HomeTech.fm - Episode 259 - The Future of Remote Systems Management

Episode Date: May 24, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: We explore the current state of remote systems management (RSM). Not long ago, four major players existed in the market—BakPak (Control4), Domotz, Ihiji, and OvrC (SnapAV). Control4, who acquired Ihiji back in 2018, has now merged with SnapAV, potentially bringing a market of four RSM platforms down to two. What will this consolidation mean for the future of remote tech support? What can be done to take this category to the next level? Tune in to get our take. That plus the latest headlines including: Lutron announces a clever new product to work with Hue lighting. Savant rolls out HomeKit support ahead of LightFair. Samsung reportedly working on a smaller Galaxy Home. The U.S. might blacklist China’s Hikvision (and why this is a big freakin’ deal). Marantz and Denon roll out new receivers with built-in RSM software. 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 May 24th. From Sarasota, Florida, I am Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How are you doing, Seth? Good. I just had to stop on the day. That's actually my birthday on May 24th. Oh, that's a weird day well yeah i guess uh you know we're recording a couple days ahead of time but happy happy future birthday thanks yeah you don't have to be belated it's it's future exactly thank you i'm ahead of the game for once that never happens right right you just have to wait till you like get on facebook and you're

like see that people had posted on somebody's i'm like oh yeah it was their yeah it's their birthday whoops yeah birthdays birthdays smurth day i like i i feel like i've i've gotten to the age now where they don't mean a whole lot and mine's coming up in july and like somebody asked me how old i was turning the other day and i actually had to like stop and do math oh that's that's my brother my brother that we were talking about that day i was like, yeah, he took a shot at what I was. I'm like, I'm going to have to do the math. I can't tell you. You just sort of stopped keeping track. Yeah.

Cool. Well, good to be back in the saddle this week. I appreciate a big thanks to Richard Gunther, friend of the show, for filling in last week. We definitely appreciate it. And Seth, I got a kick out of the title of the episode. I really, really worked on him. I really did. I tried to get him to say Alexa as many times as possible, but he's a pro.

He's a pro, and he knew what he was doing. I think he could see it coming from a mile away. That's right. Greg's in the chat room saying, welcome to your 40s, Jason. I'm saying, don't age me. I'm 37. I'm somewhere around there. I don't really, I guess I'll be 38. So yeah, I don't know. Getting there. 40s are staring down the barrel of 40 though, for sure. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, Seth, before we jump into Home Tech Headlines here, which we're going to do momentarily,

I'm going to break a sort of a soft rule I try to keep where we don't talk about the weather on the show. We break that rule quite often. We break that rule too often, and I'm trying to get better about it. It's so cliched. But I have to say, it's almost June, and we've got snow on the ground here in Denver. Nice. So I'm not super thrilled about it. I'm also not like, uh, you know, too bad. I'm pretty patient when it comes to this. I'm kind of a cold weather person. So I'm just trying to use it as a reminder that pretty soon it's going

to be really, really hot and I'm going to actually be longing for cold weather. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's already 90 here and it feels like it feels like it's 96. It's summer now. We have no rain in sight. So yeah, but you know what they say, Jason, winter is coming. You had that one teed up, didn't you? I did. I did. As soon as I saw you had snow in May, I'm like, well, you know, we got to talk about the thing. So I didn't watch it, but I hear people people are did you did you watch the game of thrones thing i i did i i was uh i was a week behind um and i'm not going to say too much because i i want to be respectful and not not issue a spoiler here um i had an interesting experience actually a little sidebar we were a week behind and i was out in boston as you know

um we had a partner summit out there for One Vision. And so on two different occasions, I was like at a cafe once, like waiting in line to get a coffee. And there was a couple behind me started talking about Game of Thrones. And I literally had to turn around and I was like, I'm a week behind. Stop talking right now. And they laughed and they, you know, they did. It was, it was kind of a funny moment, but so I don't want to issue any spoilers, but I did. We got back from Boston. My wife and I, she actually flew out there with the kids midweek,

