HomeTech.fm - Episode 252 - Live from Glendive Montana

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: Google accidentally leaks the forthcoming Nest Hub Max smart display. Resideo acquires water monitoring solution provider Buoy Labs. YouTube TV hits a major milestone in an unexpected place. FuboTV becomes the latest OTT provider to raise prices. HDHomeRun shows us how not to launch a streaming service. Lowes Iris code released as an open source project called “Arcus.” 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, April 5th from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, how was your April Fool's? How was your April Fool's Monday? It was good. I don't think I got fooled. Not even once. Yeah. No. It almost always happens to me. Yeah.

Yeah. They were older and wiser now, so we can spot these pranks as they're being played. I don't know. But on a serious note, did you get your tickets to the Wire Festival yet? Yeah. I've got the $30,000. Is there a $30,000 package? Yeah, I went for the quarter million myself.

Oh, okay. Great, great. Oh, geez, this is too funny. It's the guys over behind Josh AI. They're kind of becoming known for this, right? I think this is the third or fourth year in a row they've swinging for the fences here. put together a video and everything and um yeah there's some good stuff here they had an entire uh lineup of like the hologram let's see there's there's jeff

bezos these are people are going to be talking at this this uh um a celebration of what's just beyond the horizon an imagination of the future brought to life for one night only. So all these people are going to be talking one night only. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Steve Jobs in hologram form, Oprah, Tim Apple, which I thought was great. Tim Apple. The cast of Silicon Valley and Pilgrim. The list just goes on and on and on.

Emily Ratajkowski. Oh, that's great. None of the Kardashians at the end. Oh, that's great. That's great. Oh, the Tupac hologram is going to be there. I'm going to have to go. I definitely have to go to this now.

Yeah, but a lot of fun. Go check this out if you missed it. Again, the guys over at Josh AI always have a lot of fun with april fool's day and they definitely uh hit a home run this year reminds me of the uh the two documentaries if you haven't checked those out about the actual fire fest which of course this is a reference to uh have you seen those seth i yeah i watched the spent a lot of time on them pretty yeah yeah yeah yeah i watched the net Netflix and I watch the Hulu one. Yeah, one of them is better than the other and I can't remember which one it is. Yeah.

But they both... Anyways. Basically the same thing. Good stuff here. And again, go check that out. Josh.ai, josh.ai slash wire, spelled with a Y. If you're curious. Nice job, guys, on that one.

Also, Roku introducing a pet-friendly streaming remote, according to CE Pro. This one's cute. This one's got some good bells and whistles here. I'm pulling up the story. Animal-themed shortcut buttons, bark-assistant technology, built-in sub, woofer. Yeah. The press pause remote, P-A-W-w-s uh so anyways lots of fun uh april fools what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines let's do it google made a big goof this week when it

accidentally leaked the existence of a new nest product in the google store in the image captured before it was taken down by android police you can see google touting the benefits of the new nest hub max as it's called according to additional marketing images it seems like the device is a 10 inch hd display has a built-in nest camera and stereo speakers yeah interesting uh looks like there's no information on whether this is a product in development, which obviously seems likely, or when it's going to be unveiled or pricing or anything like that. But it makes a lot of sense. These smart displays are definitely becoming more popular. So it will be interesting to see a new product from Nest. We've been kind of waiting to see what they're going to do

since they rolled back in under Google. So we'll be keeping an eye out for that. Resideo Technologies has acquired Buoy Labs, the provider of a Wi-Fi enabled smart home solution that tracks the amount of water used in a home. The acquisition was for undisclosed terms. The Buoy Labs solution integrates smart software and hardware that can identify potential leaks and intervene to prevent them through its subscription-based app services, according to the announcement. The acquisition is Residio's first since it became a standalone publicly traded company following its spinoff from Honeywell last year. Cool, and I don't think I've ever heard of them, so good for them.

Hopefully we'll see something. Yeah, I came across them when I was researching, ended up getting Flow, but similar, you know, hire a plumber, install it on your water main type of device. Very cool. YouTube TV announced by Twitter that the service is now available in every US TV market after it arrived in Glendive, Montana. Yay. The last market where YouTube needed to finish the rollout. Wow. That's quite the claim to fame. No, Glendive is you drive in now with YouTube TV. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to make that as our show art. Uh, Glendive, Montana. Uh, we, uh, in a tweet, YouTube said Glendive, Montana, we couldn't have done it without you. We can now officially say that YouTube TV

is available in every television market in the U.S. Welcome to the family. The internet-based TV service may still be missing a few local channels in your market, so make sure to check with the YouTube TV website before you subscribe. All right. Still pretty cool.

