HomeTech.fm - Episode 247 - Token Apple TV Speculation

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: the latest home tech headlines including: A look at SnapAV’s new partnership with Clare Controls and Alula. The Home Technology Association ends their first year on a high note. Sony releases pricing on their new premium TVs. Charter to release a new $15/month channel package. Cord cutting hits another record high. Speculation on how Apple is aiming to disrupt television. And more…

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, March 1st from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How you doing, Seth? Good, man. I'm about to drop $2,600 on a plastic phone. Are you looking at one? I'm not going to get one of one of these i mean it's really cool like the folding phone phones yeah i saw a bunch of stories about these in my blog feeds a couple of weeks weeks ago i'm not sure what was happening that it was getting so much coverage but i never

stopped and looked and i just before we hit record tonight i i finally caved and went and looked at some of these like at least some of these concept ones i'm looking like an apple one it's no no no i did sam samsung is launching one i don't think apple's doing no this is like a just a fake like what it might look like i don't know when i heard folding phones all i could think about was like hipsters carrying around like the actual old folding phones that we used to have like the flip phones you're talking about flip phones yeah and like we moved past those for a reason yeah no no no these are these are like these are like picture a screen that you can fold in some like a screen just an entire piece of screen that you fold in half and that's that's what they two

companies came out the reason you saw it's is because there were two companies that came up with this thing last week. Samsung and Huawei, I don't remember how to pronounce. This is one of those we're going to have to call somebody over in China and get them to pronounce it. Hey, better you than me. Yeah. So we'll get, it's not Xiaomi.

So we know how to pronounce that one. This one got me. We got that one down. Still got some work to do on Huawei. Huawei. Huawei. Okay. Huawei.

This is how we get it. All right. See, I've heard that before. Thank you, Anthony, in the chat room. Yes, thank you, Anthony. Yeah, so I've heard that one before. But I didn't know they were coming out with a folding phone. And they actually have probably the better looking model.

Unfortunately, I found out, one, how much these things cost, which is like crazy expensive, more than $2,000. And second, I found out that they're like made out of plastic. So at first I was like, oh, I'm going to break this thing. You're going to give me a phone that has a screen on the front and the back? Done. Like there's no chance that thing's surviving more than 15, 20 minutes. At least you're honest with yourself. Yeah, yeah, $2,000 phone.

But to pay $2,000 to $3,000 for a plastic folding phone, I don't know. I don't know. You're going to have to give me a couple years for this technology to advance. It looks awesome. This is, like, really cool. Like, this is sci-fi of our childhood right this is the stuff that they were like they couldn't even make cg do right when we were growing up but it exists now this this stuff exists now and uh it's really cool looking and uh but it's going to be a while before it gets to be like something you and i

would want to go out and get i think think. It's going to be a while. Yeah, they're definitely pretty neat looking, I have to say, but I am not going to be on the early adopter curve of this, which is pretty typical for me. I'll wait this one out. But you know the way technology moves these days, it'll be here before you know it. But we are not a cell phone show,

so let's jump in and talk some smart home stuff. Seth, what do you say? Let's do it. But we are not a cell phone show, so let's jump in and talk some smart home stuff. Seth, what do you say? Let's do it. SnapAV has become the sole distributor of home automation company Claire Controls. Seth, I think you used to work there, right? Yeah, yeah. Long time ago. I think it was a different company.

And is also partnering with Alula for alarm products. I have to admit I was not familiar with them. Claire, for those of you who don't know, offers a hub that starts at less than $200, plus attachments for building out a complete automation system, including video surveillance, energy management, security, lighting, control, and multi-room AV and more. Last year, Claire teamed up with security system provider Alula to create a fully integrated security and automation platform for dealers that includes recurring revenue for alarm monitoring. SnapAV will sell the Alula products under the Clare Secure brand.

Interesting. When I was there, we did not have a $200 anything. When I was there, they were basically their entire automation. It was basically like a savant, like competitor, I guess. So like they were

basically basing everything off the Mac Mini. So, I mean, you start with a $600 price point on a build, on part of your product that you're built with,

you're going to automatically be up in the $2,000 range for a controller and that's pretty much where we were. So I can say that they have done, they've done a lot of work

since i have uh i departed the company probably i don't know six seven years ago it's been a while um so yeah i i gotta say it's it's a completely different company with completely different technology but uh the app the app kind of looks the same kind of looks like plugging away yeah they're kind of a quieter company in terms of at least on on our show and i'd say in the in the the press in general. But, yeah, I know I hear them come up periodically, and I think they've tried to do some interesting things in terms of their go-to-market strategy, like working more directly with builders and stuff like that. Exactly.

