HomeTech.fm - Episode 249 - All the World's a Coffee Table

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: Guest co-host Cody Crossland joins the show to chat about Apple Music becoming more ubiquitous, how crime does in fact pay, how your TVs really can’t wait to spy on you, heading to the theater from the comfort of your own bathroom, and much more…

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, March 15th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. This week, no Jason Griffin. He's out doing, I think he said he was going on a work-related trip up to probably the Northeast to kind of do things with OneVision there. But I'm not going to say as usual, but I asked my co-worker over at BlackBerry, Cody, to join me again. Hey, Seth. How's it going?

Yeah. So, hey, Cody Crosland from over there in Texas somewhere, right? Up in the Dallas area, Metroplex area. Dallas, Fort Worth, Metroplex. How is it out there? You had some crazy weather that came through today, yesterday? It was early this morning, yeah. Wind gusts were between 80 and 100 miles an hour, and power outages, and small aircraft flipped over at the municipal airport, and all kinds of exciting things. But thankfully thankfully no damage here at the

casa de crustland that's great spanish uh so so we'll uh and i guess it's margarita time i just saw you post that so i know where the spanish is coming from that's good no no damage was had there i i 80 mile an hour winds are no joke especially in places that aren't like you, like here where we're kind of accustomed to that on days in NY during the summer. It gets kind of crazy. Yeah, you guys actually have building codes that deal with that on a regular basis. Yeah, yeah. There's something about, you know, having a hurricane come through and wiping out an entire town. And they're like, maybe we should build these homes a little bit better.

And yeah, the construction codes here is wild. Oh, you know about it. You've been in Miami and doing construction down there. I lived in Florida for a year, a couple years ago. Yeah, so you're familiar with our tie-down specifications and crazy roofing things that we have to do. But back in Texas, what they call the Wild West, they don't have building codes out there. Cody doesn't even have a water shutoff valve in his house. We've

come to find out. We haven't found it yet. We haven't found it yet. We just shut it off at the meter. It's fine. It's totally cool. It's totally cool. Never mind the water heaters in the attic, but it's totally cool. Totally cool. well let's uh let's go ahead and jump into some tech headlines and talk about the news this week let's do it first story up is a quick follow-up apple music uh users in the u.s can now listen to their tracks on the amazon fire tvs or the sticks uh this news comes only months after the apple music became available on the echo devices stateside and it looks like apple streaming service is going to roll out to Echo users in the UK in coming weeks. Good news.

Yeah, it's always nice having some additional options for streaming. Yeah, and this is kind of like the news that is coming out now around music, but we know that there is an Apple event, I think, next week, March 25th. So, yeah, whenever. So soon. Yeah, I don't even know what today is. Okay, yeah. So yeah, whenever. So soon. Yeah, I don't even know what today is. Okay, yeah, so March, two weeks from now. March 25th, we'll have the Apple event

where they sent out the invites and there was like one of those little countdown things you see before the movies and it says it's showtime. So clearly they will be launching some kind of streaming service at that point in time. And I'm wondering if it'll end up on the Fire TV as well. Will be interesting. This is just a friendly reminder to clear out the balance due on your

credit card ahead of time. Well, I don't, I don't, I wonder how much it's going to cost. I wonder, I don't know. I wonder if they're going to bundle. It's an Apple event. That's, that's true. That's true. Yeah. So, so make sure that if you want a new iPad or something like that, um, you're ready to go. I don't know. I don't think they're going to do any hardware at this. I think they're just going to do,

uh, and now I think it's too big of news for them to do share the stage with anything, but Hey, we're launching a streaming video service. It's only going to be that. And I'm curious now that Apple music is showing up on the fire TV that the Apple music app is just going to update on the Fire TV

and be the Apple TV app. It'll also have... Surprise! It's a Trojan horse. It's a music app. It's a TV app. It's an Apple app. Get it? I think for it to be super successful, it needs to be on platforms other than Apple's own. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely has to be.

