HomeTech.fm - Episode 240 - CES 2019 Wrap-Up!

Episode Date: January 11, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: Join us as we discuss all the biggest stories from CES 2019! This year’s event was jam-packed with big releases and emerging trends from across the world of home technology. We’ve combed through all the biggest stories so you don’t have to. Don’t miss this special episode!

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm slash support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 11th. From Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, welcome back. You too, Seth. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Thank you. Did you have a good holiday season? I did, I did. You know, And last week, we had a guest. I wanted to kind of do a projects project with Cody.

Cody was kind of going to jump in. We joked around and said that you were still hungover from the new year. You did. Yeah. You did, and I was not. I was not, but I appreciate Cody jumping in all the same. We were just getting back from like two weeks gone. We were on the road all but eight days.

We were away from home this December. That pretty much is a hangover. Like if you had a different kind, but you're right. You're right. Yeah, it was a really, really busy season, but we had a lot of fun. But I'm excited to be back and just in time for CES 2019. We've got a real whopper of an episode here, Seth. Lots going on this week and really having a lot of fun just taking a look at what's going on out at CES. I've

never been out there in person, but it's always a really fun show to keep an eye on from a distance. Yes, I would say it's a good show from afar. That's what I hear. What do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. Wise Labs, the Kirkland, Washington-based makers of low-cost smart home security camera, has raised $20 million in new funding according to a filing with the SEC on Friday. $20 million for a $20 camera. If they had sold their camera for $30, would they get $30 million?

Yeah, they're an interesting one, man. But, you know, they're clearly getting some traction, so we'll keep an eye on them there. Roku recently announced its number of active accounts grew 40% year-over-year in 2018 to top 27 million by year end in addition its total streaming hours grew 61 year over year to 24 billion hours of movies tv shows sports and more being streamed across its devices in q4 2018 alone roku users streamed an estimated 7.3 billion hours, up about 68% year over year. So some impressive streaming numbers there from Roku. Amazon says more than 100 million Alexa-powered devices have been sold, a figure that shows the company's early lead in the virtual assistant technology is paying off.

Dave Lemp, Amazon Senior Vice President of Devices, confirmed the figure in an interview with The Verge. 100 million Alexa-powered devices. Wow. That's a lot. Yeah, the most surprising thing there to me, honestly, is that they released a number at all. They're notoriously secretive about that,

and I think probably the timing was not coincidental here with CES coming up. Yeah, well, Apple and their 10 home pods that they sold has got to be like, what are we doing wrong? Ouch. All right. The Zigbee Alliance and Thread Group have reached a critical milestone in IoT interoperability with the completion of the..1.0 specification and the announcement of..overthread certification program.

A little bit of a mouthful there. Developers of smart products can now use a, quote, mature, open, and certifiable interoperability language over low-power IP networks. This reduces product development risk and improves the consumer experience by reducing IoT fragmentation. Unbelievable. Like, Thread came out to be a standard, and now they're going to do another standard on top of the Thread standard to make another standard. Standard.

Whatever, guys. It's figured out. Such a strange, strange story. I mean, I'm lost on this one, honestly. Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting one for sure. Those are a few of the quick headlines that we wanted to touch on that weren't really directly related to CES.

There's obviously a ton more going on, and we're going to jump into all things CES here. What do you say we get started with that, Seth? Yeah, let's go ahead and get started. You know, I got to admit, Seth, I was looking at all of the headlines this week, and it's overwhelming. I wasn't totally sure how to even get started. It's a firehose. Yeah, exactly. It's definitely drinking from a firehose.

But definitely looking through all of the stories and sort of putting things all together, it became pretty clear that there were a few big trends. And obviously, TVs are always one of those at CES. That's really one of the big things as it relates to home technology that the show is known for. And so we're going to start out here by talking about some TV technology, and we're going to just come right out of the gate with the big one that I know engenders so much goodwill and good feelings from all of us. 8K. 8K. Definitely emerging as one of the big trends here at CES 2019. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, okay. We barely have 4K figured out, but let's go ahead and start advertising and shipping 8K TVs. I mean, there's barely an 8K or 4K.

Jeez, I can't even get these right. There's barely a 4K library of sources and streaming content or even device content like Blu-ray content out there right now. It's just getting off the ground. And now we're already talking about 8K. I don't know, man. This feels incredibly marketing heavy to me. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, definitely. You know, the big challenges we're going to talk about here, a friend of the show, Jack McDougall, had some great thoughts. We'll talk about those in just a second. But big challenges, obviously, content. There's not a lot of that out there. And infrastructure, clearly going to be a challenge. How do you transport that kind of signal around the house? That's a whole lot of data. But who wants to let those sort of obstacles get in the way of a good marketing story, right?

So we've got 8K sets from LG has an 88-inch 8K OLED that they're announcing, or that they announced, I should say. Samsung's got a 98-inch 8K. Sony looks like they've got 8Ks as well. And even TCL getting into the game partnership with Roku, they've got some 8K TVs that they're talking about. So those are the four offhand. I'm sure there are others out there. One of the things that I noticed is, at least in the headlines,

the bigger sets getting the the 8k mentioned which makes sense you know those extra pixels do become more important as the the tv gets bigger so again you've got 88 inch from lg and 98 inch from samsung i'll have to click into the story to hear what sony's doing but uh you know logical at least that that the bigger sets would get that but still a whole lot of questions if you need to sit within a foot and a half of your 88 inch tv you're barely going to notice you're going to be covered yeah yeah yeah i i uh unbelievable i mean this stuff is great for like digital signages and and when you get to larger screen sizes for like home theater but i don't think i don't think the theater technology and correct me if i'm wrong

but i don't think the theater technology has been really keeping pace with the panel like the oled and panel technology like the the panel tvs these days are where it's at for quality of picture where you get your darkest blacks and your brightest whites like i think you still have to even i mean i'm seeing people do crazy things like starting to install stacked projectors uh one on top of each other to get better and brighter pictures out of projectors so i don't know i i i think that uh the for the for the big stuff 8k makes a lot of sense to me me at least. For your everyday, I need a new kitchen TV. Oh, maybe I should go get the 8K, blah, blah, blah, blah. This makes a lot less

sense to me. Not a good story there. Yeah. I think bang for your buck panels are where it's at right now. As far as two-piece projection, I have to admit, I've fallen a little bit behind on that since I've moved out of the field doing integration projection, I have to admit, I've fallen a little bit behind on that since I've moved out of the field doing integration work. I used to do a lot of high-end theaters in my time as an integrator, and I was a little more up to speed with what was going on there. But yeah, I've heard the same thing in terms of stacking multiple projectors and some of the stuff that has to go on there, which is a little crazy.

You've got to get those nits. That's right. That's right. I don't know, Seth, if you wanted to touch on here quickly. I know you had some stuff in our show notes here from Jack McDougall, who's a friend of the show and had some great comments, I think, about some of the challenges with 8K. Yeah. And Jack is over with PixelGen, but I guess there was a 8K, 5K interconnect being announced at CES. And Jack is deep into the HDMI world,

so I thought his comments on this particular topic around 8K was fairly interesting. So I wanted to include it in the show here. He said, my thoughts on the 8K 5 meter plus interconnect already being announced at CES. 8K connectivity is definitely the next wave of work to look into. But let's not get carried away here. One, still no CTS cables, connector spec to follow. So this is just kind of like, yeah, throw in stuff against the wall, see what sticks.