So, yeah, good to see them still plugging along, and hopefully this will be a good deal for them and for Snap. Friend of the show, Home Technology Association, the HTA, wrapped up its first full year in 2018 with some solid momentum, achieving 135 HTA-certified integration firms in 64 markets. HTA goals are to raise the visibility of the home technology integration firms and establish relationships with architects, builders, and designers. Here's a quote from Josh Christian. The Home Technology Association's inaugural year was a great success, and 2019 is off to an equally exciting start. HTA-certified technology integration firms are telling us they have experienced unprecedented success in the marketplace

with many reporting their best year ever. That's pretty cool. I was happy to see these guys pop up wow when did they come on to the market yeah i mean i guess it was like we knew about them a little bit ahead of time yeah yeah i think they were kind of like underground for a little bit and then they popped up but i i i'm seeing like i mean obviously cd is trying to trying to replicate this too but uh man i i'm really it's really awesome to see they have 135 firms. Because I looked at their,

when we talked to Josh about his, what their standards were, and they're super high. It's not easy to become certified. Yeah. I'm a big fan of their mission in terms of trying to help the top integrators out there who've really put in the work to establish themselves

and create a really quality offering for their clients and helping kind of separate them from the pack, I think, is a good mission. There are very few barriers to entry in that world, and that creates kind of, frankly, a scary landscape for consumers, and HTA, I think uh sort of helps address that after unveiling them for the first time ever to the public at ces 2019 in january sony has announced pricing and availability for some of its ultra premium 4k hdr lcd tvs wow that's a mouthful new editions of the x950g series will be available both in stores and online as of March 12th. So coming right up prices for the X950G start off at $1,400 for the 55 inch and go up from there $2,200 for a 65 inch and $3,500 for the 75 inch. There's also an 85 inch version coming out, but we do not have pricing on that one yet. So definitely a premium offering here compared to what you can get for a 55- or 65-inch TV these days.

But Sony always makes a really, really great set, so I'm sure these will be no exception. Yeah, I'm really proud of them for sticking to, like, let's just increment these in 10 inches. 65, no, 55, 65 no 55 65 75 85 done no like you get a set you want a 72 we have a 72 in there we just throw that randomly in there you don't like that huh i hated those days like just make some standard sizes and get them right over two months since apple music landed on the amazon echo it's now set for another smart home speaker uh that isn't the home pod a listing for the music streaming services has been spotted inside google home app for ios by my mac rumors reader wow uh though it's currently not live the update uh indicates that it could be imminent there you go

apple music coming to more platforms i guess that's a good thing, right? I'm not an Apple Music user, are you? They offered me a free trial the other day, and I was like, no thanks. Like, I don't listen. I mean, I guess we're getting into it a little bit more with my daughter, like listening to music and that kind of thing. We've pretty much got her singing Queen songs, which is pretty awesome to hear a two-year-old trying to sing radio gaga but uh the the like we we're not really like huge on on the music like when i listen to something it's a podcast right so um yeah yeah no no apple music either no apple music no i i use spotify i

use a free version on my computer while i'm working, but I'm with you. I don't listen to a ton of music, and most of what I do listen to I can find on Amazon, and I'm a Prime user anyways, and I've got my Echo up there, so we're kind of covered in that department for now. Right. Moving on from there, in the mode of competitors like AT&T's Watch TV and Philo, Charter is planning a $15 a month TV package that will focus on entertainment cable networks. Called Spectrum TV Essentials, the package will feature more than 60 live TV channels from network groups including Viacom, Discovery, A&E, AMC, and Hallmark. The package will not

include major broadcast networks or their affiliated cable channels, nor will not include major broadcast networks or their affiliated cable channels, nor will it include any regional sports networks. To keep the price down, presumably, is why they're doing that. The service is launching by the end of March 2019, so right around the corner. It will be available exclusively to Charter Spectrum Internet customers who do not subscribe to the full-price Spectrum TV product. That's not bad. I mean, $15, that's not terrible. Yeah, it's a good price.

