HomeTech.fm - Episode 242 - Streaming's Golden Age?

Episode Date: January 25, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: Seth and Jason sit down to discuss the latest home tech headlines including: Abode adds HomeKit to its new hub. Atlona gets acquired by Panduit. YouTube TV now available nationwide. Walmart pulls the plug on its rumored streaming service. Hulu drops price on its base streaming service but raises the price of its live offering. And does Netflix’s latest price increase herald the end of streaming’s golden age? Or just the beginning?

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 25th. From Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffing. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, how are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm doing great. It's been a busy month. I can't believe January is already almost in the books. Seth, by the way, did you make any New Year's resolutions this year? I did not. No, I did not.

I'm not very good at keeping those, so I don't make them. So you don't make them to begin with. That's a good way to do it. What about you? Yeah, I did. Incidentally, I read just the other day is why it's on my mind that 80% of New Year's resolutions fail by the month of February. So you're, I guess, smart not to make them. I kept mine limited this year on a personal level. It's not super relevant to home tech here, but I'm trying to just get back into doing some more writing and journaling every day to kind of keep track of what's going on in my life and document what's

happening with the kids. And that's something I've been wanting to get into for a while. And so I told myself I'd do at least a short little journal entry every day this year. And so far, I'm happy to say I'm still going strong. Haven't broken the streak yet. That's pretty good. That's really good. Yeah. It'll be fun to look back at, you know uh when you get a little bit older and just kind of have a memorialized all of the all of the craziness uh that is life especially with with young kids which which you know well right right yeah no we we try and do something like that but it's like in the moment we grab a little like post-it note writes write whatever happened on it on there when you think about it and toss it in like this can.

And I can tell you my wife is much better at writing that stuff out than I am. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, it's hard. Cool. Well, no guest on this week's episode, just the two of us here. What do you say, Seth, that we jump into some Home Tech headlines? Let's do it. Abode has revealed its Gen 2 gateway, and the company

says that it's 100% committed to bringing HomeKit support to the platform. The hub can already communicate with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and if this, then that, that, that, that, that, and supports a raft of smart home devices using Z-Wave Plus, Zigbee, and Abode's own Adobe, Adobe, Abode RF. See, this is why you can't have a company called Abode. I'm sure they get, I'm sure they get that a lot. Adobe, Adobe. The DIN 2 also includes 4G cellular backup on some models. If you subscribe to a plan, as well as the addition of Z-Way Plus, it can also, it also

has a built-in battery and 93 decibel siren. The Abode or Adobe Gateway will arrive in February for $200 or $199 as a replacement for an existing hub, like an upgrade price, or in bundles ranging between $279 and $359, depending on what options you want to go with. Pretty cool piece. Yeah, another good option. I know I've been hearing a little bit more about Abode steadily over the last, I'd say, year or year and a half. And I haven't taken a ton of time to look into them, but it sounds like it could be another good option for anybody looking for an affordable way to get into security. Moving on here, Atlona, popular provider of AV distribution systems for both residential and commercial markets, has been acquired by Panduit, a giant in electrical and network infrastructure solutions for the enterprise. The acquisition gives 65-year-old Panduit a full line of AV electronics to offer

its dealers, mostly electrical contractors and IT solutions providers. Infrastructure. I think you said that in the pre-show. Infrastructure. You got plastic tubes to run wire through, and now you have content you can put on those wires, I guess. I don't know. Infrastructure. Yeah, it's an interesting move, but there seems to be some synergies there. So I'd be curious to see how it plays out. Comcast loaded its video subscriber losses to 29,000, 19,000 residential and 10,000 business video customers during the fourth quarter. A small improvement over the 33,000 lost one year ago.

Factoring fourth quarter, Comcast lost a total of 370,000 video subscribers during 2018, more than double the 151,000 video subscribers it lost in the previous year of 2017. A lot of numbers there. But, yep, the takeaway generally is what we've been talking about for a while. And the bleeding of subscribers continue. But as we know, companies like Comcast still have a pretty big foothold.