Hopefully it ends up on Roku, where it's actually easier to control than an Apple TV. Potato, absolutely. Absolutely has to be. Yeah. Hopefully it ends up on Roku where it's actually easier to control than an Apple TV. Potato, potato. Next story up. Being in the wrong business department, I ran across this and thought it was pretty hilarious. The Australian Federal Police, that's I guess the feds over there in Australia, announced today that they arrested a man accused of selling stolen login credentials for Netflix and Spotify. Now, the unnamed man, 21-year-old, living in Sydney, P2 Sherman, Sydney, Australia. That's the only thing I know about Sydney. Wallaby Way.

Wallaby Way, yep. Operated a website called wickedgen.com that advertised having almost one million usernames and passwords for Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, and other services. People, police believe he generated, now get this, $211,000 selling the stolen logins. I'm totally, I mean, crime pays, kids. This is insane. We're not necessarily advocating the crime, but if you can find a way to make decent money with apparently little effort, yay capitalism.

I mean, this is great. Good for him. I don't know. I don't know. I guess most of the things that he stole were not like, I guess the login credentials were international. So they're like from other places. But this could be a big thing.

Yeah. You know, they have different distribution rights in different countries. And I think that's why Netflix is doing a lot of their own content, because then they can do whatever they want with it, right? Right. Yep. And we're definitely starting to see that out of, I mean, Apple's doing their own content. We're starting to see that out of other people as well. Smart TV manufacturer Vizio has formed a partnership with nine media advertising companies to develop an industry standard that will allow smart TVs to target advertisements to specific households. The company stated on Tuesday, the consortium consortium includes major TV networks like

Comcast, NBC Universal and CBS Corp, as well as advertising technology companies like AT&T, uh, Inks, Zander. This is wild. And I, I gotta say, uh, don't connect your TV up to the internet anymore. This is, this is insane. Yeah. I'm personally wondering how long it's going to take for us to get something like a ad blocker for a TV now. So we can just watch TV without any interruptions. Hey, I see that you're watching stranger things. Right, right. That's a great idea like you could do that some of the some of the routers out there you could probably block um you can probably block things on right like you could probably block uh like certain domains and everything like in the early days ad blockers would just block you could you could take your host file on your computer and there was this guy

that had this host file and it was just like you just paste it in and it would block any traffic out to these domains and it was great and and now the ad companies have gotten wiser to that and don't let that happen but um yeah i i think that's a pretty good idea that's that's the next uh hot app on tvs, unfortunately, they don't make any TVs like my personal preferences. I don't need a web browser. I don't need Netflix built into it because there's always some other thing that's going to do that and probably a lot better than the TV. I like the old school Panasonic Plasma approach where it's just give me the best picture quality. Speakers are optional.

And I don't want any of that other junk. But now it's ads. Yeah. Yeah. And Vizio is the company that got kind of busted. They were kind of sitting back bragging about this technology that they had. That not only could it determine what channel you were watching or whatever, but if you happen to pop in some kind of tape you found into the VCR, it would, it would take samples. Like it would take a pixel

over here, a pixel over here, a pixel over here, a pixel over here, uh, run that across a hash, send that out. And the database would kind of like figure out, Oh yeah, we know what you're watching. We know what you're watching over there, sir. So like, no matter what you hooked up into the TV, it didn't matter as long as the pixels were being on the, put on So like, no matter what you hooked up into the TV, it didn't matter. As long as the pixels were being put on the screen, they knew what you were watching. That's crazy. That's too much Big Brother for me. Let me just watch my VHS copy of Terminator in privacy. Well, just don't hook your TV up to the internet because they know what you're doing. It doesn't matter. Sorry, we can't switch to input HDMI 1 because you're not currently connected to the internet. Right, right. That's going to be how they get around this, right?

Like you have to connect your TVs to the internet to get HDMI to work? I don't know. What I did see was interesting that Apple has kind of like been releasing some of these things like in the background about like what services they're going to have. And I saw that there was a story that came through that said they're desperately trying to get like HBO built into it as well for this Apple TV event. And one of the things I heard early along, and I'm wondering how they're going to push this or how they're going to like. I mean, obviously, the company is like big on privacy.