Big week in Glendive. It's a big week in Glendive. It's a huge week in Glendive. Biggest news to hit Glendive in a long time, I'm guessing. I shouldn't say that. I know nothing about Glendive, Montana. Could be a great place. They got fishing up there from what I hear. Well, that is like the Mecca for fly fishing.

So, you know. It's the county seat of Dawson county montana united states and the home of dawson community college all right there's your geography lesson for the week wikipedia entry and and and this city looks exactly like you like you would think it looks it looks just close your eyes and picture glendive montana and that's what that's what it looks... Just close your eyes and picture Glendive, Montana, and that's what it looks like. And the one probably flashing red light, you know, stoplight in the middle. Oh, that's funny.

All right. Well, Fubo TV has quietly raised the price on its base streaming TV service from $45 to $55 per month, a 22% increase, making it the latest in a succession of price hikes by over-the-top live TV streaming services. In a statement, FuboTV defended the price increase, which so far only applies to new subscribers, by pointing out that it has added many new features and channels

to its service, a quote with the addition of popular channels over the past year, including AMC, Cartoon Network, CNN, TBS, TNT, and others soon to come. I won't read all of these here. Plus dozens of other national and regional channels. FuboTV is repricing its base subscription package to $55. So really interesting. I know Fubo is one that I think I've heard is good for like sports, uh, people who want to do over the top and our sports fans, I believe. Um, so that might explain part of the higher price tag. I, you know, sports is obviously one of the more expensive things for, for these companies to get, uh, to get licensing to, but yeah, at $55 a month, plus you add your, um, you know, your internet bill bill to that you're starting to get

up there towards more of what a i guess a quote-unquote traditional cable bill would look like yeah that's that's foobar nice one you had that one just teed up i know you did yep only five-ish months after hd home launched its $35 per month premium TV service, the company has emailed its customers to announce it's shutting it down. The email informed subscribers that the short-lived service would work until the end of the customer's dated plan and would not be renewed, and would not and could not be renewed. The email doesn't get into why the offering is so suddenly going away, but the fact that major Hollywood studios

have sued its provider, Omniverse TV, claiming the company doesn't have rights to redistribute their programming might be one reason. That might have something to do with it. A little bit, yeah. Getting cut off there at the spigot may have something to do with it. A little bit. A little bit, yeah. Getting cut off there at the spigot may have something to do with it, yeah.

Might throw a little bit of a wrench in your plans. Somebody forgot to check a box. Yeah, I looked back into that. The story has a link back. It's in Gadget Story, and they linked it back to thewood studios that are suing them it's it's it's not you know people you probably know the name of like disney fox paramount sony universal and warner brothers um have all filed in federal court uh suing this company so i imagine they're not long for this world if uh if there's any you know claims you know, fruit to their claims here. The Omniverse did respond to the story and said they had received permission to do this, but the studios are saying otherwise.

So it will be interesting to see kind of how this plays out. This all kind of goes back to the beginning of the year here. So it's all in play. It feels like the Wild West, you know, like we're Fubo's raising to $55. These guys are at $35 and turning off the switch. And yeah, it's still the... Cutting off the spigot. And then YouTube is getting into Glendive.

So it's like... All kinds of big news here streaming this week. Yep, yep. All right, well, shifting gears, Iris by Lowe's is open sourcing portion of its smart home software and naming it Arcus. Arcus is the Roman name for the Greek goddess Iris. Interesting. Iris wants the smart home enthusiast and developer communities to be able to benefit from the hard work and development of its platform software. The software will now be part of the public domain and available for the

community. And the story goes on to say that the release will include public source code repositories, source code for the core platform projects, as well as user-facing clients, so iOS, Android, and web, as well as documentation support to help aid members, Android and web, as well as documentation support to help aid members of the community on how to set up Arcus in their preferred cloud solution or locally on a user machine. So good to see I think welcome news for former Iris owners, although many of them are probably not, you know, the types that will necessarily roll up their sleeves and get involved with a with an project if they were setting out to find something easy and DIY. But at least it gives, you know, gives folks an avenue to do something with that hardware.

