

we could still do it. Of course, we have a great customer service and they could do it for you. But otherwise, you can just set up a time and say, look, I want to go through a setup now and we could do a video call with you. Or if you just don't even want a video call but want to have somebody come to your home, we can do it for the gig economy or the Uber economy, as they call it.

Sending somebody to your home isn't that expensive anymore. So a great would come it's it's only 79 dollars like you know meaning you've lived in a world where sending somebody to the home used to be thousands of dollars right for a 79 dollar like you can have somebody come rewire set it up for you and go if you need to but you know we make it really simple we tell you to just disconnect your devices from your TV and plug it into Cargo and then we take care of the rest. Sometimes there are physical challenges in doing most homes they have either a TV mounted on the wall and devices underneath or they have a table or like a you know something where you put your TV on and devices underneath it makes it really really easy right so put yourself in a consumer's mode mind a normal home not a tech home not a geeked out home like yours and mine, but somebody who has

three normal devices, a live TV box, which is still 87 million homes have a live TV box, a streaming device, which is now close to 60% of US homes, and a game console, which is close to 60% of US homes. But that's right there, 60 million people who plug these three devices into their TV and that's their entertainment world, right? We really want to make sure that the problem is solved for them. And today, the way they have really solved the problem is either by ignoring it or living with it,

which is like, okay, you'll go to homes, you'll be surprised that kids even would have figured out the sequence of steps of buttons they have to press on each remote to start their game console. Like, I have to press this button on TV and I have to press this input. You ask kids and they're like, yeah, yeah, go to input three. You know, you do like, like they have no idea what is HDMI. They have no idea what is input.

They just want to play a game. And I was telling you, right, you spoke about how the touch function we put on the remote. There's one hidden function that we've really worked hard on that doesn't come out yet. And I'd love to say, which is if you picked up any of what we call original device remotes, like you picked up an Xbox remote or a PlayStation remote and pressed a button on it, we turn on the TV and put it to the right input. So somebody who needs to play a game just has to pick up the game remote control and start working. And since we know the state of the system, if you picked up a CAVO remote, a control center remote, it would control the right device, right? That itself, for somebody

who wants to play a game is huge. You pick up a game controller remote, press a button, your TV turns on, and you're playing the game right away. Yeah, no, that's definitely a convenient feature. And it's also a nice thing. You know, I think it goes back to your vision of having a product that's really designed for everybody in the home to use. Because, you know, I think back to some of the universal remotes that I've programmed in my time as an integrator, and you'd encounter maybe an older TV that didn't have discrete IR commands, for instance. And then the babysitter uses the factory remote to turn the TV on, and now the universal remote is completely out of sync. And for somebody who has any sort of programming background, that's a very easy thing to solve.

But it is very complex for the average user to figure out, oh, the remote thinks the TV's on, but it's actually off, or vice versa. And so those sort of, you know, little use cases that may sound small, they actually make a big, big difference to the overall user experience. So one way I did want to shift the conversation a little bit, you've alluded to some of the types of devices that the Kavo works with and can automatically recognize and control. What are some of the popular, like specific devices? I mean, I'm imagining Apple TV, Roku, you know, what are some of the popular specific devices? I mean, I'm imagining Apple TV, Roku. What are some of the different streaming devices if somebody's listening and trying to conceptualize, what do I plug into this thing? What are some of the more popular ones? So right now, as a requirement, we are saying buy a Kaavo only if you have a streaming device,

which means you have a Roku, an Apple TV, a Fire TV, or an Nvidia Shield. These are the four popular streaming devices. If you don't have these, like stay away from us for the time being till we do other things, right? So those are the most popular devices. In fact, we find, at least in our segment,

our connection to Apple TV is by far the most, which is surprising because Apple TV's penetration in the market is not as high as Roku or Fire TV. But these four devices we work really well with. And then we start to add other things. So live TV boxes such as Dish, DirecTV, Xfinity, and Spectrum, we are deeply integrated. So we can not only control them, but we can pull out your DVR list and actually search against the DVR list

using your voice, which is really deep. For every other setup box out there, whether it's Verizon, whether it's Cox, we can do control of that box and tune the right channel for you and search content. So if you search for Anderson Cooper, it would tell you that it's on this channel, like CNN or whatever it is,

and then you click on it and it tunes to the channel. So for every setup box out there, we can control it and tune to the right channel. For these four specific providers, we can launch the content on DVR for you, right? And then in terms of control, you can add soundbars and AVRs and TVs, and you can add Blu-ray players, game consoles,