I mean, and if you don't need the local broadcast networks, which you can get over the air anyways if you're willing to do a little bit of work to set that up. And then if sports aren't really your thing, this looks to be like a pretty solid offering. Yeah, it's probably the best one I've seen. Everything else is in that $ to 40 range which gets you back up into cable territory once you add internet and everything onto it so right interesting i'll have to keep an eye on that one in other cord cutting news uh the rate of consumers dropping their cable satellite tv packages hit in the highest level ever in the last three months of 2018 total number of pay TV subscribers dropped 4.1% from the year earlier,

the highest rate of decline since the trend of cord cutting emerged in 2010. About 985,000 more customers dropped cable or satellite in the quarter than signing up for new service industry-wide. That's incredible. One big change from a year ago seems to be the cooling off

of internet-based TV subscribers, though, due to the higher prices that we've talked about in the past, where everything's kind of gone up from that introductory rate from $30 to $40. The number of additional people who signed up for those type of packages, the internet-type packages, totaled $740,000 in the fourth quarter, which is down from $ 900,000 gain a year earlier. At year end, about 7.6 million people subscribed to one of the offerings of the internet offerings.

The cable bundle has become increasingly unappealing as consumers have turned to more flexible and less expensive video offerings such as Netflix and Hulu. Crazy. It's been an ongoing trend. So definitely something just continue to watch and major area of evolution for sure. Speaking of that one last story, wanted to spend a few minutes talking about, Seth, what do you say we indulge in some Apple speculation? Oh boy. We're a little overdue.

It's the name of the game here. We're going to get some listeners on this one. Nobody talks about Apple speculation. Right. This one's a big one, though. This is their TV service, and I think Digital Trends did a good write-up. They write at the top of the story. They say, here's some speculation about what the service might look like but i i found it enlightening

because i think it's easy to imagine that that apple would would come out with a service that looks a lot like you know what netflix does with sort of a mix of licensed content and stuff like that but it sounds like they're trying to do something pretty different and sort of a mix of licensed content and stuff like that. But it sounds like they're trying to do something pretty different. And sort of, you know, quoting from the story here, by now you've read rumors that Apple is creating a streaming service with original content to compete with Netflix, Amazon, and others. Apple's ambitions appear to go way beyond becoming a production studio. However, were it to launch a Me Too service

with a mix of licensed and original content, it might take a small bite out of the other company's profits, but it would face an uphill battle. Instead, Apple hopes to do what it has always done, create a better way of interacting with the technology at hand, and make that experience the basis of its product. Service is expected to be called simply Apple TV. Yes, that is very confusing, unfortunately, but the piece goes on to sort of outline what all this service could do, like, you know, talks about virtual cable box with an unlimited DVR, more than just a collection of content. So, you know, we'll dive in and talk about a couple of these things, but

pretty interesting to hear what Apple may be doing. And I know this, and this service has been a long time in the rumor mill. So anxious to see it come out. I think we talked about it a week or two ago that the rumors are it'll be this spring. Like it should be soon that we can stop speculating. I think there's an event in a month like march 25th so april it's supposed to be like an april 1st launch world worldwide um i've heard kind of like going back and forth about like original content versus like whatever they call it other content i'm not sure but like i don't know i'm i'm kind of feeling like this is going to be only apple content i don't know it would be yeah so it like this is going to be only Apple content. I don't know.

Yeah, so it says, well, it says just like in iTunes, personalized recommendations will be under the Genius brand and work in much the same way. But instead of being limited to iTunes, Genius will show you the best matches from everything you have the rights to watch. So it's kind of like, you know, their TV app that they currently have is sort of that universal search type of idea. I think it's sort of rolling that in and then mixing that together with, you know, new original content that we've heard a lot of rumors about Apple doing,

and then presumably, obviously, more licensed content as well. That can be big. I mean, that's kind of like what we want right like we just want to like pull up an app and i you know i really don't sometimes i really don't care what like netflix wants me to watch and suggest that i watch like it'll come up with some random movie and put at the top and start streaming like this trailer for it right and i i most of the times i don't want to see that um so i don't know this but but having like other everything kind of all like brought together in

one spot where i can go to the shows that i do like to watch uh and just like pick and choose from those i think that's like that kind of aggregation is good i don't really care too much for the ai aspect of this right like let me guess what you want to watch type thing. I'd rather personally rather hear that from other channels. Like, you know, like if I go into a podcast and be like, hey, you should watch Jason. I know you're looking for a new show you should watch. You should watch Patriot. And you literally ask that on Facebook.