But one of the things I heard early along was like that they were not allowing any of this tracking at all to happen on their platform. Like if you wanted to be, have content in the Apple ecosystem, it would, it would not be like what Vizio is trying to do here, where it matches it to an individual household, like down to the address, I'm sure. And, and, and be as creepy as possible. They, they would, they would probably anonymize that. But from what I heard that, you know, Apple didn't want to do that. So I'm, I'm very curious as to what they say about that on the stage in two weeks. Yeah, privacy is going to become a bigger concern, I think. Yep. And one more quick news story. Well, not really quick

news story. But this this came up at South by Southwest there in Austin last week. Um, and it was a, there's an in gadget story about it. And, uh, it's kind of a, an interesting, an interesting take on, on augmented reality. Uh, we we've been talking about, uh, these, these systems that are out there and one of them is magically, I know that, I know that like Facebook has one Oculus, there's the Oculus ref thing. It basically involved putting these goofy looking uh you know glasses or headsets on your head and pretending that you don't look stupid yeah okay visors okay and and and looking around and seeing things that that either aren't there or are augmented into the reality and um magic leap has done something pretty cool here uh they have they have basically volumetrically captured actors reciting famous speeches or plays,

and you could sit in your living room and watch this. And the reason this story caught my attention is because Magic Leap goes to the theater, and I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool, Magic Leap. I know what that is. I know what maybe a home theater is. But it wasn't home theater related, so to speak. It's like actual speak. It's like actual, actual theater. It's theater. Theater. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the formal

theater with, with actual live people up there acting out scenes and whatnot. Um, I, I think this could actually be, um, really cool to kind of like step back and think about, like, usually when I think about this stuff, um, and I've heard about this, like you put this on your, your head or whatever, and you look around and instead of having like a 50 inch TV on your, on your, on your wall, you have a 200 inch TV and it's like perfect resolution and everything. And, you know, it's just kind of projected into your eyeballs and overlaid in, in the environment that, that, that's all well and cool. But like, what if you had, you know, like a library, like a, like a sporting event and you looked out into your living room and all of a

sudden your court side or, or, or, or like, uh, maybe, maybe they take that, that, what does that camera that they have at football games that kind of like hovers, they, they, they've gotten it, they're getting it real close. The one on the wire. Yeah. Yeah. The little zip line thing like what if they put a 3d volumetric scanning camera i don't even know what technology they would use but what if they hooked it up to that and then you're just like hovering over the action right there that would be that'd be really cool to watch and see

and just kind of like have it you know in your living room you could get motion sickness in your own living room yeah it's pretty close you know in the bathroom you know where in your living room. You could get motion sickness in your own living room. It's pretty close, you know, in the bathroom, you know where it is. It's kind of safe. I think this is a pretty cool use of technology. Um, I'm familiar with some of the VR stuff. You know, if you're a Cedia member, they've got the Cedia designer tool, which is, you know, uh, it's supposed to give you like 3d looks and stuff like that and then there's also the fractal mob company where they do like a actual vr system that you can put the goggles on and it's it's a they walk you through a 3d virtual reality experience in your home theater so if you're a customer and your integrator offers this service, you can sit in the chair and wear the glasses and the presenter wears the glasses too. And they're

like, okay, well, this is what your room will look like. And it's crazy because you can sit there and see how far back you're sitting and the screen size and everything like that. And then they'll even show you like a trailer on the screen inside vr right which is is wild so like they're taking this application i could see it being really cool for like concerts yeah concerts would be awesome i think we were talking about that a little bit before the show like yeah put a camera in the concert crowd and just i mean you, you're, you're there in the front row. It's like bringing hologram Tupac in your living room. And the other thing, the other thing that could be really cool about it is, uh, you know, we're talking about the concerts, but I was just thinking about this, uh, as like Broadway plays, you know, how difficult is it to get? I mean, I've never

been to New York, but I always hear, you know, Broadway plays are fantastic, but it's impossible to get into and it's expensive and it's kind of exclusive. But I think, you know, if they were smart and the technology was capable enough, you could have like a subscription service to this, right? It's like you get like a show a month or something and you can just, you know, schedule a time, you know, it's like Wednesday. Oh, we have tickets to the Broadway play, but we're in the comforts of our own living room. And you get to experience those, you know, really talented people in the comforts of your own home, which is pretty cool. Right. One of the things they actually did was a musical called Laughter is the Best Medicine.

