HomeTech.fm - Episode 254 - Shake it Off

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: SnapAV throws their hat in the security ring. Who is Logitech’s new remote really for? Amazon rumored to be working on a new free streaming music service. People are listening to your Alexa recordings (PS - it doesn’t matter). Plus, we take a deep dive into Disney’s new streaming video service, Disney+. 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 19th from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, how are you doing? I'm doing great, Seth. We are enjoying some absolutely beautiful spring weather here in Colorado. Although we had a blizzard last week. So, tis the season, I suppose. Tis the season. Yeah, I saw that you mentioned the blizzard.

And like when you mentioned weather, it's like, I feel like, you know, in the olden days where you get a telegraph. And then like three days later, that shows up here. Yeah. And you get it there. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm prepared. I'm ready for it. I mean, it blizzard down to like 60 degrees but um yeah tough at night and um yeah one of the things i

saw uh the other day they launched the uh that uh the rocket we were talking about those they yeah heavy heavy yeah so it went up the everything came back and they landed all three pieces perfectly fine and then that that storm that you had kind of blew through and the and the one that was landed out at sea blew over at sea they lost the third piece oh because of rough seas so that's number two that they've lost in the ocean somebody forgot to tie it down or what i i don't even know how that works like because it's an autonomous robot ship thing yeah i don't know if anybody's out there to tie it down crazy crazy all right well we've got a fun show here another busy week in the news so we're going to jump in uh what do you say we get started and talk about some

home tech headlines let's do it snappy v surprised everyone at isc west 2019 this week with the launch of the new claire one security and smart home system. The system is a self-contained panel similar to offerings from Qolsys, 2GIG, and Honeywell with a similar price point and monitoring slash smart home service features. However, the product differs in a few interesting ways. First, Clare claims that they will integrate with popular third-party home automation systems like Control 4, Crestron, and Savant when it launches later this year. Uh, second, the panel will incorporate snap AVs oversee platform for remote monitoring and management all in all a pretty interesting bullet points there. Yeah. Interesting partnership.

And, um, the story goes on to say Claire one will include a seven inch touchscreen, five megapixel camera. Uh, z-wave wi-fi and bluetooth uh 433 megahertz radios uh cellular of course included um onboard siren voice enunciator all the stuff you would expect i guess from a from a security system and mentions amazon alexa support as well so uh interesting new partnership there for uh snap av i know they've never had a a control system really in their in their offering and this isn't really a control system per se but it does kind of give them a new sort of interesting category that they're selling so looks like looks like a good deal for for both of them yeah now we know what that partnership that happened a

couple weeks back yeah now we know a little bit more about it. It's kind of a prelude. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, moving on here, Logitech announced a new remote control that shakes up what consumers have come to expect from the company's Harmony lineup. The Harmony Express has a revamped tiny design that gets rid of the touchscreen and many

programmable buttons of other Harmony remotes. Instead, Logitech is building Amazon Alexa directly into the remote, giving the palm-sized device both a microphone and speaker for its digital assistant. The Express is aimed at, quote, casual consumers, end quote, who want to walk into their living room, turn on the TV, and get to Netflix or Prime Video with voice commands. The device has a retail price of $249 and is shipping right now. $249. I just, I can't even. There's some dialogue in the hub this week about this one,

and it is kind of an interesting offering, like casual consumers. Somebody, I think Robert in the hub was pointing out, you know, they say they're targeting casual consumers, but the price point is $249, which, you know, for a remote is not typically something a truly casual consumer is going to go out and spend. So interesting there. The design is definitely interesting as well. Very, very minimal. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's no, like you said, there's no touchscreen. It's just got a couple of buttons and it's got the weird Amazon Alexa orb thing at the top.