of course, PS4, PS, PlayStations, and Xbox, just basic controls of these devices. Like one thing we see is people use, people actually have a lot of Blu-ray players in their homes still. And the use of a game console to actually watch your Blu-ray is far more cumbersome

than it is to use your Blu-ray player, which is a really inexpensive device today. But what we're seeing, a major shift is people are using Kavo remote to watch Blu-ray on their game consoles because it's easy using a game console remote actually to watch a blu-ray disc for movie for really high end like you know 4k super high quality movies is still very tricky like you know you can't really use a game controller remote that well fast forwards are tricky and pause and play are tricky and press option. But Kavo remote acts

great for game console. So those are the devices that we really see connections, very large level connections to. One of the interesting things that I saw, and I don't remember or know if this exists on the original Kavo, but when the control center came out uh you guys had a service plan uh price that went along with it um let's talk a little bit about that and what you get along with uh with that service plan yeah so i want to like you know i um i want to change the conversation a little bit from a consumer's perspective to a market perspective on this as well.

And what you get for it is very simple, which is you get voice-based search functionality, which you don't get if you don't do a subscription plan. You'll get a remote control, which is better than any other remote control out there. You'll get a universal remote without a subscription plan. But all the cloud-based search your lists you can create lists and share lists we do a lot of curated content now like we we we get all the like super amazing people like terence had it does

like music for films so he has a list of films where he really loves the music now that kind of information you you don't get and those are the things we bring for subscription but fundamentally guys what i want to talk about is today like as somebody who's in hardware who's in software when i see when i see a device that doesn't have a subscription, my first reaction to that is that unless it's a dumb device, they are using my data somehow to make money. There is no other way to make money. There is no other way to make money. The hardware doesn't make money for anybody except Apple. Nobody in the world makes money on hardware. If it has a lot of software on it, right,

then how are they even sustaining that software development? It is a huge amount of effort that has to go in to keep search up to date. Like, you know, people have gotten so used to free. You go to Google and search for free but is it really free because you are the product then yeah so we we very clearly wanted to stay away and i feel that next year we'll see a huge we are already seeing validation for it it's like okay great if you're charging me fee i can be assured that you are not selling my data are you trying to tell me that my refrigerator with my giant with the giant touch screen on it's going to stop working in a couple years because i i i mean you're you're

using this to maintain the product is what it sounds like and and that's that's great that's what that's why i pay for apps that's why i pay subscriptions on apps is because i want those apps to continue to work and that's why and let's let's like the service plan is like not 25 a month or something like that it's it's like two or three dollars right i mean it's nothing yeah it's two dollars a month twenty dollars a year now we have a lifetime option for sixty dollars so you pay and you forget about it right yeah so yeah meaning we look say i think you should be worried about if your refrigerator does keep on working and doesn't ask you for money like now he now that refrigerator is watching you okay and and now it's doing things that you really don't want it to

do that's where the worry is like it's not that it will stop working right if it stopped working i think you should be happy but if it kept on working and still didn't charge you money you know you put your nest thermostat at home like it has a camera you put your ring it has a camera i use like yeah i was in with a tech friend of mine and we are going and he's using ways and i said i don't use ways i like ways but you know i don't use it because it wants to track you even when you're not using the app. Right. Like, oh, really? It does that?

I'm like, you're just talking about privacy and everything, and you just don't even read it. You just downloaded Waze and said okay to it. It might be okay for people, but we as a company wanted to be very, very clear that, look, guys, that look guys this this functionality that we bring to you okay uh can either be paid by you or are paid by you indirectly by targeting you so we we are asking you to pay so that we don't have to to resort to targeting you which is really where everybody else has gone and big guys have gone not just small guys big guys have gone there right and small guys. Big guys have gone there, right? And you think $35 for Chromecast pays any bills? You think $40 for Roku pays anything?

Like, how can it be true? Right? So that's the question we are. And, you know, some consumers might go out in the open and say, oh, it has subscription fee. But from the units we have sold and the customers, I think we are happy the set we have today. Right. Really large number.