It was performed by nine dancing tiny actors, I guess, I guess the way it looks is on your, on your coffee table, the stage, all the, all the world's a coffee table is what the quote is, I think. And like, um, Andy circus actually directed the demo through a production company called Imaginarium studios. And, uh, yeah, uh, that, that was, uh, so, so they're, they're already thinking about this, I guess, but I mean, I'm, I mean, this is very, very early days. I think in like maybe five or ten more years as technology gets better.

This particular technology, I mean, we were looking at these earlier, and I'm like, yeah, they look like you're an owl when you're wearing these things. I mean, you look goofy. They do look a little goofy, yeah. They kind of remind me of those Oakley sunglasses. You remember those from the 90s? The over the top? No, no. You're going to have to send me a picture of these. Google it. Hold on. Google it. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's going in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah. Those are...

So if you've ever seen pitch black, um, and, and seeing the goofy goggles that Vin Diesel wears there, that like think about that times times 10, cause this is, this is horrible. So yeah, the nineties were great. And uh, yeah, yeah. That's why we had Lincoln park plan. They're from the two thousands. Come on. All right. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found in our show notes at

hometech.fm slash 249, almost to 250. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which includes even further analysis, as well as other industry news that may not have made the show. Again, the link is hometech.fm slash 249. Don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday, starting usually on Wednesdays and usually starting between 7 and 7.30. A little bit later tonight, but we got online.

So yeah, no bail bag this week, but there is a pick of the week. And I got this, Cody, I was out in town and there's an integrator in town that I've known about for a while. I've seen their trucks. And so they're on a main street, not the main street, but a side street. And I kind of take the back road sometimes.

And I've been by them enough where I'm like, finally, I'm just going to drop in and check out this showroom. And I walked in the showroom. It's Wicked Home. I'm going to mess up their thing. Wicked Smart. Wicked Smart Home. Yeah, yeah. They're here in Sarasota. Beautiful showroom. Lutron, Crestron, Control 4, Savant. It is done

to the nines. It is a beautiful showroom and done very, very well. They even had Josh AI in there. So they had a conference room with Josh AI on the wall and they love using it to like kick things off. I like Josh. Yeah, yeah. Good stuff. um they are uh they had a bunch of like demo things you know the lutrons with all the colors and stuff and i look over and there is a there's well first there's a milson cinema frame and i don't know if you've ever seen one of those um i have not so so milson is this really interesting company in in canada up there i think in like vancouver area um but they the the the i can't remember his first name but he he his last name is obviously milson he he specializes in condos and like mdus and like getting in doing the work and getting out

as fast as possible and he came up with like these ingenious processes and paperwork and like just the most amazing, like he could teach a masterclass on organizing installations to like, uh, and project management. Cause, uh, the stuff he has, like the little bit that I've seen him talk in like these old grainy videos of somebody like pre cell phone days, holding the VHS and maybe it got encoded somehow over to the internet. Like, um, they were pretty amazing. And I've been trying to copy and scrounge and steal as much as I can off of him while I was an integrator. And, uh, and now that I'm not like, he's doing these really cool things like releasing the products that he used in a couple of years back, he designed like the cinema frame. And so this is like a picture a big box that you put in the wall and then you install basically LCR speakers and subwoofers in that box.