And I'm like, buddy, buddy, buddy, buddy. And you chimed in like, dude, Jason, how many times do I have to recommend The Patriot? Problem is I'm like, I'm looking for a show that my wife and I can watch together and I just don't think that one's her style. Yeah, well, give it a shot. Give it a shot. It's got some fun.

Give it a shot. I've been trying Black Mirror, which apparently I totally missed the bus on that. Yeah. I like it. It's interesting. Not the movie, the series, right? I guess the Bandersnatch movie.

Anyways, yeah, some interesting stuff in this piece, and we'll include a link to it. HomeTech.fm slash 247 will be our show notes. One other area I wanted to point out. Again, I'm going to quote from the story here real quick. One last quote. It says, Apple's new service aims to become the ultimate video aggregator pulling in content from a wide variety of sources, though its ambitions in this area will be limited by the deals that can strike with players like cable satellite streaming video and live TV companies.

Of course, that's going to be a big hurdle. It goes on to say, Apple is expected to build an infrastructure that will be capable of hosting everything. In theory, even free over-the-air local broadcasts could be captured. Using a massive collection of content servers positioned strategically around the country as its backbone, Apple could theoretically become

the single largest warehouse of licensed video content, period. With Apple's servers acting as a repository for all of its content, its network becomes the ultimate dvr so pretty interesting stuff there um all speculation again of course and it's all really going to hinge on the deals right like that to me is the biggest most important sentence in that paragraph what's apple going to be able to do on the licensing side and they're not going to be able to go in and strong arm uh their way into all the deals like in just steamroll companies

there's a lot of entrenched interest that they're going to be coming up against so be really interesting to watch yeah i mean this this article is like a lot of wishful thinking and if apple can do maybe you know 10 of this i think they'd have a pretty good product on their hands. But like you said, there's entrenched interests in this. And Apple was able to steamroll the music industry, but they were kind of like falling all over themselves with what was happening at the time with people downloading MP3s. Napster. Napster, yeah so like that that was that was a market that was kind of like not so much looking for disruption but also at the same time like had a lot going on the video market seems to

be doing pretty well and they there are other places to shop at right there's other places to go netflix and hulu google youtube google youtube they exist. Like if you have a show and you're a content creator, you can go somewhere else. You don't have to give Apple everything. So, um, I think the video people have, have kind of like stuck to their guns on that a little bit more than the music people were able to when, when the Apple iTunes stuff and iPod kind of like launched and took off so well. Um, you but, you know, here's to hoping. Let's hope that Apple can actually pull something off that is as good as the iPod was for, you know, music as, you know,

it will be for video, video content and that kind of thing. So I did hear one thing that I don't really see on here, but I heard it was a rumor or something that like United Airlines or something would have Apple content like on their airplanes, like just preloaded and ready to go. And that's, that seemed like a great marketing idea. Like if you're, if you're not, I don't even know you even have to be an Apple like TV subscriber, but like if you get on an airplane and you know, you've got like three or four hours to kill and you see one of these new shows that people are talking about. Um, if all the content's like preloaded on on the airplane and you just hop along you're like oh yeah i wanted to check out the show people were talking about

uh and it's there and then you may become a you know an apple subscriber when you get off the airplane three hours later right so i thought that was a pretty good idea like to just set up a some kind of like working relationship with an airline. It's the definition of a captive audience, right? You can go nowhere. That is very, very true. So we'll be interested to see. What do you think? Did we get enough of our, did we get our Apple speculation fix?

Yeah, you know, I'm genuinely curious to what they come out with. And really for them, it's going to be make or break on their original content that they create. I'm really curious to see what that is. They had a lot of good things in the works. And I think the price point is going to come down to it too, right? Because how many $15 services is the world going to be able to afford, right? I'm also curious if they roll this into Apple Music and Apple TV. Do you get both for the same price of $15 or whatever?