So we'll continue to monitor that. Moving on here to more streaming, several streaming stories, actually, that we're going to touch on here. YouTube TV has announced the expansion of its offering into 95 more markets, effective immediately. This is enough to cover, quote, 98% of U.S. households, end quote, when combined with the areas where the service is already available. YouTube claims the remaining markets, so that 2% that they're not covering, to get true nationwide coverage will be following shortly on the heels of this announcement. So good news for anyone who's been interested in YouTube TV and hasn't had it available in their market.

Good stuff. If you're hoping that Walmart would make good on rumored plans that would launch a streaming competitor to Netflix, we've got some bad news for you. For now, at least, the concept is dead, according to a report by CNBC. The streaming service, which is reportedly going to go live under the Voodoo banner from Walmart in 2010, hit a snag when it became clear that in order to be successful, Walmart was going to have to invest significant dollars in developing original content.

Yeah, yeah. I don't think they would get falling prices on Game of Thrones-type content that they expected to have. Yeah, it's kind of like they just saw the staggering amounts of money by companies like Apple and Netflix, and they were just sort of like, eh, we'll ride this one out for a little bit. So it is becoming kind of a crazy market. Speaking of that, Viacom has acquired Pluto TV. Seth, we've talked about this offering a couple of times on the show. It's a free ad-supported streaming service. The acquisition was for $340 million in cash.

The service, Pluto, has around 12 million monthly active users and will operate as an independent subsidiary within the company. Pluto TV currently offers around 100 ad-supported channels and a library of on-demand content, both of which can be viewed for free without a subscription. Yeah, you said that, you've said we talked about this before, and I remember there was something I was trying to watch on TV once, and I remembered we had talked to this maybe the week or two before, and so I went back into our show notes and looked up like what it was and clicked on it, and after I watched that one thing, I completely forgot what I had used until this story came back up. Yeah, in the pre-show, you were kind of like, what the heck is Pluto?

They've been a little under the radar. I've never watched them myself, but presumably good news, the acquisition that is for the folks over at Pluto. And as always, we'll be interested to, you know, kind of continue to see how that how that offering develops. Well, you know, it's not as good as free is is something you have to pay money for. But something that may be a little bit less. Turns out Hulu just announced that they will lower the price of its base ad supported subscription plan to $5.99 per month. It's down $2 from the current $7.99 beginning on February 26th.

The price drop comes only days after rival Netflix announced increased subscription fees across all of its plans, which we'll talk about shortly. However, Hulu does have one price hike of its own. The company is increasing the cost of Hulu with live TV service, which will jump from $44.99 instead of its current price at $39.99. Yeah, interesting. I think good move by the folks over in the PR department at Hulu to announce this price drop and then sort of tuck in that news about the price going up on the live TV service,

reading the headlines. That was hardly mentioned. So that's really interesting. You know, you look at $44.99 for Hulu live TV. I mean, you add the cost of internet to the house, and you're right up there with probably a basic Comcast bundle. Right. So streaming, definitely one of those things where you got to run the numbers and figure out what you're going to do before you cut the cord because it can very easily get as expensive as a basic package. But the drop on the ad supported plan is nice. $5.99, pretty affordable. I know we're Hulu subscribers and my wife definitely appreciates not having the commercials.

So we pay for the higher tier, which is going to stay the same. I think $11.99 a month is what that one runs for. So speaking of prices, we wanted to spend a couple of minutes here talking about Netflix. They have announced another price increase. This is their biggest one yet. Prices will increase, reading here from a story on digital trends, between $1 and $2 per account level. The $11 per month plan will increase to $13. The $14 a month plan will increase to $16. And the $8 a month plan will increase to $9. So again, a whole bunch of numbers there. I know

that doesn't always translate the best to podcasting, but point being, about $1 or $2 per month is what the prices are going to go up across the board. It's like we just gave our Hulu money over to Netflix is what I'm reading. Yeah. What happened here? Yeah. It's kind of a wash. And, you know, I got to say, on a personal level, we pay for the, I want to say we do the $11 a month plan. Yeah, I think I'm saying that. And having that go up to $13 is like, it's $24 a year.