and we had a really nice sort of team week and barbecue and had a great time. And then we flew back on Sunday and did a doubleheader, which we haven't done in a long time. We used to binge watch a bunch of different shows before we had kids. When do you have time for that? Yeah, two episodes back-to-back, stayed up way past my bedtime, paid the price for the next morning but uh i i enjoyed it i i thought it was um the ending was was out there but i i don't know how else you end a series like game of thrones like you have to be out there yeah um and so interesting it definitely i'm i've i've managed to be spoiler free as well

so like and i don't know how long since i'm like literally seasons behind and i you know don't know if i'll ever if you'll manage to get the whole way yeah i remember watching like seinfeld and lost those are two like the two big ones i think that have been kind of in our our our time frame of like watching tv like seeing those and going man okay yeah seinfeld was weird okay yeah, Seinfeld was weird. Okay, but Lost, yeah, even that was weird too. But I remember like those were like huge, you know, the shows are ending, this and the other. And I think Game of Thrones kind of had that hype, but I don't think as many people tuned into it as like those other two. Definitely not Seinfeld. Seinfeld was

absolutely massive. Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. And that one, I know, got a lot of, that was sort of a polarizing final episode. And yeah, I haven't read a whole lot online or anything about how Game of Thrones was received, but I certainly was thinking about it after and I'm like, I couldn't have written anything better. So I don't know. I thought, I don't have any better suggestions.

There's dragons in winter and zombies and like, there you go. Yeah, it was crazy. It was crazy, but it was Game of Thrones. What do you expect? So it really was like a cultural phenomenon. I think those shows only come around every so often, and you think back to when Game of Thrones first came out like a decade ago.

This was a whole different time in TV and the amount of original content and series and things that we have out there now to choose from is orders of magnitude bigger than it was when Game of Thrones first came out. And this one was really one that I feel like stood the test of time and it was sort of a cultural phenomenon. So it got to a point where even if you felt like it had sort of gotten out there, and I know a lot of people were like, well, they've totally diverged from the books, and that was a thing, but ultimately it felt like you were—I've watched every season, so I felt like it was sort of part of something.

I had to see it through to the end. Yeah, yeah. I was nearly the same with, what was it, The Walking Dead. Yeah. And that show just started grating on my nerves. And eventually I was like, I don't care about any of these characters at all. There's not one character that is redeeming in my eyes.

I used to love them. I used to like, oh, these are great characters. And eventually it was just like, no, just end this. Kill them all. I don't care. And we rage quit that show and walked away from it. Rage quit. That's funny.

Yeah, Game of Thrones kept me captivated there until the end, so I enjoyed it. Cool, cool. All right, so what do you say we jump into the home tech headline? Let's do it. Lutron announced a clever new accessory which attempts to solve a common problem for Philips Hue smart light users. The Aurora dimmer is a small button designed to fit over existing toggle switches that simply snaps over the light switch and provides an easy way to access access to hue controls this keeps the light switch itself locked in the on position and prevents accidentally powering off the circuit

which would render the hue lights unresponsive i would have gone with useless there as the word but either way uh the lutron aurora is designed to integrate with existing few uh phillips hue lights and can be ordered now from the hue website for about 40 and will ship next month a pretty cool product here yeah yeah it's better than you know tape i guess yeah those little plastic like do not turn off the light things. You screw over the screws there. Yeah. This looks much better, although only available in white. I have to think, like, Lutron missed the large almond target market of toggle switches that are out there. Yeah. It's kind of strange.

Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder if that's just sort of a V1 thing and if they'll come out with additional colors, assuming they get some traction with it. It's funny. It makes me think back to when I was still an integrator and the 57 different colors of Lutron wall plates and custom keystone jacks and the joy of working with designers who want different colors in every single room. But I digress. Yeah, it is interesting that it's only available in white, but I do think, you know, at $40 or so, it's a great product. Like, that is, to me, is the biggest problem with smart light bulbs is the fact that, yeah, if your spouse or we've talked about it a lot on the show, like most of us don't live in homes by ourselves. And for the most part, if you're putting home

technology in your house, you've probably got people there who are less sort of savvy or inclined and they go flip the light switch off and all of a sudden your smart light bulb is useless. So I think this is a cool sort of solution to that and like you said definitely a little bit more elegant than uh than painter's tape yeah a little expensive 40 bucks for a button 40 bucks for a zigbee button that's a it's a pricey button yeah uh but i i guess if it solves the frustration uh the the frustration factor is better uh 40 40 dollars is probably worth it, right? If you're constantly having someone come in

and turn off the lights, putting the little snap-on button over the top of the light switch so they can still turn on and off the lights like normal people, it's only going to increase how they feel about the system rather than becoming frustrated with it over time. Yep. One other you pointed out or we should point out i should say is it's

just a it's just a dimmer there's no you can't do like the rgb controls with this button uh not even sure how they would implement that maybe a creative way to do that in the future with a different sort of implementation but for now that is something to keep in mind that color controls is still something you're going to have to do through the app speaking of lighting smart home brand savant on tuesday announced apple home kit support across multiple products including its circuit breaker companion model module claimed to be the first ever home kit product to control circuit breakers home kit support extends to the complete Savant lighting ecosystem that includes smart bulbs, DMX LED light strips, DMX and 0-10 light fixtures, plus third-party lighting linked to DMX or 0-10 volt controllers that work with this system. The upgrade will allow people to

group Savant products with any other HomeKit device in scenes and automations, as well as control them via the Apple Home app or through Siri commands. Yeah, interesting. This one, yeah, it's a great addition. I am scratching my head a little bit on this one. We were prepping for the show, and this was shared with us by a supporter of the show in the Hub, and we appreciate that. I was a little bit curious, like how this kind of flew under the radar because I didn't catch it in my weekly scan of the feeds.

And the only place I can see this reported is Apple Insider. It doesn't appear to be reported on CE Pro or any of the other big sort of traditional industry publications. So I don't know what the reason is there, if this is maybe just a hint of things to come, or I'm not really sure what to make of that. But it's a really interesting story nonetheless. It seems like, you know, to take the quote from one of our previous vice presidents, it's a big deal. This should be leading the headlines over there at CEPro.

But yeah, it's totally under the radar. And I wonder if it's like maybe Apple Insider didn't get on. I don't know. Maybe there's something coming. Maybe there's more than just Avant coming. I don't know. I can tell you that I use control four and the like unofficial official homebridge uh thing that it's like a open source project that you like run a little

piece of software on and it connects and some guy wrote a driver and a module for it so like it all works with control four there's some copy and paste you have to do with it and man i gotta tell you home kit with an actual real lighting control system and an actual real you know automation system is a just a dream it is absolutely amazing and like it's saying here you can i can i can have little i connect thing whatever whatever the little light switch uh plug thing that i have is you and i have for the the baby light yeah i can have that in the same like project i can plug that in anywhere and and i just go to the home app and I can control it just like I'm controlling the rest of the lights in my house.

So it is a really cool setup once you get that up and going and you can actually like now I can I can be driving down the street and I can say, you know, Siri, open my garage doors and like my garage door will open. Yeah. Just driving down the street. So awesome. That's great. just driving down the street so it's awesome that's great yeah it it's it's it's been fun and i gotta tell you like as soon as it hits mainstream like if there's more that come out of this like between savant crestron and control four

those are the three that were announced at wwdc last year like if there's more to come out of this like you get crestron and control four on board, this is going to be huge for HomeKit. Agreed. Yeah. And it appears to be reported by a couple other hidden wires. I see picked it up, convergentev.net, not familiar with their work, but they've got in both of those stories, uh, reference Lightfare 2019, which is coming up, I believe. So, uh, it appears maybe this was sort of a Lightfare related press release that came from Savant and maybe just didn't get picked up for one reason or another by CE Pro. So we'll have to see. But anyways, we appreciate—I want to say it was Mike over in the— Mike Moore, yeah.