All the amplifiers and technology behind the TV get mounted into that box and then you hang the TV over the top of it and the box, the speakers and everything are covered with kind of a custom fabric, whatever color matches the decor of the room. And it looks smart. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah. It is a $30,000 piece, though. Oh, less cool, but still cool. But once you hear it, you're like, yeah, okay, I get it. That's $30,000. So he came out with that. Like, it's kind of like, it's very nice. He also has, and I've heard he's selling these, the integrator I talked to, Jim, there, has and i've heard he's selling these the integrator i talked

to jim there he was telling me that he's selling these brackets that go along with lutron shades if you do lutron shades um in any uh form or fashion um buy his brackets like they cost a lot of money but you'll get the shades hung in like record time they're they're amazing uh he's he's you can go in and hang the shades uh uh, do the tweaks on them and, and, and you're done like, um, but what I found in a showroom as a long way of getting around to this, this pick of the week is, is, yeah, it's his, uh, his wireframe. Uh, and I did not know about this and, uh, I'll put a link into strategy too. He's got some good, uh, uh, he's got some good pictures, better pictures than the one I took. But, um, this is, he calls it the BMW of structured wiring cans.

And man, I love a good structured wiring can. And I used to love, well, we had this company back in the day called us tech that we use the heck out of. Uh, they got acquired by the grand and kind of like maybe vantage had them for a while. I'm not sure. They got like passed around and eventually it just like didn't make sense to buy them anymore. But man, the wireframe looks amazing. And to me, it's almost like replicated the good parts of what the US Tech cans were and took out all the bad parts

and then put in wire management because that was always kind of like one of the harder things to do in those US Tech. Like you can button this thing up and it looks, it looks aces. Like there's a, there's a whole like used to in the us tax, you could do this too,

but you get the, like the plexiglass door and put it on the top. But most of the time, starting wiring cans, you don't want that. You want like the solid metal case. You don't ever see it. Just don't look at it again.

But this is, this is almost, you're, you're kind of leaning, you're leaning against the door and like locking it at the same time you're like okay i'm good as long as i never touch the same right the volcano that's inside of it it's like that closet with all the board games yeah you lock the door with the key and just like if i throw away this key no one will ever get back into this and know what I had to do. So yeah, yeah. This is beautiful. And man, he's got, I mean, there's a power unit in there, power distribution unit. He's got clamps

and everything for things like routers. There's this little dropdown door that I, you know, he had like an Intel NUC strapped into with a Dolmats box. Like there's all sorts of stuff that you could do with this. It, it looks great. Yeah. Yeah. And you, you pair this with the cinema frame and you don't even need a rack. Like you could, you could literally have an entire AV system installed in your house, like a really good AV system at that. Um, with no like external dangling equipment, like everything gets tucked into the walls or tucked into these install boxes and, uh, and, and, and tucked away professionally. So if, if you're, you're in the high end space and you're doing a lot of MDU, check, check out this company. Cause man, um, they are, they're really, they're picking up what they're doing.

They're picking up their game. I like it. Yeah. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or other great ideas for the show, uh, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at home tech.fm or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the form online. I want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, including Cody. He's a big, big patron, longtime patron of 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 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 you an invite

to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day to talk about the Milsons wireframe thing, because that's really cool. I'm going to try and get more people to talk about that. But this week, we did get a big $5 patron. I just want to give a shout-out to Don Kearns, who is actually in the Slack chat tonight. So, Don, thank you very much. Definitely appreciate it. Shout-out to Don.

Thanks, Don. Yay! I'll insert the applause line there. But, Don, thank you very much. And that wraps up the show this week. Cody, thank you very much. And that wraps up the show this week. Cody, thank you very much for taking some time out of your busy schedule, I know, at 745 at night. But, hey, tell people what you do and how they might get in touch with you. So I'm National Account Manager at Blackwire Designs.

We are a distributor for AV integration companies, uh, carry a number of different products from Dyn audio speakers to HDMI video distribution systems like just that power. So if you want to check us out, we're at black wire designs.com. Yep. And yeah, I work there too. So yeah. And I say work there, like you're in Dallas, I'm here and we just hang out in Slack all day. So yeah, that's see you tomorrow then. Yep. I'll see you tomorrow. All right. Well, thanks everybody for listening. Thanks for everybody for coming into the, uh, the chat room tonight and, uh, livening up the show over there. And we'll talk to you next week.