Shoot from the hip. Yeah, yeah. You're going to buy these cables. Consumer electronics companies never do that. No, no. I don't know what you're talking about. They may hit the spec. They may not.

Who knows? There's no CE, Consumer Electronic, 48 gigabits per second sources. So there's not even test pattern generators. I mean, there's test pattern generators and graphic cards, but he said they don't count. Yeah, I mean, you get a beautiful bar test screen. I can see that. Look at that 8K picture.

Gorgeous. Yeah. Let's see. With no true consumer electronics, 48 gigabit per second ready sources, how does a cable manufacturer launch an 8K interconnect with literally no interoperability points? Again, no pattern generators they can't count uh no 8k content uh let's kind of cover to uh ad nauseum i love it there's no 8k content please don't get me started on this and that's it that's a good quote the rest of these are like all fleshed out and he's just like i don't even want to talk about it yeah yeah

exactly and then he's got two more points, 5A and 5B. I love how, I mean, you can tell Jack is an engineer when you start going into bullet points on Twitter. That's right. And then you're like, 5A, 5B. Early release of the technical innovation when there is quite literally no technical way to dispute, i.e. releasing an 8K ready cables into a world with no 8 sources is a very dangerous precedent. And B5V releasing these, it only forces companies to jump ahead of the proper engineering practice to catch up. So he's basically saying, let's get a few 48 gigabit per second consumer electronic

HDMI sources, you know, some kind of media player to exist, and then do a proper fitness to application characterization can be established so he's saying let's let's get this stuff in place first and then we can we can test and put the put the cables the right cables in and man you remember when hdmi first started like we had all these problems with like oh you got a bad cable or you got a bad you know this this you would you would you install a receiver and then uh and it wouldn work with the TV, or the source wouldn't go through the TV. And HDMI, for years for us, had a pretty bad name through the CD channel, right? I'd say it still does.

I mean, it's gotten better, but HDMI is still a fickle animal. Yeah, totally. So, I mean, this is why we have those headaches downstream from this. It's because companies just kind of, like you said, they just jump in and do this ahead of time when no one's ready for it. You know, your TV says 8K and there's no source or anything. What do you do? Right. Well, it's an interesting trend nonetheless and one that we are powerless to stop, I'm afraid, Seth.

So next year it'll be 16K. Right. I saw an article from Wired that had their thoughts on what the big trends for CES were going to be, and they had sort of funny names for each of them. And for 8K, they called it Filling the K-Hole. So there you go. I'll just leave that there.

All right, let's move on. And again, we're sticking still here with TVs. And one of the interesting trends that has clearly emerged is the inclusion of AirPlay 2 into a whole bunch of TVs. And we're hearing a lot about this. I'm reading a list here from The Verge. Here are all of the TVs getting AirPlay 2 in 2019. I'm not going to get into model numbers because there are several model numbers for each manufacturer, but they list four of them, LG, Samsung, Sony, and Vizio. And each one of those has anywhere from four to, I'd say,

six or seven different models that are all getting AirPlay 2 built in. And then I believe there was also kind of a separate story here about Samsung and their TVs getting AirPlay 2, but also supporting iTunes, apparently. So you're seeing Apple make a big push here into TV land. Pretty interesting. Yeah, I wonder why that could be. Cue the Jeopardy music. Yeah, right. Let me just put that could be. Cue the Jeopardy music. Yeah, right. We can just put that in post.

Yeah, this is very interesting. As Apple kind of pivots to become more of a service company and offer these pay-per-month services like Apple Music and, of course, the upcoming Apple TV service, it makes sense that they want to have, it makes sense for them to have those services available on more devices. You know, I think I've said this in the past, nobody talked about watching Netflix on their, what device they watch Netflix on. They talked about what show they watched on Netflix and whether they watched it on your Nintendo. I think you could watch Netflix on like your Nintendo Wii, like Nintendo. I mean, Netflix went nuts.

Like in the beginning they were, they were just trying to be everywhere. And sometimes the experience was horrible. It's gotten a lot better lately, but I think that's what Apple needs to do. They need to be everywhere for this, for this video product to be successful for them. They're just going to have to be everywhere.

And then the excitement is going to come from the content right it's not going to come from being an apple tv i wonder what this this kind of like means to me like the apple tv is dead like where's tv os with this like are they ever going to improve the apple tv like it's still my favorite of well i mean roku is knocking on the doors but it's it's still my favorite the media player at this point um for for a couple of reasons but man like what this kind of guts that line i would say yeah i don't know i wonder um i thought about that a little i haven't really pondered that too much i how those two sort of overlap. But yeah, it is an interesting question. I think, I mean, why would you pay $200? Right. I mean, the price point is definitely a consideration, especially with competitive products selling for under $100, under $50 in a lot of cases. But yeah, I think to

your point, the conversation is going to continue to shift away from like, what device are you using? Because these apps are going to become so ubiquitous that it's simply assumed that if you've got any level of technology in your viewing room, then you've probably got a way to access Netflix. And you've probably got a way to access Hulu and Amazon. And Apple is realizing that, yeah, they need to be the same way. So, you know, in my home alone, I've got a couple of different ways in our very simple family room setup to access those apps. And I think your point is spot on. Apple, this is what that move is about,

is making sure that they've got that ubiquity of their app or technology baked into enough devices that consumers don't have to necessarily think about, okay, if I want to use Apple's TV service, I've got to go buy this $200 device. Right. And just think what we just talked about with HDMI and 4K and 8K. Like, that goes away if the app is right there on the panel itself. There's no interconnectivity, right? There's no interconnects to worry about. Like you just launch the app, Apple TV is on your TV now.

Right. You know, it's so much more compelling than buying even a $50 box. It doesn't really matter what the other price points are. If the apps are built into the TV, man, we're getting close to that input zero that we're all hoping to get to. Yeah, that's right.

Well, speaking of apps, Seth, I know you also included a link here on our prep notes about Dave Zatz had a story, TiVo, as an app. Oh, man. And I know TiVo's one you follow pretty closely, and you were pretty excited about this story. I'll let you touch on that one here. Yeah, I saw it right before we came on the show.

Of course, I kind of follow Dave on Twitter. He's a really good follow. And for rumors and digging up dirt, I mean, last week's show was pretty much brought to you by Dave Zatz because, you know, nothing's coming out before CES, and he's the one digging in, like— Still finding stuff. Yeah, he's finding stuff, like, on cached images on servers and that kind of thing. So I don't know how he does it, but he's the one digging in like... Still finding stuff. Yeah, he's finding stuff like cached images on servers and that kind of thing. So I don't know how he does it, but he's a good follow. He put this video up about basically a TiVo app,

and it looks like it's going to be on the Fire TV, which is Amazon's thing, Apple TV, and Roku. And he kind of goes through and demos these a couple times in portrait mode video, by the way. He said he did say he was sorry for that, but it's kind of exciting that he was sitting there recording it. And basically you just launch an app that says TiVo on it and you have the familiar TiVo interface right there on the screen. What I didn't see, unfortunately, was like having the familiar TiVo remote because the TiVo remote is remote is great and i thought i'm pretty sure he was on roku or amazon i'm not sure which one

uh and but the interface seemed kind of sluggish and what i what i liked about tivo was like that like that performance driven like the ability to to like press a button on the tivo remote and it instantly be done on the TV. You change the channel, the channel changed. You hit guide, the guide's up. And that doesn't happen even with modern cable boxes these days. So I thought it was kind of slow. Of course, I wasn't sitting there mashing the buttons.