I get plenty of value for $13 a month. I have no qualms with that. But as you might imagine, with any price increase, there are definitely plenty of people who are up in arms over this. Right. I mean, it could be a lot worse, like you're saying. But if you think about it, you probably spend that, it's like one, less than one week of coffee, right? Oh, yeah. So I spend that on a couple of K-cups. That's a K-cup a day. Yeah, yeah. So I think that it's a lot to do about. There was a lot of stories going on about this, about how it's the end of an era, that Netflix price keeps going up, that it's not affordable anymore.

But it's really, I mean, for what you get with Netflix and the original content that they've been providing, I think it's a pretty good deal. A pretty good value. Yeah. Yeah. So there's actually two different stories that we'll include in the show notes, hometech.fm slash 242. Incidentally, both from Digital Trends, but kind of a point counterpoint. And the first one, right in the title, it says, streaming's golden age is ending. And in the title, it says, Streaming's Golden Age is Ending. And in the article, I'll quote here very quickly. It says, Netflix's recent price rise is just another, I'm sorry, Netflix's recent price rise is just the latest in a string of signs that Streaming's Golden Age is nearly over. As more services emerge, content will be further partitioned, signaling the end of Streaming's good old days.

Soon, we'll all need to make some serious choices about where to spend our streaming dollars. I think you already have to make choices. I mean, you've had to make choices for a while. The point about content being further partitioned and everybody sort of getting into the game and trying to launch their own streaming services. Sure. I mean, I think that's sort of a natural part of the shakeout process. And it's why the apps like Apple's TV app, for example, I think are a great vision like that universal search or Kavo is another sort of example that can search across multiple devices or multiple apps are really promising vision, but it remains to be seen, you know, how actually helpful those are going to be as the number of different services continues to climb. Yeah.

Like you said, number of services. We know that Apple TV, I don't even know what to call it. I guess they're calling it Apple TV. That's coming online this year. Which isn't confusing at all. Well, yeah. I mean, it kind of is and it kind of isn't. You what to call it. I guess they're calling it Apple TV. That's coming online this year. Which isn't confusing at all. Well, yeah. I mean, it kind of is and it kind of isn't. You have to have, yeah.

I'll forgive them. Yeah. The Apple, not Apple, Disney, they should call it Disney Vault, but it's called Disney something else. That service will be coming out on 2. That'll hold all of Disney properties and that kind of thing. So like eventually I think there's going to come at a point in time where like people aren't going to want to shell out $80 in streaming services. Right. I mean, we're going to pick and choose, um, what services we're going to want to go with. And I'm, I'm really curious. I mean, this year is going to be kind of a defining moment

for, for a lot of these. Netflix still is, in my mind, a premium. Amazon's probably a pretty good value because it's like, what, $10 or, I forget what Prime is. It's like $100 a year or something like that, maybe $119. But you get a pretty good value out of that because you get some movies that were okay and some TV shows like Patriot, which are awesome, in there. But it's part of like, you also get free shipping and a whole host of other stuff from Amazon. And then you've got Hulu over here. Like, let's drop the price down to get in.

Like, I wonder if these are like price moves that are being done ahead of these other couple of companies going to the market. And like strategically planning out like, okay, we're going to be at $5. And there's no way Apple is going to the market and and like strategically planning out like okay we're gonna be at five and there's no way apple's gonna be 5.99 so where where you know hulu is gonna be kind of like on their own in that in that price market right yep all great points eric in the chat room is making a comment that i agree with is a weak spot for netflix he says the issue i maintain with netflix is their loss of content He says the issue I maintain with Netflix is their loss of content over time. The original content is great, but I'd still like to be able to catch up on blockbuster movies. And I got to say, I've been trying to get a little more into watching

movies lately, and I'm not a huge movie guy. So I don't have a lot of movies listed that I want to jump in and watch. So I'm just typically kind of browsing around trying to find something that piques my interest. And I agree, the movie selection is not, I don't think, great on Netflix. I don't think it's great on really any of them. I think if you want a great movie, like you have to pay, go on Apple and pay per rental or buy the title that, you know, to me, that's, that's still the best way to do that. But, um, you know, I think you may, you made some great points. Prime is a really interesting one to me in terms of how I think about my spending, because I would like, I would have prime regardless of if they had the video component, right?