Mike Moore over in the Hub for passing that along. Yep, thanks, Mike. Thanks for the heads up. Moving on here, despite not yet shipping its smart speaker, the Galaxy Home, Samsung appears to already be working on a follow-up to that device. The Verge reports a new FCC filing shows that Samsung has a new Bixby speaker underway, which looks like a smaller version of the Galaxy Home with a shorter body and no legs. I remember the other one has kind of that funky design. It maintains the cauldron-like shape and is likely going to be a tinier, cheaper counterpart to the original.

The original. I had to put that in quotes because it's not out yet. Air quotes. I am excited about this, for one thing, because I was joking that whenever the Bixby thing comes out, whenever the Galaxy Home comes out, I'm going to buy that and set it on my products of shame, shame wall over here. You're going to just take it and put it right in the graveyard? Yeah. I know it's going to end up there. But this is exciting to me because if there's a smaller, cheaper version, I'll just get that one and set it up there.

Right. Yeah, there you go. Ahead of time. But yeah, I think we should call this one the Baby Bixby. Baby Bixby. Yeah, I think that needs to be the name for it. The name practically writes itself. It does.

I think the marketing team at Samsung may want to listen to the show. I gave Apple Siri in a can, and they didn't run with it. So Samsung, if you're listening. I can't believe it. Baby Bixby. Baby Bixby. Baby Bixby. Resideo Technologies has acquired energy efficiency technology from Whisker Labs and hired the team behind it. The technology is said to create a thermodynamic model of a home to accurately predict home heating and air conditioning,

runtime and energy use to enable a homeowner to use less energy while maintaining comfort the acquisition complements the company's portfolio of connected thermostats maybe that's where i'm hearing remembering them from their thermostats let's go search for these yeah yeah the um residio is a publicly traded company that recently went back in i think october of is what it said. They were a spino just a sensing and software technology for home intelligence is how they describe themselves. So appears like they, you know, Resideo picked up probably some good IP there. It's pretty complimentary to their lineup. So it'll be interesting to see what they do with that. The New York Times is reporting that the US government is considering

adding limits to Chinese video surveillance firm Hikvision's ability to buy U.S. technology. The move by the U.S. would effectively place Hikvision on a U.S. blacklist, and U.S. companies may have to obtain government approval to supply components to them. Hikvision and Dahua Technologies both were specifically cited in a letter to Trump's top advisors last month, which was signed by more than 40 lawmakers. Sidebar, two names in there that I have no idea if I pronounced correctly. I think I got DeHua. That one's right.

So if you buy cameras in our industry, you may not know it, but you're buying one of these two companies most of the time, unless you're buying kind of one of like a main, like a mainline brand, like, uh, like Mobotics, maybe they're kind of their own thing. But, um, I put in, I'll put in our show notes links to this, uh, IPVM, uh, company or, or a website that has compiled lists of all of the OEM products that come from either Hikvision or Hikvision in Dohua. Yeah, Axis is another like real brand of cameras that do their own thing. This is amazing. This is insane. Like you can see all of the, there's some like Alarm.com, SnapAV. There's some main brands on here. ADI, WBox, Interlogix, LTS. These are major, major brands in our industry. And if those were to, I don't know,

stop being able to be sold in the US, this would be... Be a big deal. Yeah, yeah. This would be another big effing deal. Dahua, kind of in the same boat. I mean, ADT, Amcrest, Bosch cameras, FLIR, LOREX,ax icy real time is a big