He was, but I was kind of watching the interface kind of build itself out. And it still seemed kind of slow. So maybe it's just an early prototype or it could just be TiVo itself. That's how it looks these days. But I did find it very interesting that you could get a TiVo app instead of hardware.

You can just get a TiVo app, install it on your device of choice and have full-fledged TiVo in your house. That's pretty cool. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it plays right perfectly into that theme we were just talking about where apps are really becoming more prevalent and ubiquitous and there's going to be much less thought given to the specific hardware that you have in

your home versus what subscriptions you have, right? Which, what, what content you have access to. So really interesting story there. A couple of other TV, I'd say sort of miscellaneous technologies that are interesting, rollable displays. And this is not a totally new technology. LG is showing it. I believe they showed it last year at CES. I know we've talked about this before. So it's always been like prototypes and early on. The difference here is they're actually starting to get closer to a ship date. So pricing is still to be determined, but they've got their signature series OLED TV R, R standing presumably for rollable. Again, pricing to be determined on this, but they're saying they're going to have it out

later this year. So that'll be an interesting one to keep an eye on and rollable displays and bendable displays are really, really a neat technology just from a pure like geek standpoint. The fact that they're able to do that now is pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, we, we, we fawned over this last year, I think, and I still don't feel like we're any further along than we were last year because what remains to be determined is the price and uh they're saying it's shipping later this year but we still don't know the price and i kind of don't want to wait i want to know what i want to know how much this tv i'm never going to be able to afford or buy it's gonna cost right that's right that's right i have to know i have to know i really love the uh

i forget what they call it. I think it's called a mirror, or not mirror, a ribbon, where it's basically like, it brings up like maybe 20% of the screen and it has like a specialized interface for that. I think that's an ingenious thing. And if it's done well and adopted well, I think it'd be great. Yeah. Because you could just have a little status update thing over in the corner, a small TV showing when you don't need a giant TV,

and I think that would be really cool. Yeah, lots of cool possibilities there. Micro LED is another one. We talked about this a little bit at Cedia, and again, it's something last year's CES Samsung had, a really big micro LED called the Wall. We've talked about that before, but they now have announced a 75 inch 4k using this micro LED technology. It's like these little tiles,

self-emissive micro LEDs produce a pretty amazing picture, no backlight required, they can be incredibly thin. So pretty neat technology. I think it's been around for a while, if I understand correctly, in the commercial side of things. So commercial guys out there are probably rolling their eyes a little bit. This is not new technology, but in the consumer electronics world, it certainly is. Yeah. We've never seen anything like that, except for... I mean, we saw it at CES. We saw it kind of previewed at CES last year. It took it took a couple headlines but they're showing it at offkins this year and um you know we we know it's incredibly interesting but it's also i think

incredibly expensive to implement like yeah um so there's still that to kind of get around um all of these are our flagship type products or what do they call them when you build the one-off car? Not a prototype, but like the car that is the car that... Oh, I know what you're talking about. A concept car? Yeah, a concept. It's more than a concept, I guess. But these are the products that you wish you could own.

So you're like, oh, maybe if I own a Samsung TV, I can have a little bit of that micro LED feeling. And you kind of associate it with the brand. I mean, that's really what they're trying to do here. And if they sell a couple into the channel, they do. But they're really trying to get you to warm up to knowing Samsung's brand and that kind of thing. It's more of a marketing effort in our market

for this kind of stuff. Because there's no practical application for this. You're going to get a better panel at 75 inches. You're going to get a better panel for a few thousand dollars rather than paying whatever this thing is going to cost. You know, $10,000 for a 75-inch TV? No, no thanks. Right, right.

Of course, voice control being built into TVs. You know, Samsung has the Alexa and Google Assistant. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of others. I saw it's not obviously a display, but Dish is announcing some voice integrations. I'm sure every manufacturer is going to have some sort of iteration of voice control built in as well. That's kind of becoming the norm. The big one I saw was actually and i've got to read more into this um but it looks like siri is getting brought to the tv as well um so i think

this was a bunch of the vizio stories is they they were saying that siri is going to be kind of part of the yeah so you can ask siri to play a specific show in a specific room so that's part of the airplay 2 support so anything is airplay 2 that's AirPlay 2 that could have all these other things built into it, all these other voice assistants, Google and Amazon, but it also will have Siri if it has AirPlay 2, which is interesting. Yeah, there you go. Eric in the chat room is asking,

no Bixby, no Bixby. Well, you know what? There was a huge presentation on Bixby as part of the Samsung push in Samsung keynote. But yeah, we're not really going to talk about it. I guess you can get Bixby on the Samsung TVs, but no one's going to use that if they can get Google Assistant or even Siri. They've got a tall hill to climb there, I'm afraid. I'm going to move through these quick here in the interest of time.

Other TV makers that we haven't touched on yet but certainly warrant mention. Hisense, I think the third biggest manufacturer in the world, I read. They've got a Sonic 1 TV they're talking about that has a piezoelectric. That's a hard word, but some people, the geeks in the audience will know what that means. It's got this speaker that's built right in that allows you to deliver sound right from the panel itself. And I think Sony showed some similar technology to this a year or two ago when I was out at, um, in Amsterdam at ISE. So that's interesting. They've Hisense also has an RGB three laser projector. It's a short throw projector. They're calling it a laser TV. Uh, it's a short throw projector they're calling it a laser tv uh it's a short throw

projector 128 inch or 128 120 inch uh image with a seven inch throw distance thing's gonna run you about sixteen thousand dollars i think that's the one they had at cdia yeah yeah uh tcl is announcing a 75 inch version of the six series, which is excellent TV. I pulled the trigger on one of those here at home and, and love it. Uh, that's going to be about, they're saying under 1800. So as is often the case at CES pricing, isn't quite nailed down on that one yet. And then a whole bunch of new TVs from Vizio really fully revamped lineup. They've got P seriesseries, Quantum X.

They've got a 4K HDR line, M-series line, V-series, and they've also reimagined their E-series. So Vizio has options at pretty much every price point. They've really emerged in the last few years as a pretty high quality. You know, they were known for being a very budget-oriented TV maker when they first came out, and they've definitely expanded their reach. Yeah, we used to walk in and look at a client who brought their Vizio or Westinghouse TV

in the door, and be like, no, we're not going to touch that. Or we'll use it on the Lanai, because when dies in a couple of years, you know, it just replays it. But now I think some of these higher-end Vizio, especially the higher-end Vizio TVs, are really competitive on specs. And, you know, they're really trying. They're really reaching for that high-end feel of a product. So good for them. It should be pretty cool. Yeah, absolutely.