I don't know. Like it's like a pill shape. Yeah, I'm I'm not the biggest fan of Harmony remotes. So I can't really say I'm excited about this. But I mean, in 249, when all it's offering is Harmony, the Harmony remote with like a, you know, voice assistant attached onto it. I don't know. Like, it seems like Kavo is a better price at $100 or $69 or even $49. I've seen them on sale recently. So, like, it seems like that's a better deal.

Or just using like any one of these like R or i mean apple tv they all have voice assistants built into them as well so like you could just use one of those devices and kind of get the same thing yeah out of it i don't know why this product exists and i'm like we know that that logitech says that this division hemorrhages money every year. I can't imagine coming out with a product like this that's substantially different from what I was reading. It's substantially different than their other, it doesn't, it's not even compatible with their other hubs or apps or anything. It's like a completely standalone product. I can't imagine that's a good thing if it's not successful. Greg in the chat room is asking why you're not a fan of Logitech. They're up and working in 10

minutes. I don't know if Greg's being straight-faced or sarcastic when he says. No, he's not. He's not. Greg's been putting them in. And, you know, I was happy to say that, you know, a decade ago until I had to, you know, basically take, eat about, you know, 30 or 40 of those things. And I'm sure that the process and hardware has, has changed in that, in that timeframe.

But man, I had a string of bad luck and it's just like, never again, never again. Yeah. So Greg is confirming he is not, uh, it looks like he is a, he is a fan. So I guess, yeah, to each his own, I haven't used or touched a Logitech remote in so many years that I, I cannot speak to them personally as far as... Well, and I will say that I did buy my parents one for like a Christmas present or something and send it to them. And it was cool. My dad set it up by himself. And then by the time I had visited, like it was already dead. So it's like...

Already broke. Yeah. Don says they were cool, but they broke. So... That's been my experience as well. Kind of a big deal. Kind of a big deal. All right. Well, shifting gears here, Amazon might compete more directly with Spotify in the near future. Billboard sources maintain that Amazon is in talks to debut a free ad supported service as soon as next week. You'd have, you'd only have access, I should say to a limited catalog, but this would also give you something to play on your Echo speaker without having to pay to sign up for another service.

While it's not clear how much music would be available, it's reportedly willing to pay, quote, some labels per stream, no matter how many ads run alongside those songs. Amazon is not currently commenting on this rumor. That'll be cool. Give us another option to play besides Spotify before the show. It's going to get so... I feel like it's going to get very confusing with Amazon because they've already got... So I'm a Prime subscriber. I've talked about that before. And so we use the Prime streaming service occasionally here with our Echo at home. But then Amazon also has their... I think it's called Music Unlimited, which is like their more premium offering with a bigger catalog. And now it appears they may even have like a third tier. So free and then what's included

with Prime and Unlimited, not a huge deal, but certainly something to consider, especially for, you know, if you're, say, a professional and trying to help your clients sort of understand the landscape, or perhaps like helping parents or something like that, this sort of thing can get really confusing. I didn't even know that, that they had an upgraded version now, and this is the third tier. Like, we can tell it to play certain songs, and then some of it's like, it's not included. And we're like, okay, well, we just won't listen to that song. Yeah, I think it's called Amazon Unlimited Music, I believe. I'm looking it up right now, but

yeah, every now and then we'll ask for a song on Prime and it'll play a preview or something. And then it'll say, this is only available on Music Unlimited. Would you like to upgrade? I can tell you that Amazon is no stranger to confusing pricing by on their, on their like AWS side. That's very true. Oh my God. It is insane. You cannot figure out how much a service is going to cost. You just basically have to run with it. And, uh, one month I set some servers up for like database replication and everything, uh, for the office. And then like we, the next month we had like a $800 bill and I was like, well, I guess, I guess we don't need those big of servers to do this with.