Yeah. And I think it's a great validation that we have taken a bold move and it is in the right direction. Well, I applaud you for that if those are the reasons. I'm interested, you brought up a number of those devices like Apple TV and Roku in our conversation here. And every one of those devices you mentioned

is competing for what I think we talk about on the show, and we didn't coin this phrase, it's called input zero. It's the first input you turn on when you get to your TV. And clearly, Kavo is an input zero device. I mean, you're sitting over the top of everything else. And I'm curious as to where you see Kavo fits in into a world where these types of streaming devices or even cable boxes start to disappear off the landscape and move into an app on the TV. Where do you see Kavo fitting in to that market in three, five, ten years from now? So, you know, like four years ago when we formed the company, we are all hoping that that happens.

Like, we don't love to build hardware just because we like to build, like because we can build great hardware. It is super hard. It's super hard and super challenging to build as a small company. Hardware is no longer built by small companies. It's always now like 95% of hardware is only built by large companies, right? And successes in hardware are very small. But we don't see the industry moving towards that at all. They are still fighting bitterly which app resides on which.

TV companies are slow to move, extremely slow to move. Roku is trying to make TVs. Fire TV is trying to make TVs. Soon maybe Apple TV is trying to make TVs. And then set-top boxes are not losing their ground. They're coming up with new devices and new ways in which people would plug in. The game console doesn't go away. So what we put a stake in the ground is that we would love that the TV becomes the only source of consumption, but it is not happening.

So we have to try and solve this. So if you truly ask me, we don't see, we wouldn't exist, we only exist because there's so much fragmentation in the marketplace from a business perspective, not from a technology perspective, but from a business perspective, right? The TV guys don't want to,

like if you put an Android TV on a TV, whose TV is it, right? Is it Sony's tv or is it google's tv right when you put roku tv on a tcl is it a tcl tv or is it a roku tv who monetizes it how does it get monetized right and then samsung and lg they have a few apps but they don't have all the apps are they going to to get all the apps? For one year, maybe I'll be able to live with the apps that are there. But the next year when I want to subscribe to my Fubo TV, it doesn't have it. I'm going to connect a $40 Roku. Now my complexity goes up, right? Or Spectrum pushes to me in my home now, hey, look, I would love to have you back as a customer.

Here's your $70, okay, an Android TV device with six apps loaded. Be happy, right? We have cut the cost for you. It is a business push that is seeing fragmentation in the marketplace. And we are trying to solve that by using a device that makes it easy for you, right? So it lives with you. You don't have to say, oh, I'm going to stick to my smart TV and just live with the app that comes with it because the complexity is too high.

Just go and get any device you want. We will handle it for you. Very nice. And devices have become, yeah. And devices have become super inexpensive. That's the way people want to, businesses want to grab territory. We just want to make it easy for consumers

to actually use whatever devices they want. Like Chromecast, such a great device. Like, you know, millennials would love to make it easy for consumers to actually use whatever devices they want like chromecast such a great device like you know millennials would love to use it but the complexity around to using the tv remote turning it on and turning it off afterwards is a lot we detect that you started a chromecast session turn on your tv switch it to right and put you're ready to go very nice yeah we yeah you when you do voice sets one of the things like my my sister bought a unit okay meaning you know she said i'm not like she didn't take a unit free from me she bought a unit she said the biggest value to me is my niece who's 12 year old is now not

watching as much youtube video on the laptop as she's now watching on the tv because the search makes it super easy to surface YouTube on your TV, right? Those are the changing landscapes. And I don't think people are looking at it from a consumer's perspective to make it. On Apple TV, you have to specifically say, search this on YouTube in order for search. Why should you say that?

Why should you just search and have it surface for everything where it's available right these are all constraints that businesses put in front of consumers and we are trying to see if we can just simplify hey i don't know where it is i just want to watch that katie perry video like and you search for it and it there may be a 30 minute documentary documentary on Netflix and a five-minute video on YouTube. Both are exciting enough. Like, I love Katy Perry, so I'm going to just search for Katy Perry.

So can we make these experiences far more enjoyable and break some of the boundaries that are artificially created around us just because the way companies work, right? And that's really where we are trying to drive towards. Interesting. Well, I'm sold. So actually I've already been sold. But the question I have, I guess for our listeners, if they wanted to go out and get a Kavo, where do they go and how much is it going to cost them?

Since you've brought up the cost of the low cost devices, everything's gone down. The price of Kavolo has gone down too since the last we talked about. Yeah, that's also pretty interesting, right? Because the first gen, there was nothing in the technology landscape to do this. No, there was nothing in the world.

We have like seven FPGAs in the first generation product because nothing could consume a 4K signal into a silicon, analyze, do all the controls and then spit it out in real time. There was nothing that could do this. We had to, like people in the industry said, there is nothing out there. How did you do it?