So that's really it for the TV makers. There's a whole bunch going on as is always the case. And if you are into TVs, this is a great time of year to be keeping an eye on things. Everyone kind of keeps their powder dry for CES. But let's move on here. Next big category, Seth, that we want to talk about is sort of the big players. And we're going to talk about Apple, Amazon, and Google here. And these guys get a whole lot of ink all year long. So we don't necessarily want to spend a ton of time, but you can't talk about CES without talking about what these companies are doing. And I personally made the choice to come right out of the gate with Apple because I've been really surprised at the number of stories that I saw in prepping for the show that were related to Apple in general. So we talked about AirPlay 2 with TVs and then

HomeKit making a very big push here at CES. And I didn't go back and really look at our notes or take a look at how it compared to the last couple of years at CES. But, man, it feels like there's been a whole lot more HomeKit talk this year than we've seen in recent years out of CES. Yeah, I was getting that, too, in the past. And I'm not sure if it's just, I mean, I was getting that, too, in the chat room. There was a lot going on about HomeKit, and people say, is this the year of the HomeKit over in the hub? And I'm like, I don't know if it's just the year of HomeKit

or we're finally seeing... I think you've said this before. When a manufacturer comes out with products, it's table stakes for them to have HomeKit, Alexa, and Google Assistant integrations. Those are the three things you need. If you do smart things, J Team. If you do Bixby, good for you, I guess. But the basic ones that you need to have when you release a product these days are HomeKit, Amazon, and Google.

If you don't have those, you're going to be pushed off into the corner where you're missing out on part of the market for whatever reason. I think you were pretty good at calling this earlier in the year. This is what I'm seeing now we were seeing uh ikea come out with i mean they weren't at ces but we saw them come out with like shading uh that has home kit or built into it right so like that's coming uh inexpensive shading uh that'll have home kit built in like it it does seem that we're getting more and more home kit i don't know if that's just like i i think that's just been part of this slow and steady thing and now we're we're getting more and more HomeKit. I don't know if that's just like... I think that's just been part of this slow and steady thing. And now it turns into 2019, and everybody last year has been,

oh, my God, Google Assistant. And the year before, oh, my God, it has Alexa. But now they're like, okay, yeah, you had that last year. You had that last year. What's left to add? What else? HomeKit. Exactly.

That's it. Yeah, what else? I agree. It's hard to say. This TechCrunch story that I'm going to cite from here in just a moment talks about Apple inviting a bunch of reporters push this year from apple but like you said that may be incidental it may just be the fact that home kit is is sort of always been the slow and steady game they have something to show i mean that's that's definitely something you want to bring the president yeah eric in the chat room mentioning that they don't require the specialty chip uh anymore won't dive into the details on that but they did that was that

last year's ces i believe is when they sort of changed their approach there they've taken their foot a little they've taken their foot a little bit off the brake where whereas before they were like they wanted you could really feel that they me, it seemed like they wanted to control 100% of the ecosystem from start to finish to make sure the end-user experience was good. And they were delivering what we expected as consumers from Apple. And I think that they were able to do that for a while. And when they were able to kind of move their foot a little bit off that brake, you're going to see more and more of these products come out with home kit and it'll be everyone else is uh slamming their foot on the gas and apple's finally taking their foot off the brake yeah but i mean that's kind of the conversation there was a huge conversation that that robert uh spivak spivak i'm not sure how to pronounce your name robert i'm

sorry but um cool guy uh we met over at the Diego. Yeah, great friend of the show. Yeah, really big friend of the show. Does a lot of contributions there to the hub. We had a long conversation about this. And, you know, it's like these, Apple doesn't need to do anything. Like they're going to sell these millions of phones and whatnot. They don't need to open up their HomeKit specification to anybody

and be off device for any reason. But you flip it around the other way, like all these manufacturers need Apple, right? So they need to get on Apple and take up part of that market because it's a huge space. And to ignore it is not a good thing. And not ignore it, but not even be able to use it because you can't pass MFI because you're not using some specialty chip. That's not a good thing. And not ignore it, but not even be able to use it because you can't pass MFI

because you're not using some specialty chip. That's not a good thing either. So I'm glad to see that they have taken their foot off the brake, so to speak, a little bit. Because really, they still have their foot on there because you still have to pass the MFI to get Apple compatibility and all that good stuff. Well, they've got, just to rattle off a few here wemo has a light switch brilliant that light switch

smart home hub that they call it now has home kit eve has a light strip and energy strip net atmo has a smart doorbell arlo has a home security system a couple of bathroom devices uh kohler and you by moen also with home kit just to rattle off a few so tons of manufacturing kit hey i i gotta say check out net atmo um they used to make some pretty cute products holy cow like the design on their products it's you know it's it's super modern like high-end product-looking thing. Look at what they're selling. This stuff looks great. The link you have is to the doorbell, but they've got a bunch of other products like cameras and stuff that look really cool.

So keep an eye on these guys. I think they were recently acquired by Legrand, if I'm not mistaken. So you should start seeing them being a major player in our market, too. You know, outside of the HomeKit and Siri and all the Amazon stuff. You should start seeing them doing a little bit more in the Cedia channel, since I think they're a Legrand company now. Yeah, they are. They just looked that up to verify november uh of last year they were acquired by by the grand so good pickle grant all right well let's jump to amazon here

quickly they are of course doing a whole bunch at ces this year and and uh rattle off a few of these things they've got some expansions to their key offering which is they're uh still around i'm you know they're still developing it and adding more. It's the service where they can access your home or now they're doing key for business. They've got garage access that they're doing now. So if you want packages delivered right into your garage, key can now integrate with different,

like MyQ connected garage openers to give delivery folks access to your garage. So they seem committed to key. I know we sort of laugh about it when, when we talk about it, but I don't know, maybe they're seeing something, uh, that we're not, um, I'd say garage, opening my garage for, you know, someone to throw, I mean, my garage is full of my junk, but like, I, I could see that more so than I can open it. More receptive to that than your door. Yeah, I can lock my interior garage door, and they won't be able to get to the house. But yeah, I could definitely see opening the garage up.

Toss the packages in, I'll close the garage door, and call it a day. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Some new smart locks that they're integrating with for that service. I'd say probably the biggest, clearly we're going to see Alexa integrated into everything that it can possibly be integrated into. So we're not going to start rattling off devices there. But definitely a big push with Ring. And obviously Ring being acquired by Amazon not long ago. And Ring, I think this one article at least cites 13 new products from Ring. And that's quite a bit. One of the bigger ones getting a lot of press is this like peephole unit.

Have you seen this? It installs over a peephole on your door and it's a great, interesting application. Yeah. Living in every apartment I ever lived in had a people right like even if you were like at an interior walkway you still had people and i i think this is a great idea this is very smart on their part uh it wouldn't end up in any install that you have ever been on but right for like the apartment people who have apartments this is like the product to have now because i i don't i'm not sure how if every i think the

people's install with like a little screw like you can unscrew them with a screwdriver like if it just installs through that hole that's already there you can take it on and put it back off you know it's a super simple install battery operated you don't have to run wires to it like that's a great idea it's very very smart yeah yeah i. And the story here on The Verge cites apartment dwellers specifically as well. I think it's a home run for them, but certainly not limited to apartment dwellers. An interesting product either way. Ring is getting into smart lighting. They've got several a, let's see, they've got a ring floodlight motion. Yeah, ring floodlight. They've got a ring transformer. Adds smart features to outdoor or older, like, landscape lights, which is kind of interesting. Yeah.