Can you just have unlimited access to all the world's music and whatever Apple videos they want to put on there? That would be a compelling service, but I don't know. It's Apple. Are we going to get that? I don't know. Maybe'll start maybe they'll start bundling in home pods what do you think just well they gotta get rid of them somehow oh man those poor things you know i i've i've been like thinking in the back of my head that i wanted to gather up like all the world's like uh like abandoned products uh and like just kind of like i have a blank wall right here you can't see it because it's this way and I face this way,

but like I was going to make a shelves and put all these like products up there of dead home hubs and that kind of thing. Great idea. Get, get a revolve and set it up there, you know, like, yeah,

I'm not going to buy a $300. Yeah. A museum of dead home automation appliances. And yeah, I mean that the, the home pod may have a little square up there one of these days. Just save it a spot. Yeah.

I mean, it's a good speaker. I think it'll stick around. They'll figure it out. Well, maybe. Maybe. It's becoming less compelling to buy something like that when the only service it offers can be, you know, gotten on a $ google home that i have sitting in front of me that sounds quite frankly to 12 inches away from me right now like just as

good i mean not just as good but it sounds good enough for 30 that i don't have to spend 10 times that amount for an apple home pod that really can only do that one thing yeah all right well all of the links and topics we've discussed here on the show can be found in our show notes home tech.fm slash 247 while you're there don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter on the right hand side of the site there you'll see it we'll send you weekly show reminders as well as other occasional updates about all of the great things going on here in the world of home tech. Nice. And don't forget that you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday starting 7, 730. To find out more, go to hometech.fm slash live.

All right, Seth, we got a mailbag entry this week. This comes from Kyle. And I think he had some questions about, he had sort of given us a tip on a show we'll have to go check out i think a conversation around uh lowe's iris and so sort of what went down there there's another one by the way to add to your oh yeah your wall of i'm trying to get one but i don't know i'm gonna wait for the price to bottom out right hey you know i'm not gonna buy one now uh but anyways i think the thing that you wanted to touch on here towards the end of his note, he said, I'm also interested in your perspective on a DIY solution for lighting.

Philips Hue seems like a front runner, but I'd rather not have an additional hub just for the lights. LIFX, L-I-F-X, I think you pronounce it LIFX, seems to have some nice products, but I don't want to bog down my Wi-Fi with too many devices. Seth, I think you have some direct experience with Philips Hue and perhaps had some thoughts to offer here. Yeah, I mean, so the pricing is, I don't know, similar, if not about the same with Philips Hue. It's a Zigbee-based thing, if I'm remembering correctly.

I have one at the house, and I use it for Halloween-type special effects. To me, it's a toy. I guess I use it almost every day. It's in the chandelier. We have one of these Ikea chandelier things that if I put a colored light in it, the whole thing glows red if I turn the light red, so it's kind of cool. But I don't know. It's just a toy to me.

Otherwise, just working as a regular on-and and off white ish light, it works fine. And, um, I, I, I don't have too many complaints on that. I know that I've heard that like, Oh, I life fix is like a lot, a lot better, I guess. I don't know. It just depends on what you're going for, I suppose. But I really wouldn't worry about bogging down your home network, like your Wi-Fi with these. They're not going to be streaming video or anything like that. So you're going to be fine on how they connect in. You may have issues with connectivity if you don't have a good Wi-Fi access point. But, I mean, that's hard not to do these days with things like Eero on the market.

So, you know, I think either one of them are great to go with. I personally, even having the Hue, I'd probably lean towards the LIFX now, just because I know that's like probably a little bit easier to get involved and develop for on the development side. But Hue has a ton of integrations too. So it's kind of like let's see life it's worked with everything anyway alexa home kit assistant google assistant cortana

what is cortana i don't know um you know nest flick infinity for harmony remote if this then that that that stringify science sense yeah yeah yeah so i mean it it's it's got a ton of stuff that it works with. Probably not as much as the Philips Hue. But I don't know. It depends on what your goals are. At the end of the day, I don't like these types of systems, these light bulb type systems,

because they're just toys at the end of the day. They're there to enhance the mood, I suppose. They're not going to add anything to your lighting at all, other than color, if you need that. But if you're in a situation where you can't retrofit, switch it like Lutron, I would say Lutron Caseta all day long. Because then you're not buying one bulb. You're buying a dimmer that can do like five bulbs. So it would be great to do that over something like this where you lose the ability to do like color dimming and that kind of thing.