Yeah. And I'm genuinely curious to see where this goes and how much the DIY crowd kind of takes on to this. Because from all indications, everybody I talked to that was kind of a user, like an end user basically, who was going down to Los Aires and buying these things, they liked the platform. So it's not a bad, evidently not a bad platform. It's just, you know, the model, business model didn't quite work out for them. So I'm wondering, I really do wonder how this is going to, how many people are going to get involved with this and start doing something with the platform here? Because it's not, I mean, I'm looking on GitHub now,

which is kind of like the programmer's repository. And like, this thing only has 25 stars at this point in time. I'm going to head and start it myself. So now it's got 26, but like 25 stars, if you go to like something that people actually do use, like maybe Node.js or I don't know, something like some bigger repository and there's millions of stars on those things.

So like for it to only have 25 is kind of like something I would do. But this is, it's still early on and I'm, it's written in Java too, which is kind of like, it's not a, it's not a, it's a very common language, but it's not like the new hot sexy thing people want to kind of dive into. And so I just, I don't know, I don don't know how much how much further it's going to go beyond this it's nice that they did this and maybe good for reference for other people doing something

but i don't know i'm well time will only tell how how far this is going to go in the community right right there was another story too though that we had in here. Hubitat looks like they're going to be, so owners of Iris smart home devices from Lowe's can be saved by Hubitat. Reads the headline, Hubitat announced it would support Iris devices, including contact sensors, motion sensors, plug-in outlet, key fobs, and other connective gizmos, great use of the word there,

through its recently released Hubitat Elevation Home Automation Hub. So I guess late adopters, if I'm reading this story correctly, late adopters, so folks who had later generations of Iris were, I think, already able to use their devices with Hubitat. Those who had first-gen Iris devices were not not that is quote until hubitat started tinkering with the devices and the back end of the hubitat elevation software in release the company says that after just two weeks it has developed a working prototype and even showed a proof of concept on a youtube video so a couple of different options here actually for former lowe's iris users very nice i i'm glad to see, I mean, we've seen this happen before,

you and I, like where business goes out. I'm thinking like Colorado VNet, like how many of those homes are out there? Oh man, yeah. Chugging along and waiting for that day that they're going to have to pay a few hundred thousand dollars to. The moment of reckoning. Yeah, it's coming.

But yeah, I'm glad to see that there's at least some effort both by the company and by other companies trying to like help out and, and, um, pick these customers up. Cause that's pretty nice. Yeah. Pretty nice to see. Absolutely. Well, one thing, uh, one thing that came out today, I saw this kind of float across the news feeds and then I saw somebody, some saw this kind of float across the news feeds, and then I saw some people talking about it in the hub. We get this question all the time, Jason. Where do I start my smart home?

I like the show. I like what you guys are talking about. I just don't know where to start. There's so many options. And I think we've tried or attempted to answer this a couple times. If you go way, way back to listen, like maybe episode one, I think we tried to answer this. That's right. Back to the archives.

Yeah. But if you kind of want to take a look at something that was written today or this week, the New York Times actually had a really good story, The Easy Way to Create a Smart Home. And they walk through, I think, in probably one of the best orders that I've seen. Like the first thing is like, start with Wi-Fi or check your Wi-Fi. Make sure you're using good Wi-Fi systems, like these mesh Wi-Fi systems. And then they give examples of which ones to use. And then they say, start with one thing, like start with one piece that you find value in, like a single smart plug or, you know, uh, just a smoke alarm or a, uh, even a thermostat, you know, like start with one thing. Don't try and dive in deep and, and have that create some value for you. I think that's,

that's actually a really good piece of advice that I think you and I probably missed is like finding that one little thing that just, you know, you can get creative with. And then you're like, oh, I can automate this lamp at night. I have two lamps. Maybe I should get two of these things and then try to do that and just kind of build out your system from there. Well, what's really cool is that you can do that now, right? I was at a birthday party a couple of weeks ago and was talking to somebody who I have only met once or twice,

and he knows that I work in the smart home industry. And so, you know, he asked about it, we started talking about it, and that exact sort of conversation came up, right? It was like, and what I was saying is, what's really cool now is that you can start to do that. But certainly 10 years ago, like that was much, much more difficult to do. So yeah, I mean, I think that's a great way for people to who are just sort of getting into it to think about it, because it's like instead of being overwhelmed by all of the different options out there, you can instead take a look at your home and figure out what's the actual use case. Like, do I need to, uh, do I need an easy way to make my lights turn on and off and make it appear like I'm home when I'm traveling, uh, without, you know, the little lamp timers you buy at Home Depot or whatever, like, do you want a better way to do that or to set scenes or whatever it is?