They've got some smoke detector offerings. This one is, I couldn't quite tell. The picture shows it's, like, branded dome. I'm not sure if that's a partnership or i think what they're doing is they're integrating with their uh ring security system so that system actually has a ton of stuff in it like when you get you when you get a marketing image of the ring security system you you you know this you see the little panel and you see a couple of devices but they actually there's an actual like hub that comes along with this thing it's massive and that has a bunch of stuff in it like zigbee and z-wave it's a full hub in and of itself so i think they're just like grabbing on to

you know the smoke and co list there i think they're just grabbing that from somewhere else and first alert z-wave smoke co alarm um yeah they're just reselling that and integrating it in with that that hub that they have that that is a security um that's part of the security system um i got one thing on the smart lighting i think yeah they definitely uh these are definitely mr beams so if you go and look at uh at mrbeams.com ring acquired these guys i don't know a while back and um we haven't haven't seen that like synergy exist between those two companies for a while but now it looks like we are like the the these are like from the mr beams product line put into ring because there's no video in them it's just like a

motion detector and a little bit of smarts to turn the lights on and off. Right. Right. Also mentioned some integrations here with Kwikset, Schlage, and Yale SmartLocks. So definitely rounding out their offering. You know, that's really the theme I'm seeing here from Ring, between access control with SmartLocks and smart lighting and smoke and CO listeners, really becoming a very robust offering. And as a Ring security system owner, I'm really excited to see that. Yeah, that's offering. And as a Ring security system owner, I'm really excited to see that. Yeah, that's great. And I think there's a little thing down here

at the bottom of this story. At the same time, Ring alarm doorbells, cameras can now communicate with each other. So basically, if an alarm goes off or something triggers, you can trigger your cameras to start recording. And manually, rather than relying on them to start recording. And manually, you know, rather than like relying on them to detect the motion or whatever, you can just say cameras start recording and they'll start.

So that's a smart piece of automation that's built into, like if you had an entire ring system. So I know you're looking at cameras, Jason. You got to get you on board with the ring. Got to get you some ring cameras. Yeah. You know, I'm still stuck, man, on the wireless camera thing. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've got a couple of them. And I got to say, they're great. But I totally understand wireless is kind of a weird concept. Now, Ring has been talking about, and I think they came out with some hardwired versions. And they're promising or they have promised that we'll have some type of stream coming off of them that you can integrate with something like an NVR or something. So they may have a traditional type feeling camera later on. I did see in a tweet, actually, that they were promising HomeKit support as well.

This is officially announced in this tweet reply to someone. So that'll be cool. So you'll have Ring right on your HomeKit app. Very cool. For what that's worth. Right, right. All right, well, last out of the big three here, we want to talk about Google.

And of course, they're making a big push, very big presence at CES, integrating Google Assistant into as many things as they possibly can, just like Amazon is doing with Alexa. And so rattling off some of the categories here that a Digital Trends article I'm reading from is citing, you know, everything from home irrigation systems to different water sensors, including the Flow by Moen, which we're going to talk about here in a little bit. Stay tuned for that. Home appliance, automation brands, Lenovo smart clock, you know, so they've got a whole bunch of different devices that they're integrating with. But one of the interesting headings here in this article that I'm looking

at is this Google Assistant Connect. And I'm going to read from the story here very quickly. It says, Google wants to help device manufacturers add capabilities that enhance or work with Google smart homes. To that end, Google announced Google Assistant Connect, a set of new services to simplify user device setup and make it easier for manufacturers to add new device features. With Google Assistant Connect, users can enable any appliance or device in the home to respond to Google Assistant voice commands. So kind of interesting there. I'd be curious to know a little bit more

about what they're doing with that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, onboarding is probably one of the hard, I mean, it's hard for Apple, it's hard for Amazon, not so hard for Amazon. They just want you, they give you everything. Like here's the keys of the kingdom, have at it. And, you know, if you break something, they'll patch everything. Like here's the keys of the kingdom have at it. And you know,

if you break something, they'll patch it. And it's kind of what their approach has been. So, um, but I think Google has had a measured approach just like Apple. Um, except they've been a lot more open with allowing people to kind of come in

and come into the, the gates between under the walled garden and do their thing. Uh, and I think that's paying off for them. Google Assistant by far is, to me, the better experience for these home animations. I'm still a big HomeKit fan, but man, Google is really doing a good job

in everything that they're putting together. And they have a vision. I keep saying this. We watched that video a couple of years ago where this is what we imagine the smart home is. And everything they have done from then to now is kind of like is leading up to that video and what that video could do. So I haven't seen that out of Apple. I sure as heck haven't seen that out of Amazon.

So, you know, Google is, I think, the one to watch because they have a goal in mind. And, you know, they've shared it us, and they've got to get there. Good for Google. I'm happy to see them advance the product. Yeah. Yeah, this is a pretty staggering number here. Google's exhibit area at CES tripled from 6,000 square feet last year to 18,000 square feet. Did you say they made a It's's a small world ride their booth has

their booth has a really yeah it has a dark ride and like a so dark ride is is basically like either pan or small world where you go in and it's dark you know they they basically have a full um theme park ride and um there is a video i will try to find It's one of those 3D videos where you can kind of look around and see. You can move your phone left and right. That's amazing. So you're in the ride, and you can watch it. I'll have to put that in the show notes to check out. You can't even imagine what it must cost to put a booth like that together.

The design, build. 15,000 square feet at CES. The floor space rental alone has got to be astronomical. I think it's a building that they made on a parking lot. It's not on the show floor. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. 18,000 square feet. We rented a Walmart this year.

Yeah. That is pretty crazy. All right. Well, we're going to shift gears now again, and we're going to talk, we're going to bounce around a couple of different categories here in the smart home and talk about some other, I'd say, miscellaneous manufacturer stories that we've seen that we thought were interesting. One of the areas that we wanted to hit first here was a couple of lighting control stories. And I'm with you, Seth. I think you and I talked about it before the show. And one of the big stories that could be a sleeper if you're not really tuned into DIY smart lighting in the home is Lutron has added fan control to its Caseta lighting system. And I know there's a lot of

people out there who are probably rejoicing. That's been something that has been a hole in that lineup for a little while. So it's really good to see them come out with that. No surprise, but really good to see nonetheless. I think it's a hole in everyone's lineup. I mean, it's one of those products like, I don't know what the deal is. Like, do you have fans in your house? Of course. Okay.

I'm just like, I'm trying to like figure out if this is like a regional thing. Because in Florida, like it's very common to have fans in every single room in the house like it's ridiculous not just the bedrooms but like every room in the house um you'll you'll see a fan uh so like when control four for example for years didn't have a fan control and we had to use switches to turn on and off fans like it was it was a problem here in florida but it wasn't not necessarily a problem in other states where um you know control four had a fireplace switch not not so much of a use here in florida but a fan switch would have gone a long way no no no can't imagine why so i mean i i think having a one thing i'm missing about this and there was there was

definitely discussion about this in the in the hub uh this last week is um why so this is a device you put in the wall but um why isn't this like a canopy switch where you can just wire it up in the canopy uh i think insteon is the only one has figured that out how to do that and man uh having a canopy control versus like taking up a hole in the wall, uh, as far as from a lighting design perspective is so much better. So I, I really hope one day Lutron has this like on their higher end products.