So I back those down. But yeah, I mean, figuring out and doing pricing on these things, there's no way to do it. So they're bringing that over from AWS to the consumer side. They're going to be successful. It's the spaghetti strategy. Yeah, yeah. Right? Just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. No, in all seriousness,

I mean, it's, I guess it's good to have options, but yeah, it's getting a little bit confusing. I feel like for sure. Now here's, here's a long one about Amazon. According to Bloomberg, thousands of Amazon employees are listening to Alexa user recordings every day for quality control purposes and to fine tune the product. product, and in some cases, they're listening in on embarrassing or even criminal activities. Yay. The team comprises of a mix of contractors and full-time Amazon employees who work at outposts located in Boston to Costa Rica, India, and Romania, according to the people who signed an NDA,

barring them from speaking about the program publicly. They worked nine hours a day. Oh, this sounds horrible. Nine hours a day, and each reviewer has parsed as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift. Where do I sign up? Oh, my God. One worker in Boston said he mined

accumulated voice data for specific utterances, such Taylor Swift and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the music artist. Occasionally, the listeners also pick up things Echo owners would rather stay private, like a woman singing badly off key in the shower or a child screaming for help. The teams usually, the teams, the board teams, I guess I should say, use internal chat rooms to share files when they need to help parsing out a muddled word or come across something amusing. And according to a statement from an Amazon spokesman, employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow. All information is treated with high confidentiality,

and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption, and audits of our control environment to protect it. Interesting. Yeah. This thing came across last week, and I was just like, this is a hit piece. Yeah, the headline's an attention grabber. There's no doubt about that. Bloomberg here did this original piece. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I know you've got some thoughts as it

relates to other services like Apple, for example, doing this sort of thing. It's also great. The exact same thing. Like Apple apple in this article i so that those paragraphs you see there there i'm not going to read them but you can see there's two paragraphs there uh it it literally lays out that apple and google are doing the exact same thing now i copied and pasted those from the same article which is like pages long about amazon amazon amazon and it says oh yeah apple and google do the same thing foot Footnote. Yeah, footnote. Yeah, it's like, but why did they go into this much detail about Amazon when this is industry practice to do this with?

This is how you train machines. Well, I think some of the things, and I'm not defending the piece, but some of the things that I'm sure get people's sort of blood up, which I'm sure happens at the other places too, is you can just sort of blood up which i'm sure happens at the other places too is like you know you can just sort of see the people like internally sharing like the funny audio clips in their slack channel or whatever they're using and having a laugh about it but it's like i would do that i mean a thousand of those a day i would if i read something funny you're gonna know about it you

know and it's like it the the stakes are so high for these companies when it comes to privacy that you, I mean, I personally, when I hear them make statements like, there's no way that this is personally identifiable information, like these clips cannot be tied back to an individual or whatever. Like me personally, I, I believe that like, why, why would a company like Amazon with so much to lose in terms of, uh, consumer trust? Like that's at the core of everything that these companies do. And I can understand the, like, I can understand and empathize with the emotional reaction that people have to pieces like this, but it doesn't get to me personally. It's one of those things that you just sort of have to accept. And there's a great piece in Digital Trends, actually, that I think does a good job of sort of breaking down why this actually isn't that big of a deal. And it's really sort of breaking down like why this actually isn't that big of a deal and it's really sort of three parts like number one um people know that amazon records the conversations

between them and their echo like obviously like it has to and none of the none of the recordings that these people were listening to they were all recordings that were triggered by the wake word. It's not as if the device is just listening continuously. It's reasonable also to assume that human beings are listening to these recordings is another point this piece makes. You alluded to it, Apple, Google, other companies do this. It's apparently part of how they help machine learning get better. Humans have to be involved in that process. And then finally, voice assistant speaker users have already traded their privacy for convenience. And this is something we've talked about on the show before in terms of sort of having to look at the smart home in a pragmatic sense.

Like you are inviting connected devices into your home. With that comes some inherent trade-off of your privacy. Now, of course, there are limits to that, and we should all be able to expect that those reasonable limits will be adhered to. But ultimately, it doesn't seem to me like Amazon did anything wrong here. And Bloomberg certainly got a lot of clicks out of it, but I see nothing to be alarmed about with regards to this story. I agree. I agree. And I'm about as big an Amazon fan, or Amazon Echo fan, I should say.

