HomeTech.fm - Episode 253 - Is That a Lamp??

Episode Date: April 12, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: Popular automation app, Stringify, announces imminent shutdown. Is the Wink Hub on life support? The truth behind Amazon’s Eero acquisition. YouTube TV becomes the latest streaming service to hike prices. T-Mobile launches TVision cable TV offering. The IKEA-Sonos speaker-lamp lovechild. First-run movies now streaming in the home (if you can afford it). Netflix abruptly kills AirPlay. And 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 12th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How are you doing, Seth? Pretty good. Pretty good. Good. Loving the weather we're having here. It's nice and summer. Summer's here. Yeah. We had 80 degrees yesterday and a blizzard warning today. No joke. It's Colorado for you. Yeah, we didn't get it too bad here, but it's snowing outside right now as I'm talking.

Yeah, I see you're bundled up and I'm like, yeah, I need to turn the air conditioner off. They were forecasting up to 65 mile an hour winds and 5 to 7 inches of snow in uh in some parts of the state so welcome to spring in colorado another day in colorado exactly yeah hey did you get your copy of ce pro yet i did i did and and in fact i think we talked about this a little bit there's a we talked like there was a story i don't know a month or a couple weeks back that was like a, like a, a story about One Vision and like the process you guys had put together. And you, and during that, you told me that you, that Jason, uh, not the editor of CEPRO had gone out and like shadowed

the One Vision team and, and to expect the story on that. And I guess we have that now, cause there's a, there's a pretty good write-up in CE Pro about one of your partners there. Yeah, I wanted to give it a quick plug. Go check it out. So it's the cover story of CE Pro, and it's a partner of ours at OneVision Service Tech. Really great company, awesome company to work with, really good people there. And like you alluded to, Jason Knott was kind enough to take some time and come down on site and shadow us. At One Vision, anytime we partner with an integrator, we always go do an on-site onboarding

and really sort of boot camp style, get in there with the whole team and cover all of the really critical need-to-knows for the platform. But the article definitely spans more than that. One Vision is certainly mentioned in there. But I think it's a really interesting article for the pros in the audience to go check out. But the article definitely spans more than that. One Vision is certainly mentioned in there. But I think it's a really interesting article for the pros in the audience to go check out. Service Tech is doing some cool things, especially with regards to service and their approach there. So it was a really fun piece for me to see finally published. I've known it's been coming for a while and wanted to take an opportunity here to share it.

Yeah, it's cool. It's a cool write-up about a pretty cool company. I read it in the magazine. Actually, sometimes I catch the magazine when it comes to the house, and I get some time to thumb through it, like if I'm in a waiting room for the car or something. That's right. Yeah, it's one of the few print magazines that I still get.

It's kind of nice to have print every now and then. We're so digital these days. Although every single issue i get is my last issue i haven't figured that one out but they put like this warning label on every single issue i really don't understand that right you gotta create urgency seth yeah i guess so for me to sign up for the free magazine that i'm getting yeah no matter what i do all right well what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines let's do it stringify sent out a notice this week that it will be shutting down its free cloud-based service integration platform the announcement comes as little surprise after a 2017 acquisition by comcast former ceo mike you're on chco gosh dang it you picked it always good mike you're you're on chco apologies for that announced in an email that his consumer phasing

app and service will shut down at the end of june and this is from digital media zone a friend of the show richard gunther wrote a good piece you know, sort of summarizing the reasons behind this. And it is unfortunate, probably shouldn't come as a huge surprise to people, but this was kind of like a more robust version of if this than that. And I know there'll certainly be some disappointed people out there. Yeah, yeah, there were. And in fact, I saw a number of people say, you know, I had if this and that for the basic stuff, but a lot of my automation was run through Stringify, and there were some automations that you could only get through Stringify.

Like, I think people were using ring doorbells and that kind of thing, like getting events off that through Stringify. So Comcast, thanks a lot. What was funny is on the blog post, they suggest that you move to if if this than that, Unomi, which is an app-based kind of hub thing. I think Unomi is pretty cool.