I think they have a canopy control. Yeah. Uh, and I, I wish they would bring that into the automate maybe, maybe I think there's one in QS. There's definitely one in Maestro, but I wish they would bring it into like the automated realm where you can automate that that thing in um in the canopy without having

to like take an entire space an entire one you know one space in inside the wall uh up for fan control right no that's a good point but um you know gotta start somewhere right seth gotta start you can't have everything because it is their Well, and Caseta is their entry level. So, I mean, I think this is great for that. I think this is absolutely great. Alexa compatible as well. No HomeKit, it says here initially. But hopefully, you know, that'll come.

I'm not sure where the limitation is, but certainly we'll be on the lookout for that. A couple of other quick lighting ones we'll rattle off here. Philips Hue is expanding their outdoor lighting range. So that's something to take a look at if you're a Hue user. TP-Link has a smart light switch that's got voice assistant, motion sensor, nightlight, and intercom built in. It's not the prettiest device, in my opinion. But, you know, if you're looking for a way to do intercom and you want to add some smart lighting, you know, it might be something worth taking a look at. And

Leviton has a Decora voice-enabled dimmer with Alexa built into it as well. So those are a few of the lighting options. We also talked about Wemo earlier when we talked about HomeKit. They've got a new one, and I'm sure there are dozens and dozens of other smart lighting products out there that are being talked about. Brilliant was another one we touched on with the HomeKit portion. So quite a bit of development going on in smart lighting, and it's a great category. I can see why. I tweeted out, actually, when I saw this, I think it's the, it's not the Leviton one. Hold on.

It's the one you said doesn't look very good. But I'm going to send you this in Slack. The TV link. Yeah, I'm going to send you this over in Slack. Actually, I'll put it in the Home Tech Live channel so everybody can see it. This is what this thing would look like if you actually want to do lighting control in your house. Oh, beautiful. Yeah, it's like a, what, a six gang box there yeah that's funny so imagine one of these

like they always show these things with the microphones and the alexa built in in a single gang which looks great but if you think about it like sometimes you have six gangs by the house like by your door front door or whatever and this is what it's going to look like if you want to do lighting control so yeah good point yeah good point. Yeah. Good point. Hopefully they got the smarts built into them to know which one is which and you're not activating the voice assistant in six different devices. I'm not sure how that's handled, but presumably they've... I was hoping it would just be a choir of voices coming to you. With slight millisecond delays between each of them,

so it gives you that flanging effect. That would be wonderful right right so again tons going on in lighting i know that's a category that i am looking to make some movement on here at my house this year so happy to see it yeah definitely moving on here security another area where we're seeing a lot of development. One of the interesting non-traditional security stories that I saw was Xfinity. And moving away from thinking about security in terms of the physical premises of your house, they have this offering they're showing at CES about using AI, artificial intelligence, I know the buzzword we talked about we're going to all hate soon, to protect your network. So basically a network security

offering, $6 a month, so subscription offering from Xfinity. And I suspect these sort of network security type of offerings are going to become more commonplace in the years to come. That's interesting. And it comes from Xfinity, which is, you know, Comcast is the ISP. And this is great. This is, to me, I mean, security in the house is great. Coming from the ISP, you know, they have a lot more visibility into what you're doing than other internet, you know, other sources. So, you know, it's probably a pretty good thing. They can probably, they can tell if something is going on inside the house and lock it down through their gateway router rather than, you know, I think we've seen other companies

do that. Like I think Almond was doing this, like the Securify routers. We've talked about them in the past. I think Norton had a product out um i think other other people were getting into this uh as well um but bundling it in with your xfinity i mean that's gonna be a well what's another six dollars when you're already paying them three you're already paying through the nose for everything else and their xfinity home and cable and internet so what's another six bucks don't forget the the taxes. You got to add the telephone and whatever tax. Yeah, yeah.

No, great point. Moving more to traditionally what people think about when they think about security. ADT, I think, was an interesting one to look at this year. Story we'll link in our show notes to talk about them. And ADT really, I think, is a company in a bit of a tough position. It looks like they're doing the right things to grapple with the changing market, obviously, with newer technologies coming to market. ADT had Pulse that they put out back in 2010. And so they're not totally new to trying to dabble in the smart home and be more integrated. But with companies like Ring and others really pushing that space forward, ADT is clearly having to respond.

And they announced ADT looks like command panel and control platform. This is a new wireless panel. They've got a bunch of smart home capabilities built into this. So new integrations with digital assistants, so voice assistants, new video doorbell, a mobile safety app, interactive crime maps. Any of this sound familiar, Seth? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just spec by spec. It sounds like a mix between Ring and what's the other? Vivint, I think. Just kind of from the product look and feel and what they're trying to do. It seems like ADT is taking notes from these other companies

that have success in the market and implementing those ideas in-house, which is good for them. They've got a ways to go, but it's good for them. Yeah, they're still a big security company. Yeah, and they've got some big legs to stand on, so I'm sure they'll do just fine. Best security system I ever bought was the fake ADT signs off of eBay that I have in my yard right now. There you go.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I read a story from somebody interviewed a bunch re rehabbed is not the right word. Former, like people who used to break into homes, former burglars. And they talked about like, what are the biggest deterrents? And,

you know, like two, two of the top three were like a sign in your front yard and a car in the driveway. Yeah. I was like, Oh, I can do that.

We have both. I've got both. Right, right. I mean, driveway yeah i was like oh i can do that we have both right right uh so i'm covered yeah we i mean we actually have a security system that is monitored and on when we leave but yeah so do we but this is the the deterrent factor right is is really uh have what you're after fifteen dollars i ever spent thanks edt you want. You want some redundancy there. Right, right. Cool. Well, moving here into a few sort of product or manufacturer-specific stories that we thought warranted mention. One is Flo, who we had on the show not too long ago, and I went ahead and purchased one of these devices. I've got it in my house, and I like it. I don't interface much with

it, which I guess is a good thing. It means I don't have any issues with my water, but it's a sort of water monitoring, water management security device. That's intelligent. You install it on your water main and it's got pressure sensors and flow sensors and temperature sensors built into it, uh, to monitor for leaks and, and monitor usage and stuff like that. Looks like they are, you know, the story on this is a partnership. I don't know if this is, it's not an acquisition, I guess, but it's a rebranding. The two companies are working very closely together. It is now

being called Flow by Moen. So it is actually a rebranding and appears to be a very, very close partnership between the two companies moving forward. Yeah. I kind of got that it was a strategic partnership, but I mean, Moen's branding is all over this, including when you go down and download the app, like it says Flow by Moen. It's been completely renamed. So I mean, I don't know if that it's been like an acquisition, so to speak, but maybe Moen has just dumped a ton of money into Flow and said, okay, we want our name on this product. So, wait, wait, we got to back up here. Did you get yours installed or did you install yours? No, I got it installed professionally. I've got copper piping

here and I wasn't brave enough to get into, you know cutting and soldering pipes gotcha all right well i i have some uh some sneaky uh sneaky news here on the show that is a home tech exclusive you're only going to hear it breaking news yeah well yeah i i installed mine over the holiday, too. Hey. So we both have flows going. Nice. And yeah, yeah. We, I have thoughts on it. I have thoughts on this. And I actually installed what's called a sense.