doha oem uh these are some major major brands in our industry uh right that that that will get hit by something like this and it's not it's not it is it is and isn't like part of that trade war thing that's going on right now that's costing us 25% more, I think those are hitting now. But the other part of this is there's some human rights type issues in China that are going on in one of the provinces. And I think that's what the letter that was signed by 40 lawmakers that it's referencing. They're talking about them setting up these crazy, crazy like prison cities, which I read this New York times article on what they were doing there. And you can see like cameras,

you'll see a pole with like a camera stuck on every conceivable angle on these poles, just, just recording all the time. Yeah. And they're just, it's insane what they're doing with this but i think that's what their their their goal is to kind of pressure them to stop

doing this kind of thing to those minority groups over there and of course politics trade imports exports all that's gonna like come into play at this point in time and man i can't imagine not being able to purchase one of these two brands in the security market right now. I mean, that would be crazy for these two to go away. Yeah, interesting. There's some really interesting dialogue going on in the chat room right now. So just to catch people up, stepping back just a second, Andrew confirmed Resideo is Honeywell's smart home spinoff.

It used to be called Honeywell Home, apparently. So if you're familiar with that, that is now Resideo. And again, it has been spun off to its own private company. And then regarding the conversation about tariffs and trade wars and just this growing sort of rift between, you know, this growing sort of geopolitical rift and how this is manifesting in our industry. It looks like Don points out that Savant is adding 3.75% to every invoice starting at the end of the month. So that doesn't sound like a huge number, but yeah, that's significant, especially when you start to consider the amount of business that a lot of dealers do with a company like Savant.

And they're just one. That's just one company. Yeah. I mean, we work with a number of manufacturers that with a company like Savant. And they're just one. That's just one company. Yeah. I mean, we work with a number of manufacturers that have been sending us updates. I mean, we sometimes get them every night as they work with their partners overseas. Yeah, I'm sure.

In your line of work, yeah, you're hearing about all that. So we're looking at probably another 10% on most products before they hit wholesale. So yeah, yeah. And it's weird. It's some products, not all wholesale. So yeah, yeah. And it's weird. It's some products, not all products. You know, whatever these tariffs, they don't exactly target certain things,

but you can get hit with one product line, but not the other. So it's kind of tough to say what's what, but without knowing where these things are made and what materials are made on them. Yeah, right. Yeah, and I think companies like Savant that have bigger portfolios may choose to take an approach of this sort of approach, where it's like we're just going to add a smaller percentage across the board versus companies that have a smaller portfolio of products,

you know, that may just result in an uptick, a more significant uptick on a percentage basis on a smaller number of products, right? So it's really just going to depend on the makeup of the company. And like you said, it'll, it'll take some time to really for that to all shape, shape up. But, um, you know, we're, we're nearing that threshold where we're going to start to see that, uh, here. Uh, so be interesting to watch. It doesn't exactly stop here within the States. I saw that control for was, um, some,

I think somebody posted in the hub or i had seen it in other forums that control for had uh sent out an email to basically every dealer worldwide saying you know price price rates price rises are are coming like it's and i think they were saying you know the uk dealers were like oh this is gonna there's gonna be a price rate raise here too so um, yeah, it's going to be a worldwide phenomenon. I mean, China and the U.S. are pretty big as far as economies go. And whatever happens between those two countries on a political level is going to affect the entire marketplace and the entire planet. Oh, totally. Yeah, it's like when the U.S. sneezes, the world gets a cold, right?

Yeah. That's the old saying um china totally it's all interconnected in china especially yeah absolutely all right well moving on here uh sound united brands morantz and denon announced two new models for their respective slimline and x series av receivers morantz's nr 1510 and n1710, as well as Denon's AVR X1600 and X2600, all come in the sub $800 price range. So really compelling price points there. We can rattle off some of the features here, but I think one of the big ones that I thought was really interesting, they have HEOS enabled on these, AirPlay 2 support, I thought was also really interesting. And then one that I thought was really interesting. Uh, they have heos enabled, uh, on these airplay to support.