And then you go out and you start piecing the stuff together, one piece at a time. And eventually, if you want to make it all sort of orchestrate together to use Martin Plein from Control 4, there's a word he uses a lot, I think it's a good one. If you want to start orchestrating that stuff into a singular app to have more control instead of jumping from app to app, for the most part, you can do that later with a little bit of foresight, a little of planning uh you can you can add that functionality later

yeah yeah yeah one of the nicest things and i'm so guilty of this because like i have the whole house set up with lighting control there's only a couple rooms that don't have lighting in them we don't go in them so like but i i keep forgetting like i can so yeah i can say you know siri good night and it shuts off all the lights in the house other than the master suite. And I always forget that I have that done until like, oh, yeah, I've got to turn the lights off. I'm like, oh, yeah, I can yell at my phone or my watch or into the air,

and it will actually do it, which is kind of nice. Yeah, it reminds me of my – I have a little smart plug in my daughter's room and she's got a lamp in there. And so she has seen me multiple times say, hey Siri, you know, turn off Riley's lamp. And so now it's like a fun game. Like the kids are like, we want to do it. So I hold the phone up and I count to three and then we all yell at the phone to turn off Riley's lamp.

And lo and behold, it works most of the time. And so it's fun. Just, you know, you get that sort of functionality. Like that's a very useful thing. I use it every night. And side note, it's also interesting to think about like our kids growing up just where that's the norm. Like you can say a word and have a lamp turn on or off and what things are going to look like when they're adults.

But that's a whole, obviously different conversation point being like, that was a very specific use case. Like when I, when I put my daughter to bed, she likes to have, uh, the light on for a little while before we turn it off and we'll read a book. And then when she's ready, uh, to close her eyes, like, you know, I, it sounds so lazy to say it out loud, but I don't have to get up and go walk over and turn the lamp off. I just grab my phone and we say, hey, Siri, turn off the lamp and we're done. Right. And her room is smart like that. So it's, you know, it's cool.

It's just stuff we didn't have not very long ago. No, no, it works better. Most of the time it works better than you think. Definitely. But, you know, coming back to the article, it does talk about virtual assistants, of course, a really well-researched article. They've got a lot of, uh, architects in here who they've interviewed for the piece, which I found a little surprising. Most of the architects that I dealt with as an integrator, pretty much all hated, uh, technology, but I guess they probably, you know, I'm, forgive me for

painting with hugely broad strokes here, but probably many, many architects probably like what's happening because I know a lot of the issues that, that architects had with technology was like just the heavy sort of infrastructure that had to be planned and thought about. And like these sort of lighter weight wireless devices are, I'm sure very appealing to them. Although of course we all know they come with their own sort of sets of drawbacks. So it's all pros and cons, but to your point, like the piece is very well-researched. It's, it's well laid out. One of the parts that I liked was when they talked about the difference between smart light bulbs and smart dimmers in the wall. I think that's a part of the conversation that is very easy to miss for

people who are just getting into this sort of thing. And you know what this article makes me think of? A perfect person for this article would be my dad. I often, and probably listeners can relate, I'm sure, being the tech guy in the family, I will frequently get inquiries from my parents or family friends or people who are like, hey, I'm hearing more and more about the smart home. What can I do? What should I do? And this would be a great article to just bookmark and send it to people when they ask you because it really is a good sort of like starter guide. And it comes from the New York Times, which is not like two guys on a podcast talking in 2014.

You could go back and listen to that, but this is the New York Times. Right. So anyways, it's a good read. I think for anyone, just go check it out. And just kind of the way, again, they have it laid out and sort of walk you through the different categories and options. And I think it's a nice piece. We'll definitely include it in the show notes. All the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at

hometech.fm slash 252, 252. Wow. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for the 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 252. Cool. Don't forget, you can also join us in the chat room live, typically on Wednesday evenings around 7 or 7.30 p.m. Eastern. We do try to hold to that. We are recording a day early this week, so we've got a couple of folks hanging out in the chat room with us tonight. We appreciate that.