Just for the free shipping, to me, it more than pays for itself over the course of the year, given how much we purchase on Amazon. So to me, the Prime video is just kind of icing on the cake. And I don't even really consider that part of my TV budget. So we certainly use that. And then we use Netflix and Hulu. I wanted to circle back, though, very quickly and mention a few minutes ago, I alluded to the fact there was a couple of articles, and I thought this other one on digital trends that we'll link to was a really good counterpoint, and I'm going to quote here.

He says, the pundits got it wrong. The golden age of streaming is, in fact, just beginning, and this rate hike is going to pay for it. So he's talking about why Netflix raising its prices is a good thing. He says, again, the golden age of streaming is just beginning and these rate hikes will pay for it. If you really believe the golden age of streaming is about price, it was over in 2018 when the price of all the subscriptions necessary to replace cable started equaling dot, dot, dot, a cable bill. Wait, wait for it.

Yeah. It says, no, this price hike signals a new paradigm of entertainment, one in which creators aren't shackled to fossils, talking about the older companies there, and where content is owned and distributed by the same crusty relics that have controlled the industry for decades. Netflix is independent. It is a trailblazer and is going up against some of the most powerful entertainment conglomerates in the world. This costs bucks, big ones. Where's that money supposed to come from? If you're smart, it comes from your wallet and I promise you it will be worth it in the long run. So I thought that was a really good perspective. And generally speaking, nobody ever likes a price increase. But again, to me, I'll go back to what I said at the beginning of this conversation. It's all about value. And I still feel like I'm getting plenty of value at $13 a month. enjoying at least let's see we've got netflix hulu hbo uh and amazon and between those four

like i generally can find something on um and or like you said go and buy it buy the movie like right just go and physically buy it or digitally buy it i guess on on apple or you know and it's always there in your library so i mean there mean, there's, there's always, there's always, there always seems to wait a way now to get the content. It's not like I'm going to the store and hoping that, um, that movie is in stock because it rarely ever is. Um, so yeah, I think it's pretty, uh, pretty good time. And I, I'm, I'm all for, I'm all for supporting this original content movement right now, whatever,

whatever platform it's on, whether it be Netflix or Amazon or anything like that. Um, uh, there, there've been some great shows, uh, that, that have, that have popped up over the past couple of years, um, on, on both Netflix, Amazon, uh, and Hulu for that matter. Hulu's had some really good ones too. Yep. Absolutely. So certainly to be continued. Don't expect this conversation around streaming to die down any anytime soon and continue to think it's a really fun landscape to follow. All of the links and topics that we've discussed here on our episode can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 242. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll send you weekly show reminders as well as occasional other updates about all the great things going on in the world of home technology.

And don't forget that you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday starting from right around 7 to 7.30 p.m. Eastern. Find out more at hometech.fm slash live. We've got a couple of people in the chat room tonight. Looks like even uh there was a bruno sighting briefly bruno bruno sighting indeed appreciate bruno joining us and a few other folks joining us as well it's always a lot of fun to have some company here when we sit down and record seth do we have a uh a pick of the week this week that's my burning question yep we do uh i i ran across

this actually i think there's been a couple of people over on the reddit home automation uh um subreddit i guess uh that have been posting these like pictures of their like diagrams of the workflow that they have for their diy security not not security system, but like home automation systems. And man, this one is a wild one. It looks like a ton of work, but they have got like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven different things, seven different platforms. Yeah. Seven different platforms that are all communicating somehow back and forth with each other and it's it's almost like the craziest rube goldberg machine