You gain the ability of like simplicity, a switch that works on the wall. You don't have to figure out like most of the times when I see people with the Philips Hue, the second question is like, okay, I got this working. Now, how do I stop people from turning off the light switch on the wall so this actually works all the time? Yeah, exactly. You end up putting duct tape over the light switch or something. Yeah. So, I mean, that's not the best product experience for everyone else in the house if that is a use case. You know?

I don't know. So, to me me these seems like like little toys that it's great that they change colors and that's awesome but it's a toy at the end of the day and if you really want something like use look into something like uh luchon caseta where you can replace the actual switch in your wall um or you know step up and find some other lighting control system that works as well i I don't know. Caseta seems to be like the bad boy on the block, right? They've got everything. They've got, they've got Amazon, they've got Apple, they've got Google, and it's, it's a nice, convenient, inexpensive little dimmer package, dimmer and switch package that you can put together fairly easily. So I,

I don't know that that's probably the direction I would kind of like say, Hey, if you're, if you can replace the switches in your wall, you have that ability, look at this. Because in the long term, it's going to do better than looking at these Wi-Fi bulbs that cost, you know, $50 a piece. It's going to hurt. If these $44.99, $29.99, and they have one that's like $19.99, but that's not going to give you much light. You know, if these go out, you're going to be crying a little bit more than if a bulb goes out in your house and you need to replace a bulb. You know, I regularly do bulbs. I think that's a good way to answer that question.

Like between LIFX or Hue, like Chris is in the chat room saying a lot of good things about Hue. I'm sure there are plenty of people people have similar experience with lifex i have to imagine that ultimately the user experience pretty pretty similar between those two i think if you're looking for something like maybe you've got a couple of lamps in a room that you want to use for accent lighting it'd be cool to have them turn on a different colors for different occasions. Like that's, I think what those types of products are really good for. And to your point, if it depends on what you're trying to do, like if you're actually looking for a more functional way to control your lighting in your home, like day-to-day use case, then you're much better off looking at an in-wall lighting where

the intelligence lives in the wall. The intelligence lives at the dimmer or the switch not in the light bulb itself right so that's where you get into lutron caseta is probably probably the you know the front runner there i would agree with that so really just depends like if you're looking for um a way to do some accent lighting or something kind of fun uh hue or lifex great for that or if you're in an apartment like i i have to think about like the times i was in college and i would i would personally swap out the crummy little like thermostat they had on the wall with a connected thermostat because that's just what i did yeah but um you know i can understand that if like you you don't have a landlord that's says accommodating um to something like that or

you know say hey i'm going to swap out these these light switches that's probably not going to happen in a rental like you're probably going to need to do something like a phillips u or a lifex so like there's definitely use cases for these things uh where you wouldn't run into something like lutron uh right and be able to put that in right all. All right. Well, thank you so much for the note, Kyle. We do appreciate you reaching out, and hopefully that answer helps get you steered in the right direction. Moving on from there, Seth, picture of the week. And this one is cool.

You sent me a shot of this midweek and had it tied into our Patreon page. Oh, I still got it tied in. Yeah, you've got it tied into our patron patreon page and oh i still got it tied in yeah you've got it tied in cool little called i guess pronounced la metric and it's like the size of like maybe a little bluetooth speaker if you picture that like one of those smaller rectangular bluetooth type of speakers you you would put on the countertop and it's like i i guess it's a clock primarily but that's not even doing it justice like it ties into different services and apps and you can have it display all kinds of stuff ranging from the temperature that you've got it hooked up to our twitter account to see

twitter followers our patreon page to see where we're at with contributions there a whole bunch different stuff you can hook this into so it's kind of a neat little device you can put around your house. And I presume, Seth, that it just sort of cycles through the different apps that you have it linked with. Yeah, so you can actually configure that. Like, it has a lot of settings that I was pretty well, you know, pleased to have. I don't know if you can see it. Like, it's got the clock. I can press the button on top and get to, oh, there's our patron.