And we did it at great cost. But we knew that the market we want to go after is not the one that wants to pay 400. There's a good market for it i'm not saying there isn't one but the market was three year old and the eight year old right like and everybody in between so we we have like first gen itself we were working on our second gen kind of right and it became a reality like launching two hardware products one at 400 and one at 99 in one year for a startup is a super amazing feat.

Right. So our product is $99 today to buy, and you can buy it on carver.com. You can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it on Best Buy, right? We have promotions going on sometimes to just like, you know, make it easier for you, but really it is a $99 product and you can get a lifetime subscription for 59. Sometimes we discount it to 49 or you can get a yearly subscription. We give it 45 days free. You can try it out or you can go monthly if you wanted to, right?

So that's really what the product is about. You know, it ships in two days. You can go, we are in all Best Buy stores. So walk into a Best Buy store and say, I want my cavo. If you're not happy, write to me directly, and I'll answer every single query, figure out why you're not happy about it.

I can't let this go because I do have one question about the new cavo control center versus the old cavo. Where's the wood grain? I miss the wood grain. We saw that on the first one. It was so unique of a choice. Where's the wood grain? I miss the wood grain. We saw that on the first one. It was so unique of a choice. And I mean, it brought us back to like our childhood with the VCRs and everything.

Like that's what we saw. But what happened? No. So the wood is super expensive to produce in a sustainable. And plastics have become much easier to produce um in a sustainable and uh you know plastics have become much easier to produce but the wood um in an electronic product is super difficult it's super difficult so that was actual wood that was not like like that was actual wood that you had on there yeah it is oh wow yeah and and it is made in a sustainable way.

It's reinforced inside, conditioned and conditioned and conditioned to stay in a hot environment, for example, not bend, warp, things like that. So, you know, meaning we have some other prototypes for even the control center that we haven't yet released. And maybe one day we'll come out with it. But we had to make certain choices as to what direction we go. And we noticed that the enthusiasts love it, but most people care about functionality. And we made that choice to go down that path. We still have iconic, the real metal buttons on it.

And the carver button is really the first generation. We put a lot of effort in real materials like if you looked at our cables you know our remote control with real wood on the back and metal feet right materials are important to us but fundamentally we we had a goal internally that we want to bring it to mass market and at below hundred100. And it is still, like if you open this hood, like it's more than a TV inside. So, you know, and eventually I think we'll further and further propagate this technology and make it easier and lower and lower cost

as more people put, more silicon put functionality into this, you know, and integration cost. As more people put, more silicon put functionality into this, you know, and integration happens, it just is a scale-dependent variable. So if we are able to reduce costs further, maybe we can give you a wood back at the same cost or give you an option for doing that. A special deal.

Hey, also speaking of, very quickly, and we're up against our time here, so we'll wrap up here in just a moment, but speaking of the old unit versus the, versus the classic, I think you call it, versus the control center, I believe the control center added HDR. Is that correct? Yeah. So the major differences between the two, cost aside, is HDR that we added to the box

along with other audio formats, so Atmos and high-end format that it passes through. That's really the big difference. So it supports HDR now and passes through HDR. Cool. So a quarter of the price and you get HDR and additional formats and a nice small form factor and seems like a great deal.

I know Seth has his and seems to be a fan and I haven't yet picked one up, but the holidays are coming, so we'll see. We appreciate your time. You alluded to it a second ago. If anybody has any questions, maybe they want to learn more or perhaps they have a question about their Kavo

that they just bought, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you and learn more? Yeah, I'm happy to give out my direct email address, which is my first name, Ashish, A-S-H-I-S-H, at kavo.com. Happy to just reach out and discuss and talk. We have support email IDs.

We have media info. You can reach out anyway. They all come to us. We all look at every single email that comes. Phone calls become tricky because you get so many spams today. I'm happy to give out phone number, but I won't be able to make out spam versus non-spam. So email is the best way. So reach out to me anytime. I'm happy to answer questions. If they mention your name, they'll get a super high priority. Well, we appreciate that. And Ashish, we really do appreciate you coming on. I'm sure it's a super busy time.

We won't keep you any longer. But thanks so much for joining us and telling us about yourself and your background and what's going on at Kavo. Not just with the product, but with the vision. I really enjoyed hearing about what you guys are trying to do in the home. And so we really appreciated it. Thanks a lot. Yeah, thank you guys for your time. Just keep the communication lines open.