I thought it was also really interesting. And then one that I thought was really cool that only garnered a single sentence in the CE pro article, but I think is a really interesting aspect of the story is they both have remote monitoring built in. They've got domotes oversee and a hegy support built into all of these receivers right inside so all three of the major platforms there um so really cool uh pretty interesting to see that yeah it's some pretty good specs on these two like they're all 4k uh 4k ultra hdmi support got decent power behind them um and yeah i i did like the custom integrator feeder features in there especially those like the remote management the remote management stuff

and that's built into it as well, like Domot's. I was surprised. Domot's, Oversea, and Ahege, kind of the big three that we think about. I think we're going to talk about that a little bit further down the road here. Yeah, it transitions nicely into our next story here, but sticking on this one for another minute, it does look like we had a little bit of an error.

So one of them is in the sub-thousand. So some of these do actually nose up over 800, but still pretty compelling price points if you're in the market for an AV receiver. And again, like you said, I think you said it well, those sort of integrator-friendly custom installer features built right in is always a cool thing for me to see, at least. I enjoy seeing that from companies like Denon and Marantz. I think it's a good thing. And I do think that that is one of the areas where RSM, as we call it, remote systems management, can continue to evolve is getting outside of the extra little box that you have to install and seeing this more built into more devices on the network right right and i i do like the uh the dinon form factor on those two receivers those are the big big big type of receivers that you and i like you look over and you recognize oh that's that's a receiver that's a receiver but the marantz ones are are kind of

like these thin like maybe two three ru uh units thatU units that, man, that's a lot of power that you can pack into such a small place. I've always wished that the receivers that were out there could be at least that form factor. And Marantz is kind of the first company that really went down that road to try and put 5.2 and 7.2 receivers in that form factor. I've always liked that from them because you always get in those situations where you're in a cabinet and they have not made it to spec and like you can't fit. No, that never happens. You can't fit the 50 pounds of potato in the 10 pound sack that they gave you. That's right.

Yeah, I always liked those Marantz receivers for that reason. And they were like digital amplifiers anyway, so they didn't produce too terribly much heat. You know, generally the cable box was hotter, but having all these features built into them is pretty cool too. Yeah. I used to literally joke that I wanted to get a 3D printer and 3D print like an AV receiver and a network switch and a power conditioner and a Blu-ray player and have them in our office so that anytime a designer was like, how much room do you need in this cabinet? And then we'd tell them and they'd be like, no, you're not getting that. And I could take these 3D printed units to their office and be like, here, you try to fit these in that box right there and tell me how

well it works, right? it's a hard thing to visually conceptualize but yeah there's never enough room never enough room and i think the slim line form factor is really nice i agree you gotta print you gotta three you gotta remember to 3d print at least like three inches of wires you know coming off the back oh yeah that's that's gonna get piled up back there get the spaghetti piled in the back of the cabinet there yep absolutely well hey we we talked about uh 4 and Snap AV last week, pretty in-depth, and I was actually on one of the ResiWeek podcasts too and kind of had some thoughts on there too.

But since you're back, this news dropped literally the day after we recorded, which is always frustrating. Why can't these companies get their act together and get on home tech, right? That's right. You got a bell. So I've got to get your take on this, especially around the RSM area,

because Control 4, there are three major brands that are here. Backpack, which is Package, Envision from Ahege, and Oversee from SnapAV that are here backpack which is package uh envision from a hiji and oversee from snap av that are kind of merged now into one one giant company and i'm wondering to me it's to me i have my own thoughts on this but i'm wondering what you think on on this as well yeah no i i did want to i did want to touch on it and it was tough timing like you said the story broke right after

we recorded and then i was gone for a week so i know this this story's been been out there for a little while but yeah i think it's one of the there's a ton of questions to ask about this merger and i think generally speaking to speak about the merger in broader terms i know there's a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt right there's a lot of fud going on right now and people are really scratching their heads and and there's a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, right? There's a lot of FUD going on right now, and people are really scratching their heads, and there's a lot of different narratives going around about what this means and why it happened and all of that. But I think generally avoiding speculation, because none of us know really for sure how it's going to shape up. But the big takeaway for me overall about this merger is that you have the two big powerhouses