I like their Prime stuff. But I'm a big Amazon fan as much as I am a Logitech fan. So, like, I'm not going to go out of my way to defend what is arguably just a garbage product that works. You know, that that's that's what it is. And like there are better products out there that work better. But Amazon was the first to market with it. And there it is. But I'm not like this seems like a hit piece. And it's like this. The ring ring just got in trouble for the exact same thing, which they're Amazon, too, from The Intercept a couple months ago or a couple weeks back.

I don't know what's going on here, but it seems like these tech publications should know a little bit better and use their time to maybe educate people on what this machine learning is all about because obviously it's happening industry-wide. Obviously it's happening in both video and audio. Like you can't get from a computer knowing the word Taylor Swift without telling it, this is what the word Taylor Swift sounds like, right? Like you have to physically manually do that. And Jason, you say that different than I do. It's tomato, tomato, you know? Like everybody has different inflections and dialects in their speech. And these machines are expected to learn and know these every single time. And there's no

way that that can ever happen. There's no way that Siri can get any better without somebody going in there and fat fingering in exactly what you said. Like there's, it's just never going to happen. Uh, so I, I applaud Amazon and Siri and Google for doing this and making their voice assistance better. And like, if again, this is, this is just how it's done. So man, I don't know what, I guess they're going for the clicks. That's really all there is to it. Like it's just a click bait piece. And I guess we fell for it by talking about it so much. Yeah. Well, well, you know, I think it's a good conversation though,

because you do have to kind of dispel these things. And certainly, I know our audience is not exclusively home tech pros, but that's one great example of where, as a former integrator, these sort of stories hit Bloomberg. And then you get, oh, Don, that's great. He said, just shake it off. Yeah, my Taylor Swift reference again. There's our Taylor Swift reference for the week. But anyways, yeah, you got to be educated about these things, I think, and get past just what you see in the headlines and really understand so that you can speak in an educated way with your clients and whomever else, family or friends who are interested in this sort of thing so that people can make educated decisions based on reality and not just what they saw in a headline. So anyways, stepping off my soapbox now and moving to more, I guess, not mundane,

but run-of-the-mill type of news, but a big one, Disney+. We've been hearing about this coming for a while. Been plenty of rumors and news sort of circulating around, and we finally got some real hard news and an idea about what Disney's going to be doing. So just in time for the holidays, Disney's new streaming service, Disney Plus, will launch worldwide November 12th with an initial subscription price of $6.99 per month or a discounted offering of $69.99 per year, $70 per year. The service will feature content from all of Disney's major properties, including Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, Fox, and more. Content created exclusively for the service

will also be available, such as a Monsters, Inc. spinoff series, the Sandlot TV series, ooh, good one there, and many new Marvel projects, all of which are reportedly in the works. In the first year, Disney aims to offer up 7,500 television episodes and 500 films from the Disney Library.

All content will be downloadable from the platform. So pretty cool. Good price point. $7 a month. Yeah, I worry that it says initial subscription price of $7 a month. And then, I mean, I worry. I'm going to pay it, whatever it is. Like, it's going to happen. But I wonder if I'm going to pay it, whatever it is. It's going to happen.

But I wonder if that news is going to go up. Anthony in the chat room, just right before you said that, said, and all the parents with young daughters, I would say young children, open up their wallets. Oh, yeah. Right? Yep. Absolutely.