And WebCore, which I don't think I've ever heard of. Yeah, we had them on the show a while back. Yeah, Unomi. Unomi. Yeah, yeah, yeah. WebCore I haven't heard of. Oh, I guess it's for smart things. And then as this was coming up, I heard of this new project called Node-RED, which is

kind of like an IBM-backed node red which is kind of like an ibm back thing which is kind of in in the same vein i guess as stringify it uses a very graphics heavy interface to do some things it's like no programming involved but then even in their demo version they use a lot of programming so it's like it's like yeah i guess you can the dragon you can drag and drop things to connect the dots and basically make it work. But it will be interesting to see where people end up going with this. Yeah. An interesting article over at HowToGeek says, entitled, Why We Can't Recommend Wink Hubs Anymore.

And they go on to say, we love Wink Hubs. We have recommended them highly in the past. But the Wink Hub has been temporarily unavailable in stores for over five months now and wink won't say why what's going on is wink done for uh the the story goes on to explain uh many many of the things that that have happened to the wink hub over years i remember wink was one of the first that like managed to brick themselves and they had to like do this huge process to update all the routers. And, uh, yeah, yeah, that's, they, this, this Wink has been like one of the ups and downs. They're still alive. They're owned by Will.i.am now, I think, like is, I think they're still out

there. Uh, so man, what a, what a crazy story this particular product has had. And then for it to be unavailableailable even on the wink website for five months i don't know i i gotta say i may be picking one of these up for my museum i was gonna say this might be a new museum entrance says it's disconcerting to say the least here that wink apparently last announced new product integrations in september of 2017 so i was definitely not aware how dormant that company has, has become. And it's not one that I would be building my smart home around. I'll, uh, I'll say that much. No, no, definitely not. Definitely not. Well, I mean, and who knows, maybe they'll

come out with something really cool tomorrow. And, but I don't know, this is, it sounds kind of scary. He's planning his, That's what's taking so long. Right. The big takeover. It's coming. Keep an eye out. Keep an eye out for that. Insert some Black Eyed Peas music right here.

Yeah. There you go. Hub. Hub. Hub. Hub. Hub. Hub. When Amazon announced a deal to acquire Eero, the maker of a groundbreaking Wi-Fi system

at the time, it sounded like a classic Silicon Valley success story. The real story, however, investors losing tens of millions of dollars and dozens of employees left with meaningless stock. According to confidential documents viewed by Mashable, Amazon acquired Eero for 97 million, which is not a lot of money, I think, compared to what they fundraised, at least. Eero executives brought home multimillion dollar bonuses and eight-figure salary increases. Everyone else, however, didn't fare quite so well. Investors took major hits, and the acquisition rendered Eero stock worthless at about three cents a share down from common stock high of $3.54. Meanwhile, the execs who stay on to help Amazon

wage its war for smart home domination will take home around $30 million. So, you know, I would imagine these kind of things happen all the time when there are big acquisitions. Some people win, some people lose. That's probably kind of an unfortunate part of the business. But the surprising part to me, again, was a $97 million acquisition. I forget the number that I saw, but I saw that that kind of paled in comparison to how much they had fundraised. So this appears to have been a sort of a rescue or an acquisition of opportunity, which doesn't come as a huge surprise to me. Yeah, very interesting there that it was,

like you said, an acquisition of opportunity or rescue. I don't know. I don't know which one to think about this. I wonder if Eero would have been around in a couple more months if they were, not maybe, not months, but you hear Eero advertised all over, and they're a pretty good product. But I don't know.

It's very interesting to see them sold for so low compared to, I think this article had it in there. It was like hundreds of millions of dollars that they were invested, people had invested into them. To see them sell so low to Amazon, man, that's pretty crazy. Right. In streaming news, and Jason, I don't know if you do this, but evidently 14% of Netflix users share their passwords. According to a new survey from analyst Moffat Nathanson, see, you get one, I get one, Moffat Nathanson.

There you go. Finds that 14% of U.S. Netflix users admits they're watching the service using an account paid for by someone they don't live with. That is, they're watching Netflix, even though they're not technically supposed to be watching Netflix. Jason, Jason, do you do this? Just a quick question. You know, I don't. I actually think that number... I feel it's low. I would have guessed it was higher. I would have guessed that it was higher, to be honest. The amount of people I know that share Netflix passwords is pretty crazy. I don't share mine.