You get to hear from your guys. Let me know. I'm happy to work. There's a constant sense of improvement. We are never there. It is a complex problem where many companies have failed. I think we are at a 90% customer satisfaction mark and we'd love to get it to 95 in our next iteration. Yeah. That's great. Well, thanks so much, Ashish. Definitely keep us posted and

good luck with everything. Yeah. Thank you guys. Great talking to you. Thank you. All right. And that does it for our interview with Ashish Seth. Again, like I said at the beginning of the show, I really enjoyed the conversation, learned a whole lot. And I think the thing that struck me the most is I had a pretty good handle on the technology and how the device installs and what its intended functionality, meaning like the problem that it's trying to solve is. But what I really enjoyed and took away from it was the company's focus on really trying to make this a product for the everyday user. You and I talk about that a lot on the show and how products really get designed for more tech savvy people or single, let's face it, single males living in condos in Napa Valley or

sorry, in Silicon Valley or whatever it is. And so I thought it was good to hear about a company that really is keeping the consumer in mind and the everyday user and seems like they're heading in the right direction. Yeah, absolutely. That's the confusion I had when I first set the system up. And I said this in the interview too, like it was a strange system because it's very technical up front to get everything put in and installed correctly. And then to kind of go through the setup process is easy, but it's very technical as well. And then when you start using it, it's just a completely out of your way device. So it's a very striking device, I think.

I think they have a long way to go with it, but I also think they've come a very long way. So it's, and for $99, hard to beat. So yeah, we'll be interesting to see what they do with it in the future. Yeah, yeah. Great option for the holidays as well. Those are coming up next week, Seth. We're going to do our annual Black Friday special. So that'll be a lot of fun.

Tease that very quickly there. But like you said, at $99, a very compelling device and would definitely encourage everybody listening to go give that a hard look if you haven't done so already. Don't forget, you can join us live in the chat room on Wednesday evenings. We typically start around 7 or 7.30 p.m. Eastern. We'd love to have you. Got a few folks hanging out with us tonight, including Bruno. Haven't seen Bruno in a while. The man, the myth, the legend. Good to see

you in the chat room, Bruno. We appreciate it. If you're interested in joining the live chat again, that is on Wednesday evenings around 7 or 7.30 p.m. Eastern, and you can find out more at hometech.fm slash live. Nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a couple of picks of the week. First, Jason, I ran across this tweet. I'm going to have to tee it up a little bit because if you're not familiar with these kind of retro gaming systems that companies like Nintendo and I think Sega, maybe Atari have out, they're kind of like the little, they're little tiny miniature versions of the consoles from yesteryear, so to speak. So like Nintendo came out with the NES Classic

or something like that. I think they had the Nintendo Classic. And I think there's been a couple of other like, it was extremely successful. You can buy these things anywhere. And I think there's been a couple of other, like, it was extremely successful. You couldn't buy these things anywhere. And I think there's been a couple of other ones. And I found this tweet the other day. And, man, it's hilarious. This is the VHS classic. So if you were missing out on your VHS movies from the 80s and 90s, it was like, this is the way to go bundled with 16 vhs classic movies films ripped in 240i uh let's see does not record video does not come with a power adapter uh hdmi out image upscaled to 720p and audio in stereo where available this is great yeah those all those little like i think they're

called like emulator devices or whatever i'm not sure if that's the appropriate term for it but yeah like you said you've seen all these little consoles coming out that come pre-loaded with all the games and this is a a great play off that this is a great tweet yeah i'm trying to see what the movies are there's ferris bueller's day off, classic. Beverly Hills Cop, classic. Back to the Future. Batman, the original one. The one where you can't move his neck. And, oh, The Terminator. The Terminator, that's pretty good.

Home Alone, I see in there. Jurassic Park. These are some classics. Yeah, Little Mermaid. Makes me want to go dig back into the archives. Yeah, I got to say. Oh, Harrison Ford, The Fugitives, down there, too. This is pretty good movies in here.

That's a good one. Yeah, you definitely have to go check this out. Let's see. The Little Mermaid. I can't help but think of what was the. Wasn't there like a phallic symbol on the cover that the artists had like snuck in there? And once you noticed it, it was like the only thing you could see. There was on that one one i think they ended up

changing the cover it probably rectified that at some point anyways that's all i can think of when i see the cover disney plus what do you think the plus is for jason there you go well seth you've got another uh pick of the week on here on our show notes but there's actually nothing attached so i'm i'm being held in suspense on this one well this i think i've i talked about this on the show before uh but in the hub this morning uh james uh radcliffe was in there complaining about having to fix a fluke meter for like i don't know three or four hundred euro uh and he was like does anybody know of uh ethernet Ethernet testing device that you can get that's, you know, more reasonably affordable than going out and getting another one of these flukes? And I was like, oh, yeah, I've been using that POC Ethernet device.