This $69, $70 a year is gone, in my opinion. And, I mean, it's... Already written it off. it's it that's really not that bad i i but i do wonder if it's going to go up in the next couple of years it sounds like as they get this thing rolling get more seasons put on there they may start bumping it up into netflix territory too where you know then you start kind of questioning is this you know a streaming thing any good because after you pay for internet and then all of these streaming services like where's where's the value like how how far do

we go and and how do i pick it because i mean apple tv plus could come out and be at a decent value this later this year you know it could be like seven or eight dollars a year maybe nine dollars a year or nine dollars a month and like i'll i'll pick that up just to kind of take a look at what's hot on there so i don't know this is this is we're getting so many of these streaming services uh like it's gonna it's gonna add up to basically a bundled cable price at some point yeah no it's getting up there and we'll include a link um excuse me in the show notes from uh from mashable and uh author talks exactly about what you're talking, right? He says, choosing a streaming service used to be simple.

A decade ago, you had two big ones, Netflix and Hulu. And now he says, nowadays you've got, just to rattle off a few here, PlayStation View, Sling TV, YouTube TV, Amazon Video, HBO Now, CBS All Access, Fubo, DirecTV Now, Apple TV Plus, and of course now Disney Plus. And I'm sure there are probably half a dozen fairly substantial other offerings out there that I'm not, or that he's not including on this list. So like, yes, there are a ton of these out there. He talks about how researching and comparing every service is really a painstaking task. It's true. I think there are some good resources out there.

I know there are some that we've pointed to on the show in the past. But ultimately, to really get a comprehensive look at everything that's out there is very, very difficult because often you're not comparing apples to oranges either. Some of them offer live TV. Others don't. Some of them have different tiers. So like Sling TV comes to example, or comes to mind as an example. I know they've got several, like they do, I think, a pretty good job of having some really skinny bundles and then bigger packages that have more

channels. So how do you start to compare that? So very, very difficult. I mean, I got to say that I think the article's good for a read. It's sort of maybe cathartic a little bit, certainly for the author to write it. Ultimately, for me, I have a hard time complaining about choice, right? Like, we just have a lot of choices. And yes, it's confusing. And yes, that comes with an inherent downside. But it's also generally a positive.

You can pick and choose. And the beauty of these services is you can create an account and then cancel the next month and you can duck in and out. Do whatever you want. Activate HBO for Game of Thrones and then shut it off and move on to the next one. You do have a lot more flexibility now and a lot more choice than you used to. Uh, I do get it. There, there's some inherent sort of headaches that come along with it in terms of just figuring

out which one is right for you. And then of course, like you alluded to, uh, the economics of it by the time you factor in a high-speed internet connection and three or four streaming services, I services, you are right back up to what you were paying for cable. But ultimately, the question you have to ask is, like, what quality of cable? I know for me, like we had a we were paying like $125 a month or something for DirecTV. And we watched almost nothing on, on direct TV. Like the content is just better in my opinion for streaming. So even if the pricing goes up nowadays to me, like the content is better. It suits our lifestyle more. It's what our kids want to watch. It's what my wife and I want to watch. Um, so ultimately to me, even as the price starts to go up, I feel like I'm still getting plenty of value.

Yeah. Yeah. And I agree. I agree with that. And you may have gotten 3000 channels on direct TV, uh, but you only saw value in like three or four of those, right? Like you, you, and, and you, you kind of have, you kind of get that now. Like that's what they're kind of gunning for with Netflix and Hulu is like, they want you to see value in like the types of shows, like Netflix has thousands of shows that

you can access. I don't know, maybe not thousands, but they have a lot of shows that you can access on there. And like, I only find value in a couple of them, but you know what? It's enough to keep me busy. It's enough to keep me watching, uh, and, and, and paying for the service every month. Um, but I, yeah, I, I wonder, I mean, there's, there's going to be a good, a good, a good service, I guess, to pay somebody to kind of manage these and keep, you know, flipping the switches on these, uh, in the future. Right. Like it seems like this is right for an app, like streaming monitor or something like that where you can oh turn off turn off netflix this month and then that that after you wrap up this thing and then turn on yeah and yeah there you go yeah so you know it's it there's always two