To be honest, I've never had anyone really ask for it. And I don't typically use shared passwords. To me, Netflix is, I don't know, what do we pay, $12 a month? If I want Netflix that bad, I'll find $12 a month, just not to have to deal with the headache. But yeah, it's interesting. There was a comment in the article, and I wasn't sure exactly what it was referring to, but it said something to the effect of Netflix has never gone out of its way at all to prevent this. I've heard this anecdotally from other people like

i i was looking around to see if i could find any verification of it online but again anecdotally i've heard several people mention to me like yeah netflix doesn't really care about that um which seems very weird to me so i'm not sure what's at play there uh but again 14 if anything seemed kind of low to me yeah Yeah, it's low to me. Now, I'm not a Netflix mooch, I guess. I'm the provider, I suppose. Moocher or moochie. Yeah, we gave it to an account or whatever to our sister-in-law. So she could, I guess, keep up with whatever my wife was watching on Netflix

or something like that. I don't really know what was going on, but they have their own. If you log in, there's more accounts up on our screen than there are people in our house. And that's one reason why. And I think the major reason they wouldn't care about it, it's like you're still watching their shows. You're going to go out and you're still watching their shows.

You're going to go out and you're probably going to talk about some show you saw on Netflix. And that's going to gain another person to watch it more likely than not. They could easily crack down on it if they wanted to. See which IP addresses are coming from where and you know quickly determine that oh this profile is always logged in at this ip address and it's on like a comcast network yet this one's on a frontier network and uh it's always this this profile is always logged in on this ip yeah so like they could easily and they're on different sides of the country or whatever and they're watching the same show on the same night yeah yeah so it's

definitely something they could they could solve for but um you know i think it's kind of a goodwill thing like at this point yeah they don't spiv in the chat room says hbo has a lot of shared passwords also this has been going on ever since aol uh there are solutions but companies have never wanted to bother spend implement anything to really put it in check. So interesting. Like you said, there are goodwill, word of mouth sort of opportunities there as well. I wonder what like the first company that cracked down on that, like that's going to be a huge PR hit, right? So like if HBO moves to like crack down on password shares. Yeah, it's a game of chicken at this point. Netflix is going to move in and be like, we don't do that. It would be like a selling point.

So I'm all for this particular race to the bottom. Yeah, that's funny. YouTube TV has announced for the second time this year that it's raising the base monthly price to $55 if you subscribe directly through Apple TV. This is effective immediately for new subscribers and from May 13th onward for existing customers. For the trouble and the extra $10, you'll now have access to eight discovery channels that include the original as well as Animal Planet, Food Network, HGTV, Investigation Discovery, Motor Trend, TLC, and Travel Channel. Even with the rate hike, the service still offers a better bargain over most conventional TV subscriptions, but the difference might not be as clear as before. So continuing

trend here, a lot of streaming providers over the last six months or so raising prices. We've definitely seen quite a bit of that. Yeah, I don't really know if getting eight Discovery channels is worth it. I have no idea what I would need to watch any of these for well yeah it feels like they're sort of inching back slowly but surely towards like this model where you know everything is just bundled together and you can't like you know that i think uh which one is it sling tv has has like a bunch of different packages you can choose from skinny bund bundles, that whole concept. So yeah, I'm not sure what's at play with all these hikes. They appear to be adding more content, but the question, I guess, is do users want more?

Like Discovery Channel may not be appealing to you. So I don't know. Interesting. Definitely not. Going in the opposite direction, T-Mobile has officially launched its pay TV service, T-Vision Home, a rebranded, upgraded version of Layer 3 TV that will retail for, get this,

$90 per month. The company has been selling Layer 3 TV service in its store since last year, with prices set around $80 to $100 for T-Mobile wireless subscribers. The package includes more than 150 channels,

local broadcasts, regional sports, and access to on-demand content, as well as premium add-on channels like HBO. T-Vision Home, this is really hard to say because TV is there, and I keep wanting to say TV Vision, and it's not TV Vision, it's T-Vision, like ATM machine. T-Vision Home has more than 275.