And Jason, I'll put this in the show notes, too, so you can see it real quick. It's a little, basically a little tiny device that comes like in a pouch, and it comes with a little end that you put on the other side of the wire that you can do a wire map with. So this device talks to that, and it figures out if you have any bad wires. But it also does like speed tests and everything. But what's unique about this one is that it doesn't have a screen on it. It's just a little device. I've got mine sitting here. You use a USB thing to recharge it. You just click a button.

Nice. It turns on. And what you do is you actually use your app. It has an app on the phone. So Android, whatever. It's got it all on there. It's got TDR, so you can figure out how far, if you've got to cut the cable, you can figure out how far the cut is from where the test is. And I, or it makes sure that the cable is actually, you know, if it purports to be a hundred foot, um, that is actually a a hundred foot cable.

Um, so it's actually really easy to use. What's kind of funny is the reason this is the pick of the week is because when we first started recording, I had a cable problem. cable problem i we were when we first sat down and i kind of pointed to a cable and wiggled it and then we were offline uh and uh so right now i'm testing that cable so uh it says it's okay so it must be something wrong with the end or the the like the jack with no trim plate behind me yeah well there you go um yep go. Yep. I'll, I'll figure it out later, but this is a 96 foot cable that I plugged in evidently. So pretty good. No, this is neat. I think you and I have talked about this on the show before this does look familiar, but it's like a handy little tool, the Swiss army knife for it admins, as it says on the website. So go check

that out. I think that's a pretty neat idea and certainly something that I would be purchasing if I was still, or at least would consider purchasing if I was still out in the field. So go give that a look. Yeah, worth getting and worth looking into if you're into that kind of thing. Cool. Well, if you're listening

and you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or ideas for a show topic, any and all of the above, give us a shout. We'd love to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Again, that email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Or if you'd prefer, head on over to the website, hometech.fm slash feedback, and fill out the online form. We definitely read all of those messages and always enjoy hearing from our supporters. Yep. And we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but also,

especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support Home Tech for as little as $1 a month any pledge over five hundred dollars a month gets you a shout out on the show but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private slack channel the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day to complain about how much it costs to repair fluke meters there you go uh yeah and seth we did want to give a big thanks to Von Hong Ping. I got an easy name finally. Von Hong Ping came on at the $5 level this week.

And Von, we really, really appreciate that. Again, if you do come on at that $5 level, we'll give you a big shout out on air. For anyone listening who can't contribute to the show financially but want to support us, we would absolutely welcome a review on iTunes or your podcast app of choice. We're shooting for five stars here. We'd love that review, but any review is great. Let us know what we're doing well,

what we could improve on. Any of that is all good. We would welcome that. Yep, absolutely. Well, Jason, next week is Thanksgiving, and as you kind of teased earlier we're going to try and sit down and and do a deep dive on some of the black friday deals uh that that are that it's not even black friday anymore it's black black october so

you can get deals on stuff all all month long that's true uh they just want to sell you stuff now so um yeah that we'll have we'll have what black friday and then of course cyber monday that comes cyber weekend i don't even know like it's pretty much everything everything now you can shop through this entire season basically um i i saw what's the big one in uh in china um i can't remember it's like friday it's the 11th i'm not sure but they they did uh alibaba did like so many bill i think they hit a billion dollars in 85 seconds 85 whole seconds that's that's obscene yeah so that's uh that's you know that's that's it's the month it's the month you buy gifts and that kind of thing singles day they've got to figure it out singles day singles day yeah here it is alaba Singles Day 2018 record sales on largest shopping event day.

Alibaba on Sunday tore through last year's Singles Day sales record, racking up more than $30.8 billion. $30.8 billion with a B in the 24-hour event. That's right. Wow. It's insane. Just one day of sales, and they do it right. Yeah, it's crazy.

All right, Seth. Well, fun show this week. Enjoyed sitting down with you and we'll look forward to getting together. I can't believe it's our annual Black Friday show again. Time certainly does fly and we'll look forward to reconvening with you next week. Yep. Sounds good, Jason. I'll talk to you next week.

All right. Take care.