sides to the coin pros and cons and uh i i get it it it's a pain and the the dream of cutting your $125 or $150 cable bill and going down to something like $12 and having everything that you could possibly want is just not a reality. And so ultimately, we're seeing now, we're starting to see more, especially this year with all of the pricing increases that are happening, we're just starting to see a more realistic picture of the economics of streaming and to get the kind of quality and choice in the content we want, it costs money. And ultimately, I do think where there is room for improvement is what companies like Sling TV are doing. And again, I'm a Luddite when it comes to how these arrangements are made and what's involved with that, but they've got a nice like tiered offering. And I'd like to see perhaps more of that as companies continue to develop

so that you don't, like, that's my big fear is that we get to a place with streaming where everyone is so focused on having as much content as they can, that all of a sudden you don't have as many low cost options. And the whole dream of having a skinny bundle, sorry, I keep botching that, goes away because everybody's in this content war, producing more and more and signing more and more studios up and all of that sort of thing. So I think to me, that's the big thing is making sure that we continue to have choice and options. And as long as that's the case, like, I'm good wading through all of this stuff. I mean, to me, it's like, cool, Netflix, Hulu, maybe Disney Plus will be set.

Maybe I'll try Apple TV Plus for a while. All good. Not that much to wade through, really. Right. Yeah, it's not confusing. It is confusing, but less so than buying a cable bundle and then not watching the 3,000 channels that you get, right? Right. Right, that's exactly it. Being confused by the multiple hundred dollar bill that you get every month. Yeah. Yeah. Another interesting facet to this conversation, of course, with Disney Plus

is, you know, what does this do for Netflix, right? Netflix has definitely been, I'd say, the king of the hill for a while when it comes to streaming. And this, to me, definitely seems like their biggest competitor to date. You know, Disney's got a massive amount of muscle behind them. There was a story from Engadget that talked about Disney apparently told investors this week that it's committed to losing money on Disney Plus until the year 2024. So, you know, they're already committed to running this thing at a loss for the next five years. And given the kind of revenues and war chest that Disney has, that's not an insignificant statement, right? They could throw a ton of money at this. So Netflix definitely has some brand value, and I don't expect this to, by any stretch, to obliterate Netflix by any means, but

certainly going to take some of their market share, I would think. The question really does become, okay, it's $7 a month. If you're also paying $12 or $13 for Netflix, does it really become a one or the other proposition? Or do people just say, okay, well, that's the price of an expensive latte. I'll just do both. So it's a really interesting time in TV. I know we've been saying that for a couple of years now. It's just a really evolving landscape. You mentioned Hulu there, and Hulu is actually mostly, I think Disney owns now like 60% of Hulu, I want to say.

Yeah, there was a story this week that I think AT&T sold off their stake. So they had a stake, and now it's just Hulu and Disney. No, it's Hulu and Comcast. Sorry, Disney and Comcast. Yeah, and what's funny is I found this story here. I was looking for the AT&T exiting story, but I found this on Multichannel News. Comcast will seek to remain a pebble in the shoe of majority shareholder Disney, thwarting the latter's effort to bundle streaming services. So Comcast is staying around out of spite. Yeah, Disney has 60 percent and then Comcast owns the other 30.

So that only adds up to 9. Yeah. And Gadget Story also talks about Disney's strategy sort of being like a pincer movement. And basically what they're doing is Disney Plus will have like the family-friendly educational content that parents love. And then Hulu becomes sort of like, you talked about this a while ago on the show, like Buena Vista and Miramax. Those were like studios Disney had to put content out that they didn't want associated with the Disney brand. Right. And so they're saying like Hulu could basically become that, the equivalent of that in the streaming world. So they've got Disney Plus now where they can do the family educational stuff. And then Hulu becomes a repository

for the material that they don't want, you know, associated with their brand. Interesting thought. It's even crazier than that. And as A.W. Rayner is bringing up in the chat, like the Disney buyout of Fox was huge because they got all of these properties, but they get Marvel as