in the industry and two of the most dedicated companies when it comes to dealers. Both of these companies have been very, very dedicated to the professional channel from the outset, and they've been very, very consistent about that. And so I think from that perspective, this is a very exciting story. And I've been lucky to get to know some of the top leadership at both of those companies, and they're run by very, very intelligent people who have a lot of business sense and are very dedicated to the channel and are looking at the big picture. And overall, I think that this is going to be a great thing. So I did want to go on record as saying that. I'm excited about this.

I think it's a wonderful thing. And certainly there's going to be some fallout and there's going to be some winners and losers as there are going to be any time two companies merge, especially two companies of this size relative to our little channel here, right? So there will be some winners and losers. But ultimately, I think the net effect of this merger is going to be a really positive thing for the industry. With regards to remote systems management, I think that's a really interesting one. And none of us really know Control 4 generally does a very good job of keeping things quiet, and you don't hear a lot of leaks sort of coming out about what's going on until things are ready. And that's typically how Control 4 has always done business.

It's announce and ship. getting those two platforms to merge together has probably been a ton of work and perhaps significantly more than they anticipated, given that we just really haven't heard much of anything. And now you've got the merger with SnapAV. So what becomes of it? You've got your three, if we rewind a year or however, I forget how long it's been since iHeG was acquired, but of the four major platforms, Aihiji, Oversea, Backpack, and Domotes, you now have three of those for under one roof. And so what does that ultimately shake out to be? And I think with the amount of investment and energy that SnapAV has put into Oversea, I think that's really the one to watch. And I think more or less,

things will probably consolidate. But ultimately, going back to what I said to begin my little soapbox speech here is both of these companies are very, very dedicated to the dealer channel. And one thing that I will say I do not anticipate regarding RSM is that anybody's going to be sort of left out in the cold. I think whatever strategy they come up with is going to be backwards compatible. And I think whatever you have out in the field, you know, if I were still an integrator today, I would continue deploying what I'm deploying. I would not change my strategy based on speculation. i think have confidence that whatever these two companies decide to do they're going to make sure that it's backwards compatible

they're going to do right by their dealers yeah i i i would agree with that yeah i don't i don't think that there's like and this isn't something that happens tomorrow right this is totally these two companies got a lot of stuff they're not even merged together yet. Second of all, getting a strategy put in place, this is a multi-year thing. Because the products that they're going to release at CD this year, and possibly even CDN next year, are already on the drawing board table. They're already investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into developing products that you're not going to see for another year so like they may they may come and like put some of those on the chopping block and we may never see them but like because they're duplicated you know say over at control four or whatever but uh it's trying to develop a product

that is is the same as snap av but we're we're not going to ever know or see or learn about that. So I really, I mean, the thing that would be like the best for everyone, you know, is if they take these three different versions of the same thing and figure out how to make them into one. And I mean, eventually moving forward, it would just have one particular name. I am not technically versed on what each one of these particular products are doing.

I mean, I have a general idea. I mean, it's not very hard to figure out how they're monitoring different pieces of hardware and reporting that back. I mean, that's easy. The harder part is when doing it at scale and doing it in a way that doesn't break things when you update it. That's much harder than doing a one-off monitoring of a piece of hardware in your network. Yeah. Well, and I think ultimately, if I can jump in there for just a second, I think really, and we did a deep dive on this at One Vision a couple of years ago, put out an e-book about the landscape and really took a deep dive at all four of the different platforms.