The marketing folks are banging their heads against the table right now. Right. T-Vision Home has more than 275 channels available, including 4K channels. At the outset, T-Vision Home will be available in Chicago, Dallas-Worth, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. metro areas, as well as Longmont, Colorado, because why not? The company said other markets are coming later this year uh and tivo tivo vision see there we go t vision home uh goes on sale april 14th in stores and online very interesting longmont colorado a very rural area layer three i believe is based here in denver i believe that's where their headquarters are yeah denver colorado Colorado. Um, so interesting that Denver specifically wasn't

listed, but Longmont is anyhow. Maybe an executive lives there. Yeah. There you go. Uh, yeah. Interesting offering. I layer three is a Ben interesting company. I've been trying to casually to keep an eye on and figure out what exactly, uh, you know, they're, they're about, um, their website talks about you know rebuilding cable the approach to cable from the ground up and i don't know i'd be curious to maybe dig in deeper and understand a little bit about what they're doing uh differently but yeah it's it's definitely not uh like this is not stream well it is streaming and no it's not in that in the fact that it comes in over your internet right like you You're going to have to have the internet to do this. But it's...

It's not like over-the-top content, basically. Yeah, this is a traditional cable TV offering, including like $10 per connected TV fee that will be added onto this, I guess. And they said they're going to have apps and stuff that they can, like soft clients, that you can launch on maybe like an Apple TV or Roku later on. But right now, this is kind of like...

This is a full cable TV service from T-Mobile with the prices that you'd expect to pay. They're going after satellite subscribers. I read in the article here over from Fierce that we'll put in the show notes, but they're going after satellite subscribers by offering to pay the early termination fees. And when you read that, you just say, oh, they're talking about DirecTV because that's what everybody I talk to about DirecTV says.

It's the truth for sure. Yeah. Moving on here, Vivint. Vivint Smart Home Authorized Pro. Vivint Authorized Pros enjoy all of these riches and a cherry on top, a revenue share for all product and services sold as long as the customer remains a Vivint subscriber. So an interesting opportunity here, I guess, for integrators, if you're, you know, wanting to maybe dabble in the security business, but not, I guess, necessarily build sort of your offering, you know, kind of piece things together. Vivint's got a

pretty compelling footprint and, you know, quite a comprehensive lineup of products. So it could be a good, a good thing to go check out. Yeah. It, it seems like a, I don't know, for, for the right person or for right company, it could be a win-win. Like if you're just interested in, uh, selling off the security part, I mean, uh, I, I was part of a business that did this. Like we, we did not care about security at all. We just wanted to do the AV and automation stuff. And the security was just kind of like ancillary stuff that popped up all the time. And this would have been a pretty good program for that company. So I'm sure that there are guys that fit that model.

Absolutely. So IKEA and Sonos have finally unveiled the pair of speakers that we've been talking about, what seems to be for months now, that they have collaborated on for you for years the symphonisk table lamp and the bookshelf yeah symphonisk symphonisk who knows it's probably yeah uh the the lamp the table lamp is 179 the bookshelf speaker is $99. They will both ship in August. You'll be able to control them through the Sonos app, allowing each speaker to be fully integrated as part of a multi-room audio setup. I got to say, those prices sound great.

I feel like you just glossed over the fact that this is like a table lamp. Okay, yes. Well, we got to talk about that like we got to talk about that it's pretty funny looking i i i'm not sure i i don't know so i mean i guess it's here here's how i would describe it if you took a plate like just a plate and you set it on your table and then you took an apple home pod and you put that on top of the plate that's exactly and then you know those those lamp ceiling fans that have like the bulbous looking little lamp like if you put that upside down on top it would give you something that's it yeah it would give you something like this i'm

putting this over in the slack channel uh you guys can see it it would give you something like that and um that's courtesy of seth's photoshop skills right there i think we got a cover art Something like that. Courtesy of Seth's Photoshop skills right there. I think we got a cover art for this week's episode. Well, for our cover art, I went one step further and went ahead and did the whole Ikea mock-up. Because if you look at whatever marketing campaign they're doing, they decided to use cardboard furniture for everything. So I went ahead and just Photoshopped it right on there on top of that table. Oh, that's great. Nice. Nicely done. Put, putting those Photoshop skills to use. No, right. Uh, the, the, the lamp has got to be the ugliest thing I've ever seen. I don't know. Like, I don't know who would buy