well, and Marvel is Deadpool, and so now Disney is Deadpool. Is there going to be a Deadpool land at Disney World? That would be crazy, first of all. It would be done very, very well, but crazy. But yeah, so I think the Michael Eisner, is that his name? The, the, the CEO. Yeah, I believe so. Basically came out and said that Deadpool, you know, they, they were going to continue

doing Deadpool, but it'll be, it'll be over there. It'll be separate from the Disney brand. Not in their backyard. Exactly. Yeah. They're happy to make the money off of it but it's it's not gonna be be branded with the little mickey mouse intro that you see at the beginning of every cartoon yeah so shaping up to be a really interesting year between between disney plus and apple tv plus you know those

those two stories alone make make it a pretty interesting year in streaming and then you've got everything else that's been going on and developing for the last several years or more so really really interesting and we'll continue to keep an eye on it i do think it really has been one of the most rapidly evolving areas in the in the home generally when it comes to technology over the last few years and so a lot of fun to watch and speculate you know what's wild is that I go to Universal quite a bit now because we have the season passes, and there's a Marvel comic book land, basically Spider-Man and X-Men and that kind of thing.

And then over in the other side, there is The Simpsons, which are also now Disney. These are major areas in the theme park that are not universal or, you know, not what do you do. Yeah. It's part of Disney. That's wild. All right. Well, that'll wrap up our news here.

All of the links and topics that we've discussed on this episode can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 254. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. 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 live for the live broadcast. You can join us in the chat as well. To find out more information, go to hometech.fm slash live. Today, we are live in no time. We're ready to go.

Yeah, we strive for it. Right, Seth? Good turnout in the chat room tonight. So thank you to all of you hanging out with us live here. We really appreciate it. It truly does make it a lot more, a lot of fun to sit here and record. Moving on here, we had a mailbag entry. A good friend of the show, Richard Gunther from the Home On podcast, which is a great show.

If you have not listened to it, definitely go check it out. If you're a fan of Home Tech, you'll definitely love his show as well. Again, that's Home On Richard Gunther. And Richard was kind enough to reach out and follow up on a conversation that we had last week regarding Netflix and their unannounced, you know, they didn't give any warning about killing off the AirPlay functionality in their app. And so we were talking about that story, and Seth, you and I were both kind of kicking it back and forth and saying, well, is this really a big deal?

Like, what's the actual use case? I mean, anything that you would AirPlay to is going to have Netflix built in, so just use the built-in app and be done with it. But, you know, Richard writes in, he says, my Netflix Airplay use case hotels. I often travel with an old Apple TV that I'll hook into the TV room with Airplay. You can cast offline downloaded content directly to the Apple TV. Uh, so pretty smart. Like, as you know, Netflix users know you can download Netflix content on your phone and then you could AirPlay it right onto the Apple TV.

This would prevent you from having to worry about connecting the Apple TV to the hotel Wi-Fi. You could argue that consumers don't download movies and shows anymore, but when you travel as much as Richard does, or as much as I do, as he says, you get used to working offline. Connectivity is still not ubiquitous, unfortunately. So great point there. And I'm trying to figure out where to put in his footnote. I think I'm just going to go ahead and hit it now.

He says, unrelated, did Amazon fix the false trigger problem in the past few weeks? Despite your best efforts, my Echo sat blissfully undisturbed while I listened to your podcast in my office. So I don't know. Richard loves our Alexa utterances on this show, and apparently they are no longer triggering his echo. So that's good news, Richard. That doesn't have to weigh on my conscious anymore. Yeah. And I don't have to worry about editing the dings and things that we were getting in trouble for anymore. So yeah, that's great. We're off the hook. I'm going to say they went ahead and did it. It was these, these guys in Bucharest and Costa Rica

that were, that were typing in, you know, wake words and whatnot, I guess, making the product better. Yeah. There you go. Way to bring it around, Seth. That's pretty good. That's an interesting use case for the, uh, the Airplay. I, I would not have thought about that. I kind of have a different setup where I bring my own, uh, wifi system along, along in tow with me, uh, when I'm traveling and are going to be at a hotel or Airbnb. And, and I have like a completely different setup that I use and hook an Apple TV up directly up to the TV when I can. Uh, but no, this, this makes a lot of sense. Um, I, I, I don't think I would have ever thought of that. So pretty good use case and definitely makes the case for having AirPlay or casting built into the Apple TV.