There's our patron followers. Twitter and you know the weather you see that temperature jason 70 degrees yeah 70 degrees what do you we're getting close to spring here we'll be there soon enough you'll catch up right yeah that's it it cooled off actually for that temperature kind of surprised. So, yeah, but it's got a bunch of stuff built into it. I can tie my Sonos into it and see what's playing on there. It'll cycle kind of like a ticker type thing and kind of run through. You can set it up to cycle through. You can set it up to press the buttons like I just had to do there, or you can actually set it on a schedule so at certain times it it'll change

to different things um there's also a development side to this that i've already kind of like got into um because like i hooked it up to my work to see how much each day that we had sold um you know we have basically we have our yeah so like i can see like just look over and see where we are with sales for the day. So I thought that was a fun little use case that I could do pretty quickly since I have development access to both sides of this. And I was able to set up in probably about an hour's worth of work. It wasn't very much to do. Everything is kind of done through their web portal online and little app gets installed to the device. It's all set up like over your iPhone. So kind of like apps,

I guess. Like you just add an app in and it gives you a little square and you tap on that to configure it. So it works just like what you would find on your home screen of your iPhone, your Android within an app. The interface is super easy, and there's a ton of settings. Like if I wanted it to be in centigrade rather than Fahrenheit, I can do that. There's all sorts of stuff. 24-hour clock. I don't know if you saw on the calendar.

You can change out the icon here on the side. I have the date on there. But you can change that out to be any icon you want. They also have like animated icons too. So like on a holiday, it may be a Santa that's laughing or something. And then across the bottom here, you can turn this on and off.

These little lines are the day of the week. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. That's Wednesday. It's on the middle. I should probably know that. That's probably why I thought it was Tuesday all week, but anyway, yeah, there, Wednesday. That's Wednesday. It's in the middle. I should probably know that. That's probably why I thought it was Tuesday all week. But, huh.

Anyway, yeah. There you go. Yeah. Yeah, really cool. It's a cool thing. $200. So not cheap. No, no.

They also, if you look on their website, they have the sky thing at the top. And that's what I'm really waiting on. So I got this. I was looking at their website. And this is like those panels that we've looked at. Oh, yeah. What's the name? Yep. It looks very similar, but they look done right.

Like, they attach without random cables and that kind of thing running. Each one of the pictures has a stupid cable hanging off the backside of this thing. And I'm like, I want this, but I'm going to hide the cable. But you can do, like, if you scroll. At least they didn't Photoshop the cable out. No, no. It's like, you know, that's just disingenuous. So points for honesty.

Yeah. If you scroll down, you can kind of find like some pictures where they arranged these panels like in a long rectangle. Like you see here with like the temperature and, and, and what it's like outside kind of like on those panels. And I, that's, that's kind of what I want to do with this.

I want to have a, I want to have this little display here, like on my wall there in, uh, surrounded by dead, uh, dead, uh,

technology. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that, that's, that's what I'm going for. One of these days I'm going to hide the wire. You're not going to see the wire because i'm not an animal but uh yes savage yeah

i'm not a savage right yeah but i i don't know how much this thing costs when it comes out it will be cool to see this yeah very cool we'll definitely go check that out it's a pretty neat looking product we'll have a link hometech.fm slash 247 once again. Now, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, great ideas for a show topic, what have you, even if you just want to say hi, we would love to hear from you. Shoot us an email. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Once again, that is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit our website at hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show but especially those who

are able to financially support the show through our patron page if you don't know about our patron page head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support hometech for as little as one dollar a month any pledge over five dollars a month gives you a shout out here on the show but every pledge gets you an invite to our private slack channel the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for inside baseball conversations about all aspects of home technology seth we lost our magic was something we did a few weeks ago we got like five no three five dollar patrons in one week so haven't been able to recapture that but uh who knows maybe this week will be the week you'll get notified this will play a sound this will play a sound on the clock it'll say something so there you go uh if

you cannot support the show financially but want to help us out we totally get it would greatly appreciate a review on itunes or your podcast app of choice that helps more people discover the show so take a few minutes and give us a review again that would be tremendously appreciated yep well i guess that wraps up the week's show uh jason um i don't know what we've got on for next week hopefully there'll be more news to talk about only time will tell yeah yeah we never know this is going to be kind of a fun fun slow week yeah that's right well we've got uh nothing locked in We've got several, I've got several things in the hopper. So we'll see.

We'll definitely have a couple of guests on in the month of March. Can't believe it's going to be March already. Looking forward to some nice spring weather. And Seth, we'll definitely look forward to reconnecting with you next week for another episode of Home Tech. Hope you have a great weekend. Absolutely. Have a good weekend, Jason. All right.

Take care.