I don't know if you've seen these. Same idea. Well, not quite the same idea, but same idea for electricity. So I installed this a while back. These are not the most instant gratification products I've ever had. No. There is a learning process when you install these devices that you have to wait for. And mine, you know, I'm going to show you.

Mine's still learning, Jason. Yeah, mine took a while to learn. I didn't anticipate that either. It takes a little while to figure out what your use patterns are. I don't know how long mine took. I didn't pay super close attention to it. But one day I flipped it open and it was doing its thing. You almost forget it's there, right? I think it's about the peace of mind, really.

Yeah. Peace of mind. Exactly. So I actually recorded this. I'm going to try and put some video together on a review of this once I get my thoughts completely, you know, besides what I'm saying here on the show, but put my thoughts in like a better, more organized fashion.

I've got some video recording of me installing it and how easy slash hard it is to install a flow system. So I thought it'd be pretty cool to share. We'll keep an eye out for that. Yeah. The press release, by the way, mentions that both of the companies are going to continue to operate. It says, I think, independently. So yeah, I think strategic partnership, definitely the right word for it.

Presumably a very, very good thing for the folks over at flow. So I think congratulations are probably in order there. And I look forward to seeing what they're able to do moving forward a couple of other manufacturers here arlo few stories about them uh this is net uh netgear spinoff that went public uh 2018 i believe they've got some home security devices with home kit zigbee and z wave support coming out so arlo really known for the wireless cameras, the battery-powered that you can stick up. They were one of the first companies out there really doing those wireless cameras. And it looks like they're looking to expand their reach into some more security areas. Yep.

And LG, weirdly enough, also is offering a security program. I'll jump in here, Seth, because this one's actually a little bit off the beaten path, as you alluded to. And it's not a security system, but one that I specifically put in here because I thought it was an interesting story. You may have heard me mention from time to time that I think the idea of remotely monitoring and managing appliances in the home is going to be something we're going to see more of in the future. Right now, we talk about remote systems management in the industry, and that's really limited to like monitoring networks and AV devices, automation devices, and things like that. But this proactive customer care program, again, using AI, not sure how much actual AI is in there, but the idea here is that they're building a platform into their appliances that will monitor them and let you know if there are

things going on with your washer and dryer, if it needs maintenance, if it's indicating that maybe there's an issue brewing or something like that, this platform, this proactive customer care program will monitor that and let owners of these devices know ahead of time. So I thought that was a pretty interesting approach, and I think something that we're likely to see more of from appliance manufacturers manufacturers moving forward it'd be great if they brought this into their entire lineup rather than just being in like the the ten thousand dollar refrigerator line you know like if i could buy a regular thousand dollar refrigerator whatever they cost you know i think i think mine was about that much like it'd be great if if it had like i think i read somewhere that lg

like part of this proactive thing like if you leave the door open, it will send you a text message to your phone saying, hey, you left the door closed. You know, because usually I have my phone on, and sometimes the door doesn't close all the way, and there's a little alarm on there that'll go off. But if I go back out to the garage here to work, I don't hear the little beep going off on their refrigerator. So I don't know, it'd be nice to see some of these features brought into their lower end models where they're actually more useful to more people. Yeah, I agree. And I think fast forward, I don't know how long, three to five years, maybe longer. The idea of smart appliances that are not just, you know, the gimmicky stuff you always hear about, like a refrigerator that can tell you when it's out of milk. But like, I just think about it as a, as a homeowner and I've got things like water heaters and refrigerators and washers and dryers and dishwashers. And

these are things that I don't have a great sense for, like, what are things I could be doing proactively to maintain them? Are issues brewing? What do I look for? And if appliance makers could figure out how to make that approachable and just give owners the peace of mind of, you know, not in an intrusive way, but just let me know if something's wrong. And if I need to do some maintenance every three months, like send me a quick reminder, that to me would be very useful. And I suspect we'll see more of that moving forward. Like I said, it's funny you mentioned water heaters because a part of my, my flow, uh, my flow, uh, install this weekend was actually, you know, I'm going to have the water off

because I may as well install a new water heater because ours was 2004. Not really working all that well. We bought it with, it came with the house. We replaced everything else in the house. Why not replace a water heater? So we went to like lowe's it's a price like these water heaters this night so let me give you an idea i paid like 350 bucks at most for my water heater 40 gallon water heater a 50 gallon smart water heater is 1300 yeah what's the difference it has wi-fi like that's i mean okay so yeah that's a commodity

now but it'll get there yeah i i just i don't see it and um i think the 50 gallon version of what i had probably would have been all of 30 or 40 dollars more uh so i i man the price premium on these things is absolutely incredible um yeah to for the for the appliances and i don't i i say this not knowing anything about the uh i think they call them the white box or something like that market where you know everything is a white box um i don't know anything about them so like there may be margin issues and and and kind of the same thing, like $350 washer and dryer is never going to have a smart, you know, intelligent thing to text your phone when the, when the dryer's done, like it's just never going to have that, but it would be nice to see like maybe the higher end

models, um, you know, maybe the $700 driver have the option to, to text you or something like that. And right now I don't see that. Yeah, no, I think it's going to take some time but uh i'm betting that that will get there yep shifting gears here to something totally different and i thought pretty a fun product a japanese company called mui mui has a touch sensitive led light display and it's built into a piece of wood and I don't know how useful or practical this thing is. I just thought it was kind of neat. It was launched on Kickstarter in October. It did meet its funding goal. Showed a demo here reading from Engadget. He says it looks like a pretty clever product. Quote, it can give you an overview of various devices in your home,

including thermostats, lights, Sonos One speaker. You can adjust temperature, play and pause music, turn various lights on and off straight from the touch interface. It also has swipe, so you can swipe across to do different things. So just kind of a neat, like tactile, flexible device that will integrate with other smart devices in your home and give you readouts and some controllability. I thought it was kind of an interesting approach. Smart wood? Is that what we're going to call this?

Smart wood. We're going to call this. It's a first. Yeah. You heard it here first. Okay. All right. To each their own.

Yeah, you know. Tactile control. Okay, Jason. There you go. And it's at its finest. Can I get this in a different finish? You don't like that? No.

I don't. I don't think I like this. Hey, like I said, this is not about practicality, Seth. No, it's CES. Nothing is practical about CES. That's right. That's exactly right. Oh, Jason, we talked about standards a little bit more previously in the show. Guess what is going to be the next home automation standard next year? Oh, it's got to be Bluetooth. It's got to be Bluetooth. It's going gonna be the

new hotness oh my god we we say this every year i i this is what i wait for out of ces is for somebody to you know a blue a bluetooth story to come along and julie took the bait this time julie jacobs i i think we're gonna have to search for last year and see when she talked about a bluetooth mesh taking over and being the home automation standard on CES 2018. Because, man, these guys talk about it every year. And next year, man, I think next year we can bank on them having something, a story that says next year, meaning not next year, but the next year, Bluetooth is going to be the de facto standard in home automation. Well, toie's credit or in her defense it does say becoming a home automation standard and not the home automation okay hey i'll put

that out there important difference but yeah bluetooth mesh it looks like they've put together the story here is uh sig i forget what that stands for sig i i don't remember what it's like the the working group something yeah yeah that they form uh when they're you know looking at new areas where they can expand expand expand uh bluetooth so they've got a smart home sig or sig i apologize i forget what that stands for uh and some application layer development. So it's backed by Xiaomi, Alibaba, and 60 other IoT companies. Special interest group. There you go. Thank you.