that even for $179 for a Sonos speaker. It's not even a smart lamp. It's just a dumb lamp that you can put, yeah, I guess you can put a smart bulb in it, but it's a dumb lamp. And $179 is a pretty good price for it, I guess. There's no, there's like, there's no, the voice services aren't built into this thing. So I don't know. The bookshelf speaker for $99 though, that, that is a really, really good price for entry level Sonos, I think. And I can't know. The bookshelf speaker for $99 though, that is a really, really good price for entry-level Sonos, I think. And I can't wait to hear what it sounds like because I mean, that would easily go here in the garage, you know, and all you need to do is plug it in. You know what I'm missing on my Photoshop here and that has been unapologetically done

in every one of their ad campaigns is having the power cable like inappropriately draped or run down the wall of their cardboard. Well, at least they're not trying to hide it. No, they're not trying. They're just like, here's our, it's going to have a cable, guys. Yes. Let's make sure we manage expectations. Oh, that's funny.

Greg in the chat room, that's a classic. What is that? Christmas story? Christmas story, yeah. Yes in the chat room, that's a classic. What is that, Christmas story? Christmas story, yeah. Yes, the classic leg lamp. Fragile. Fragile. Oh, good times. Anyways, it's an interesting offering.

I agree. I'm not a fan of the aesthetic at all. Usually, I'm generally a fan of what IKEA does from that perspective. But, yeah, I think you've described this thing pretty well. And you've also made my job pretty easy in terms of finding cover art for this week's episode. So thank you. No problem.

I do what I can. All right. Well, uh, moving on, you, you mentioned whole description, uh, speaking of HomePod, Apple this week cut the price of HomePod on its online store by $50. The smart speaker is now listed for $299 down from $349. The price drop follows recent promotional discounts at several third-party retailers across the U.S. Apple's expensive HomePod speaker accounted for just 6% of U.S. smart speaker installed base through the fourth quarter of 2018, according to a February report. So who knows? Looks like dropping the price maybe to try and get sales up. It's obviously hard to say, but I guess makes it

a little bit more enticing if you've been sitting on the fence about it. Still not a product I'm going to be considering. No, not at that price point. It's still not a product like I would want. I mean, it has to have more services on it than Apple Music. And at $299, it's still maybe $100 more than it should be. Yeah. But I got to say, I've been reading, and I have read, and I've not believed it for a long time, that Apple was selling at $349,000, selling these things at cost.

And that comes from, I believe, John Gruber, who is like a pretty big Apple insider type guy. So like, and he's been saying that, or he said that a while back. If they were selling it at cost and they're dropping it down $50,000, maybe to move inventory, I don't know if HomePod is long for this world and it may end up on a very expensive piece of the museum. Yeah. That Siri in the can ends up on the shelf up here in the garage. Man, that would be tough. Well, it's a valuable addition to your collection, so you have to bite the bullet. It would be the centerpiece crowning jewel

that doesn't do anything but play apple music which i refuse to subscribe subscribe to this time will tell well if you're looking for another reason to envy the rich red carpet home cinema is here to help for 1500 to 3000 per film the company will let you rent first run films from the comfort of your tricked out mansion to qualify you have to pass through strict verification process the new york times reports that applicants will have to own a credit card with a limit of at least fifty thousand dollars because i guess you'd watch what 50 movies or something i don't know how this would work. And those approved must then buy and install a $15,000 streaming box that comes with piracy protections.

Right now, the service is only available in LA and New York. The company's FAQ says they will expand to additional markets later, but that is it for now. It's our intent to limit membership in 2019. And not only membership membership like they're limiting movies because i went to their website and actually looked at it and there's like three

movies yeah none of which i've i think one of them was like pet cemetery which you know like okay and the other two i hadn't even heard of so i'd have to this would cost a lot because i'd have to move to la or new york by yeah you know you got to factor in that total cost of ownership, right? Yeah, yeah. This would be a very expensive project. It's really interesting. I worked when I was living in Los Angeles on a couple of projects where, I forget the name of the system, but it is basically the same like digital media server or whatever that they use in in theaters um you know there was also a real reel-to-reel setup in this in one of these particular theaters but they had the whole digital setup there and uh there's a there's a thing uh any listeners out in los angeles who

work in that sort of high end of the market will be familiar it's called like the bel-air circuit it's basically kind of like an informal name for like the inside sort of clique of people who are, you know, connected enough to have access to these first run movies. And there's, it's fascinating. Like there's literally people who, um, I don't know what, I'm sure they have more to this than their, you know, their full-time job entails more than this, but part of their job is literally to, uh, chauffeur these, um, these hard drives around. So if you're a very rich, like a Lister in Beverly Hills, and you want to have a first run movie at your home on like a Friday night, you know, the, the person will come like from the studio with the hard drive, They'll hook it up. It's all got this crazy encryption and keys on it.