that i've ever seen but it it is that's a great that's a great way to put it but this is a really really cool graphic though yeah well i mean and it's a really cool setup, too. If you think about it, you and I look at this and we're like, man, that's a ton of work, right? Yep. That is an absolute ton of work. So they have really gone above and beyond here to make their system work the way they want. There's a couple of things in the thread. He said he got bored and wanted to map out and

see what was actually going on in his home automation system. And he said, not nearly as bad as I thought. He said his goal behind his smart home was to make it user-friendly for myself, my wife, and largely doing that by using voice control on Google Home Mini using Google Assistant throughout the house and on iPhones, Apple Watches using Siri. It sounds like they're, he said, he's nothing too fancy as my wife would murder me. And I understand that, absolutely understand that. But man, seeing the hoops, seeing these hoops that we have to run through to get all of these different systems to kind of work and talk together. I mean, there's integration at its core, but, man, it sure looks pretty crazy when you look at it like this. Yeah.

Yeah, he's got, just to lay this out a little bit, you've got a bunch of HomeKit devices. You know, your iPhones and iPads and points of control, really. It looks like some Samsung smart thing stuff going on, smart fridge, some Cree light bulbs, some other devices there. He's got a whole device list on the right-hand side of this graphic, so you have to go check it out. Sleep number bed integrated somehow it looks like google home logitech nest an intel computer running some software presumably to make you know bridge the gap between some of these devices so a really interesting i would say visualization of what a true like to take the diy more consumer focused devices out there and really do like a comprehensive integrated home,

you can get a visual sense for how much is actually involved in that. And anybody who's ever done one of these systems on their own for fun, for a hobby, or if you do it for a profession, you'll be able to sort of relate and instantly see, oh, man, you know, this is a lot of moving parts. And to try to make it all simple for everybody in the house to use is not easy. And I think this is a really cool visual representation of that. So definitely go check it out. And Seth, maybe we can reach out to this gentleman across Reddit and have him on for a projects project one of these days.

Yeah, it's not a bad idea. Yeah. I mean, you can tell that there's a ton of work that's gone into this. And I think that what you just said there, it's not easy. Like, it's still not easy. Like, as much as we want, and you and I coming from the pro side, like grabbing an Apple HomeKit device and installing it and basically pointing your phone at, you know,

camera at the little serial number on the back and it works. Like, that's really easy. But, you know, when you start building out and building a home automation system, it's still hard. It's still something that's hard to do. So especially something like bespoke like this. Absolutely. All right. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, or picks of the week, great ideas for a show, want to come on for an interview, whatever it is, reach out. We would love to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Again, that's feedback at hometech.fm.

Or if you'd prefer, you can jump on over to our website and fill out the online contact form at hometech.fm slash feedback. 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 don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Home Tech for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over $5 a month gets you a shout out on the show, but every pledge gets an invite to our private Slack channel, The Hub, where you and every other supporter of the show can gather every day for the Inside Baseball conversations about home technology.

And maybe we're going to share some Plex logins in there. I don't know. It seems like that's what we should be doing. You never know what you're going to get. With this great power that we have, right? That's right. That's right. And if you can't help us out financially, we totally get that.

But we would appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in your podcast app of choice that is of course assuming you think we're a five-star show we hope so but any review any feedback is appreciated so definitely take a moment to do that and we'll be on the lookout for it absolutely well i think that wraps up this week uh jason we're kind of moving into ise territory next we. We are. Yeah. So I think it's the week, the following week, but we'll probably have a little bit more in the news when it comes to like home automation systems and that kind of thing, as I think everybody is probably, what do you call it? Keeping the powder dry.

Keeping the powder dry. Yeah. I got to credit Mike Wolfe for that one. I stole that from him. I think you're probably right. A lot of the pro side of the industry was a little bit quiet this week, and I think we'll see definitely some momentum there as we enter ISE here in the next week or two. Yep, absolutely. Well, I think that wraps up the show tonight. So thanks, everybody out there for listening, and Jason, I'll talk to you next week. All right. Sounds good, Seth. Have a great week.