But again, our typical recording time is on Wednesdays around 7 or 7.30 p.m. Eastern. A good way to get a heads up on that, if you do want to join us, is to follow us on Twitter at Home Tech Podcast. And no mailbag this week, but we do have one pick of the week. This one's kind of funny. It just kind of reminded me like, I don't know if you've seen this, Jason, like there's this ad like this, it kind of reminded me like, I don't know if you've seen this, Jason, like there's this ad, like this, it kind of floats by, but there's like this ad from Radio Shack.

Like you remember Radio Shack, like back in the 80s and 90s? You'd have like this ad of like, there's a telephone that you could get for $19.99 and be like those big letters, $19.99. And then they'd have like next to it, some kind of like, I don't know, fax machine. And they'd have all this, all kind of, I don't know, fax machine.

And they'd have all sorts of incredible pieces of technology, a Tandy computer there. And then everything on this page is now in your cell phone. Right. It all gets reduced to an app on your cell phone. And that popped in my head as I saw this tweet float by this week. It says, in the end, we all become apps. And they have a picture of the first generation Apple TV, the big boy, that got like to 300 degrees when you turned it on.

And next to an iPad running the new beta software with the new Apple TV logo on it. And yeah, it looks, you know, a little logo that's right on top of the old Apple TV. The first gen Apple TV's logo is right on top of that app. And man, it just, it's just like everything gets shrunk into an app. Yeah. Yeah, it is a tweet from Zach Hall, who is the lead editor over there at 9to5Mac. And I thought it was very, very apropos.

We've been talking about that a lot on the show, especially when it comes to, to, uh, streaming TV content that that's really like one of the latest frontiers. I mean, to your point, Seth, like all of it sort of gets condensed down. If you go look, look back at those old radio shack ads, but, um, yeah, that's really, that's really the big one I'm talking about. I put the one I'm talking about in the Slack chat over there. It's uploading now. So it's like a cell phone, like one of those bag phones, a Tandy computer, camcorder, speakers, a Discman. Yeah, a tape recorder. Yeah, it's funny.

That's funny. No, it's very true. Yeah, it's absolutely true. So streaming video is just the latest in that in that series and a very appropriate tweet uh also by the way mention here while we're talking about apple they did open up their uh their beta so i guess if you're interested in doing a public beta of some of these new uh app apple features they do not have Apple TV plus, which is of course the new, uh, ad-free streaming service, but they do have a TVOS beta 12.3 that has as well as iOS 12.3, um, that has

the latest version of the Apple TV app with the channels feature, um, and some of the new curation features like for you and recommendations based on your uh your watch history so if you're into tinkering or being out sort of on the bleeding edge of some of these things they have a beta out that you can go i guess publicly download so go check that out if you have any feedback questions comments pics of the week or great ideas for the show give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form. And as we always do, we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports our show, but especially to those of you who are able to financially contribute to our efforts through our Patreon page. If you're not familiar, head on over to Patreon. I'm sorry,

head on over to hometech.fm support. Once again, that's hometech.fm support, where you can learn about how you can support our show for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over $5, we'll give you a big shout out on air, but every single pledge, we'll get you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for the inside baseball conversations about all aspects of home technology. Definitely a fun community, so we'd love to have you. If you want to help out but can't support the show financially,

we totally understand. But we appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. You know, we're aiming for that five stars. We're working for it every week, man. We're hard workers. It's a labor of love. Out there.

It's a labor of love. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. It's a labor of love. Out there. It's a labor of love. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's a labor of love. But that really helps people find the show better than, you know, any other way that you can do. Maybe, you know, if you have like a million Twitter followers or, you know, you're the New York Times and you write an article that's basically what we were talking about in 2014. You know, you could mention this there too, but if you're neither one of those people,

you can support this. If you want to help support the show, those are eating there, and it definitely helps visibility somehow. Yep. The algorithm takes care of it. It's all algorithms all the way down. That's it. All right, Seth. Well, that will do it for this week.

I hope you have a great weekend and we'll look forward to reconnecting again for another show next week sounds good Jason thanks for everybody for tuning in tonight

thanks for everybody for listening live there in the chat room we appreciate it and Jason I'll talk to you next week sounds good

take care Seth