So anyways, we couldn't do a CES story without mentioning Bluetooth Mesh. Thanks so much for putting that in. That's's great. So moving here to close out our wrap-up of CES, a couple of, I'd say, lighter topics here, Seth. A few silly products that you got to mention those when you do CES. I mean, you just have to. So we'll get into some of the specifics there. But one of the surprising trends, I guess, I didn't expect to see so prominent as I was going through the headlines this year, smart bathrooms or IOT podcast, I followed her on Twitter, and she bought one of these things or got one somehow. And it's actually really cool. So she had one that had integrated with Alexa, and you could say, pour me one cup of water water and one cup of water came out okay that's cool

and all right that sold me i'm all for uh hands-free voice-controlled faucets at this point can you do temperature can you say like hot water i don't know i'm thinking about giving the kids a bath right you're always trying to get the water like perfectly right so if you could be like draw me a bath at i don't know what the temperature is that i have no idea but 85 degrees non-scalding non-scalding yeah you're looking for uh so that that'd be kind of cool i don't know that that probably has more to do with your uh water heater right i suppose but anyways kohler, Moen. I feel like there was a few others that I don't have on here. But anyways, quite a few smart bathroom or smart faucet stories. There was even a toilet.

I think I put that under silly stories. I'm having trouble finding it here. But I want to say it was from Kohler. Promised a, quote, immersive experience on your smart toilet. Can't make this stuff up. Yeah, well, I mean, I saw that press release, too. And, yeah, well, I am always immersed when I am in the library, so to speak. So I'm posting the best image I've ever seen, promotional promo image into our Home Tech Live channel here. Holy cow. Look at this. This image is from one of the Engadget story about

Moen and Google Home. This woman's here. She has like her shower just randomly running in the background. She's sitting there enjoying a nice like looking at her cup of tea and there's a google home sitting on top of books like who does that why would you why would you put the google home on top of the books aren't you reading the books i i don't understand this whole thing screams marketing like gone wrong right they they have the the plumbing companies have a long way to go before they understand how to do this right yeah that is the shower's just running back there why is it running why would you do that yeah this is wasteful uh so anyways that was a surprising

trend and kind of a silly one other silly stories to come out of ces here an iot connected litter box for the uh for the cat owners out there. So now your litter box goes on the Wi-Fi and I guess tells you how many times a day your cat poops. I'm not really sure how useful that is. We've got a picture of an immersive toilet here in the chat room, again from Eric. Eric's uh some good material tonight we we appreciate that oh that's great that is great smart breast pump so i think there was one of these last year uh i want to say this is a version there's one every year yeah every year there's a smart breast pump so if you're an expectant mother and you're looking for a smarter way to breast pump, CES is your show, apparently.

And then Petcube 2. This one allows you to fling treats at your pets, according to The Verge. So that's kind of cool. This one, I think, think a little bit less silly. Like if you travel a lot and you want to be able to like give your pet a treat, entertain them for a couple of seconds. I can totally see that the litter box. Not so much.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you, you might need to know they ate over here. You flung them a treat and they went to the bathroom and they, your bowels are working. You need to get that push notification that the,

the cat made it to their get that push notification that the cat made its own. Their push notification? Yeah, the cat made its own push notification. Oh, that's really bad. I mean, these guys are asking for it. That's a great way to wrap up a CES. I can't think of a more perfect way. Anyways, another busy show.

I think we've got some friends of the show out there. I believe Richard Gunther from Home On is out at CES this year, and Mike Wolfe, who joined us on the Fireside. So definitely look. If you don't follow those guys online, go check them out. Rose Thibodeau as well is out there. Rose Thibodeau possibly be out there the the funniest pre-tweet pre-ces tweet that she received an invite for a one-on-one demo with a quote robotic sex tech product at ces i have so many questions and at least 20 of them

are related to sanitation thanks but no thanks oh that's great i but no thanks. Oh, that's great. I died when I saw that. That's great stuff. That's really funny. That's good stuff. All right. Well, all of the links and topics that we've discussed here on the show can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 240. Once again, that's hometech.fm slash 240. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which includes weekly show updates as well as other occasional updates about all the

great things going on here in the world of home tech. So head on over to home tech.fm slash 240 and check that out. Don't forget you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday, starting sometime around seven to 730 p.m. Eastern and lasting to who knows how long, because it's CES. Find out more at hometech.fm slash live. All right, Seth. Well, before we wrap up here, I think you had a pick of the week, actually a video of the week that was a pretty good one. We're looking forward to sharing this one.

This comes, by the way, of Julie Jacobson, who ran across this at CE 2019. But do you remember a couple of weeks back, we ran across that guy who automated his sprinklers to basically spray drunk people from urinating in his yard? So this is probably how he was doing some of that. But man, these things, it's like a motion activated sprinkler system and it's designed to keep pests like deer and and from from eating your flowers and whatnot so it just kind of sprays and and and scares them off but uh i we we i read she tweeted this out and she posted a video along with it and then the video has got to be the funniest thing i've ever seen it is it's it's

pretty good and it certainly proves that it does its job. It about scares the life out of this poor deer. And my favorite part is that you don't just see it once. They loop it back for you. And not only in full speed, but they do you the courtesy of looping it back in slow motion. So you get the full effect. Need that instant replay. So whether you've got drunk people peeing in your yard or deers eating your flowers, this thing, Orbit Yard Enforcer, has you covered. Right. What we need is this slow motion.

Well, maybe not. Maybe we don't need any more videos. I had to rethink my opinion on this. Yeah, let me back that up. Let me walk that back a little bit. All right. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, ideas for show topics, whatever you've got, give us a shout. We'd love to hear from you.

Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Or if you'd prefer, you can head on over to the website, hometech.fm, slash feedback, and fill out our online form. And we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you know about our patron page, head on over to home tech. FM slash support to learn how you can help support home tech for as little as $1 a month.

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because that's kind of what we've been talking about all week. All right. And as we wrap up, I want to quickly mention that next week, be sure to tune in. We're going to have Adam Justice on. He is from ConnectSense, the company that does several smart home products, including a new connected outlet that they just released, which we look forward to chatting with

him about. I think Adam's out at CES as well. So we'll probably look forward to getting some thoughts from him on that. And if you don't listen to it already, definitely be sure to check out Adam's podcast, The Connected Home Show, which is a great show. If you're into home tech, you'll certainly like that one as well. So we look forward to having Adam on next week. Make sure you tune in and check that out. Absolutely. Well, with that, Jason, I think we've gone a little bit long tonight. I will talk to you next week and have a good week. All right. Sounds good. Take care, Seth.