Right. And granted, this is not a use case that is going to apply to a large swath of the population, most likely, but it's still a great point. And anytime these little changes are made, they're obviously going to affect people. And to those people, like to Richard, that's a big inconvenience now that he'll certainly find a workaround for. But definitely appreciate you, Richard, sending that over. And Richard, just so you know, Greg's in the chat room telling me that I just triggered his echo and calling me profane names for it. It did not. We've done a live testing of this. And from our group theory, it has not been fixed.

From our test group, we can determine. Canada has not received the update. Yeah, Canada has not received the update. Yeah, Canada has not received the update. That's great. Sorry, Greg. Not sorry. Not sorry, yeah. So got a pretty cool pick of the week this week.

I ran across this, and it's, of course, one of these video doorbell recordings from a Nest cam or a Nest doorbell thing. And man, this is really good. There's a little girl that has implemented a new technique for an old system. So Jason, have you ever done one of these knock and run off things where you knock on somebody's door and run off? Oh, yeah, the ding dong ditch. That's what we used to call it at least or the ding dong ditch we were masters

of that and she's got this down to a new technique and i'm drawing a blank on what these things are called hoverboard you know what hoverboard thank you so you see her caught on the nest cam rolling up on her hoverboard looking around looks like she looks right at the camera oh yeah here she goes knock knock knock and she's off on the hoverboard she spins that thing around taking off down the driveway those things are amazing i i saw my nephew on one of those on a on a facetime call the other day and what he was doing i would i would probably have killed myself if I tried to do that. The arms up in the air

are my favorite part of the game. Yeah. This is great. No, that's really funny. This is a good find, courtesy of Reddit. So if you want a quick laugh, go check that out,

hometech.fm slash 254. We'll have a link to that and kind of lighten up your day a little bit. If you've got any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, great ideas for a show, guest ideas, any of that, we'd love to hear from you. Go ahead and shoot us an email at feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit our site, hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out our online form if you would would prefer again, we definitely appreciate it. We read all those messages and always enjoy hearing from hearing from our

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Again, taking a few minutes to leave those reviews definitely helps more people to find the show. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, take a moment to do that. We would really appreciate it. Well, I guess that wraps up the show this week. Jason, it's good sitting down and chatting with you again and talking about everything that's going on. I think we had a pretty good discussion this week about streaming services and Bloomberg, which is always in the news for messing

up there. I mean, this is the same company that did the Apple... They said Amazon had... It was, again, Amazon and Apple had the spy chip in their servers or something like that, that they never walked back. Ah, man, I am so upset with Bloomberg at this point. Well, they've done some good work as well.

They recently had the piece about Amazon, the companies wanting data stream from smart home devices even when their systems weren't being called upon. Remember, Martin Pleen from Control 4 was quoted in that story. So I guess you kind of take the good with the bad. But anyways, it is fun being able to sit down and chat with you and sort of pick these things apart. Kind of dive beyond the headlines, as they like to say. Point out, as Don is calling, fake news every now and then. So anyways, a lot of fun. It's a loaded term these days.

Yeah, totally. I know. A lot of fun this week. Definitely tune in next week. We've got a guest coming on. We're going to do an installment of the Projects Project. So we've not done that in a while, and we'll look forward to jumping into that. So definitely tune in.

And Seth, I'll look forward to reconnecting with you again next week. All right. Sounds good, Jason. Have a great weekend. All right. You too. Take care.