It's a very involved process, as you might imagine. Really interesting. So this appears to be kind of like a one-step more approachable version of that, right? Still very, very expensive and very exclusive, but a little bit more approachable than like literally having to know Jerry Bruckheimer on a first name basis or something like that. So it's interesting. I've been around this world where this sort of stuff goes on and there's a whole ecosystem to it. It's really, it's pretty fascinating. Yeah. That's, that's, I mean, I guess I could see

this happening, right? Cause it's, I mean, for, for some people, $1,500 is a blink. The target audience for this sort of thing, this is pocket change. When you're talking about people who have these super high-end dedicated theaters built into their Beverly Hills mansion you know it's it's literally nothing i i did see the the people that were behind this the i think the main guy was like what the one of the founders of ticket master so like i mean it it has a what to seem to be a decent management team but they were they were all kind of like of the well i mean i'm not going to be ageist here but they were all kind of older. So I don't know. It doesn't seem like this is like a millennial project to me.

Yeah. No, it'll be really interesting to see, though, in, you know, 10 years, 15 years. I don't know. Who knows how long? Like, does the idea of a first run movie in the home actually ever become a reality for everyday people. It does. It already is. We're already here now.

Like, I can get first-run movies off Netflix, you know, from Netflix's studio. Not so much from, like— Yeah, no, that's true. Yeah, I mean, that whole paradigm has changed, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I'm referring more to, I guess, the big studios. Blockbuster-type movies.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good point, though. All right. Well, we got one other story here we wanted to touch on netflix with no warning and little explanation has removed support for

airplay netflix confirmed to the verge that it pulled the wireless casting feature this past week due to what it's calling a quote technical limitation airplay 2 doesn't have digital identifiers to let netflix tell its tvs apart uh you know which tv you're you're casting to and so the company can't certify its users are getting the best netflix experience when casting to those new sets so now it's quote throwing the baby out with the bathwater and pulling the plug on AirPlay, period. Call me skeptical. Yeah, I don't know. Apple starts to launch a competing product.

And all of a sudden Netflix loses the ability to have a standard quality of viewing. So we're going to stop you from watching it on your TV and you force you to watch it from your phone. Yeah. Okay. Right. Okay. I guess that's more quality viewing than my 80-inch TV, but okay, whatever. Yeah.

Thanks for that. It's a strange limitation. Although, I mean, it doesn't really matter that much because I guess if you're, if you're doing this anyway, like if you're, if you're streaming Netflix to an Apple TV, like why not, why not just do the Apple TV app on Netflix? You know, like why would you, I don't know why you would have this particular setup because there's really no other way to,

to airplay anything into an Apple TV or to a TV other than Apple TV. So it's kind of, kind of, well, so they've got, yeah, I mean, thinking this through, that AirPlay is going to be built into a bunch of new TVs, right? That was one of the big stories from late last year or early this year, I should say.

And so you could stream it to a Samsung TV that has AirPlay built in, but to your point, i see that tv is also going to have the netflix app so why wouldn't you just load it up on the netflix app i i i see okay so yeah that that makes sense that it's airplay too i kind of glossed over that but yeah you wouldn't have the apple tv in that case you would just have some kind you'd have the airplane to enable digital TV. And Netflix wants to know what type of TV it is, probably to track you and figure out who you are. So instead of doing that, they're just, yeah, they're throwing it all away and saying, no, forget it.

We want to have all that information and you'll give it to us by using the Netflix app on the TV. Done. Okay. Right. Whatever. It's their platform. Yeah, that's probably what this boils down to. Yeah Okay. Right. Whatever. It's their platform. Yeah, that's probably what this boils down to. Yeah, and you know what?

It is their platform. And, of course, the comments on the internet are all over the place in terms of, oh, this is an anti-competitive measure and blah, blah, blah. But it's like there's no law that says Netflix has to support AirPlay. No, not at all. Last time I checked. Uh, so ultimately, uh, find a workaround. Like, like you said, I mean, if you're any, any device receiving device, like a TV, that's going to have airplay built in is also going to have the Netflix app available. Um, or you go buy a 30, $35 Roku or something.

Like, this is not going to be a showstopper for anyone. So it's kind of annoying. I get it. But it goes on. And if there is truly a technical limitation to AirPlay 2 that Apple hasn't thought of, you know, it's software, so maybe that can be updated too. Who knows?

But, yeah, I'm kind of, you know, Netflix doesn't want to do it. Fine. can be updated to who knows but um yeah i'm kind of you know netflix doesn't want to do it fine don't they can you can watch it's one of the other 50 million ways you can watch netflix so yeah yeah there's no shortage of other options that's exactly it all right well all of the links and topics that we've discussed in this episode can be found uh in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 253 while While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, where we'll send you show reminders and other occasional updates about all of the great things going on here in the world of home tech. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 253. And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room

live on Wednesday, starting sometime between 7 and 7.30. To find out more, visit hometech.fm slash live. All right, Seth. Well, no mailbag this week, but we do have a picture of the week. This actually has a little video in it. We're stepping way outside of our normal realm here, but this was just too cool not to include. The first real picture ever taken of a black hole. Yeah.

It's happened. After years of relying on computer-generated imagery, scientists using the Event Horizon Telescope have captured this first real image. And it's pretty cool. We'll link to a story. I believe this one is loading now here on my side in Gadget. And I'm sure this video is all over the internet. But there's kind of a video that walks through like how they did it. And they had to link up eight, I think, eight different telescopes from across the planet somehow and make these all sort of come together to reveal this image and pretty fascinating stuff. I'm not an avid follower of astronomy and things of that nature, but I do find things like this very, very interesting. And this is a really cool event in the world of science and astronomy. So definitely go check that out. Looking for you, I am an avid follower of astronomy. There you go. Yeah, no, yeah, yeah.

Actually, the alarm that went off on my Google Home a minute ago is there's a Falcon Heavy launching across the coast, and if it's not cloudy outside, I should be able to see it go down and then come back. You can see both rockets come back. You can't see the one that lands at sea go back, but in this case, I'd be able to just step outside and take a look if there's no clouds. But actually, been scrubbed 29 minutes ago, so I don't have to worry about that. Bummer.

This was really cool. There's a little bit of AI involved, Jason, if we're going to throw in some industry buzzwords. They had to take petabytes of data and just kind of like process it through algorithms to kind of figure out basically how this thing should look because it's not evident. And this explanation that I heard was basically like if you took an orange and you put it on the moon and then tried to look at that orange from the earth, that's the size of what we're working with here. Wow. look at that orange from the earth. That's, that's the size of, of what we're working with here. And that's, that's kind of wild to think about because like we can't even with earth telescopes can't even see, uh, like the lunar landers or anything like that because they're so small and they're like meters wide. So like there's, there's a lot of science that went into this. Uh, I've been kind of like geeking out on the videos and like past videos like TED talks from the some of the scientists that were involved with this there's over 200 people involved wow scientists

working on this worldwide through many different countries including an observatory on Antarctica so pretty amazing that we can we can do that with technology here at the internet and I actually internet and snail mail because the data that came from Antarctica, there's no way they could transfer that much data. So as they do with movies out in LA, they had to run those hard drives from Antarctica out to a place where they could process it. Yeah, yeah.

Crazy. Well, yeah, really cool. Definitely go check that out. Again, hometech.fm slash 253. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, ideas for a show topic or guest, give us a shout. We'd love to hear from you.

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to miss that no little levity in your work week exactly all right if you want to help us out but can't do so financially we totally get that we would absolutely appreciate a five-star review on itunes or a positive rating in your podcast app of choice those reviews definitely help other people find the show so if you can find a few minutes to do that it would go a very long ways so thank you everyone for tuning in this week we really appreciate it seth had a great time a great time sitting down and chatting with you. We'll look forward to reconnecting again next week. Sounds good, Jason. Thanks, everybody, for listening, and we'll talk to you next week. All right.

Take care.