And the big takeaway from that was that there are subtle but important differences. They are important, but they are subtle. And at their core, all of these platforms do the same thing, generally speaking. They monitor devices and they give you diagnostic information and they allow you to reboot and tunnel in and do various things. And the difference is, don't so much lie in the core functionality as they do in kind of the scope and scale of how far they go with each one of those subsets of functionality. And I think that's going to continue, I think, where remote systems management really needs to go next, where the single biggest challenge that we still see out there, and it's pretty rampant, is just difficulty in deploying it. And so I think there are two different layers to that. Number one, it's the software.

And so as the software can get better, and I know Domot has tried to solve this with their acquisition of Fing and network scanning technology and getting better at automatically detecting devices and figuring out what they are. And I think that technology still has a long ways to go to really get to the point where a dealer can flip a switch and turn on monitoring on a site and have it self-configure, even if it could do that to 80% or 90% would be awesome. Like that would be a huge, huge deal. And the other thing is the physical installation. So you think about, it's one thing on new projects, but it's another to go into an existing project. I was talking with a dealer

about this just last week, and they were talking about the challenge of like, well, you get this watt box or blue bolt or whatever that has the built-in reboot capability. But if you're going to a legacy project where it was installed with a different power conditioner, then certainly the wires are all going to be laced in there. And swapping out that power conditioner is not a quick in and out thing. It's several hours of work at a minimum. And that has to be paid for. And the client has to be billed for that. And that has to be paid for and the client has to be billed for that. And that makes a barrier to entry for the client. And so that ultimately translates to less remote support capability out there, which we need more of, you know. and think about, um, if you envision like a little, uh, iPhone charger, the, the part that plugs into the wall that has a little USB port picture, something that size. And if you could somehow, if they could somehow figure out how to build the technology into that, where you could

literally take like a bag of those and walk around a house and just drop one of those on every device and put it between the power cord and the outlet and have your reboot ability there, that would be awesome. Like that would allow you to just go into a home and without having to rewire everything, you could go to every cabinet, every device in the rack, and literally put everything on a rebootable outlet. And that would be a total game changer. So between the software and the ease of physical deployment, I think those are the two big sort of greenfield opportunities for remote systems management. And I think the core functionality, regardless of what they do with

these three platforms, is largely going to stay the same. And that'll be iterative improvement. You're not going to see necessarily big leaps and bounds there. The big leaps and bounds are going to come from the ease of deployment. Yeah. Yeah. I like your idea. I posted in our Slack back channel, or not the back channel, but the live channel, a link to the GoSun. This is probably not pronounced correctly. The smart plug, GoSun mini Wi-Fi outlet works with Alexa, Google Home, and if that's no hub required, remote control your home appliances from anywhere. ETL certified, only supports 2.4 GoSun mini Wi-Fi outlet works with Alexa, Google Home, and if this and then that. No hub required. Remote control your home appliances from anywhere. ETL certified.

Only supports 2.4 gigahertz network. Four pieces. Yeah. Product from Amazon. And that is pretty much what you're describing, I think. I mean, I think this is technically possible to do what you're talking about. But like you were saying, like, there are still issues. Yeah. That you could could run into with like, I mean, even the 2.4 gigahertz thing is already an issue in some, in some situations, some installs. But there are still issues with, with, with coming out with something

like that. But I think definitely that would be a lot easier than, than going in and trying to replace an entire laced in, you know, Panamax box from a couple of years ago, right? So yeah, it will be interesting to see what happens with these two companies. From what you're describing too, like the setup and everything, if you step back and think about it, like there could be no more boxes that you even have to worry about with, with snap AV and control for at least, I mean, they could, they could put kind of like an oversee process on a control for controller and just have that spin up and read the project and say, okay, these are all the, the, like the device discovery comes,

comes a lot easier if you're using a product where you're, you're dragging and dropping the literal names of the products, like dragging them in there, you, you know, the literal names of the products, like you're dragging them in there. You know the model numbers and the IP, how they talk and everything, and variables that come off of them. So it could be a great thing for RSM in this respect. Oh, I agree. And I think that the link between the programming software, like Composer already knows everything that's in your system. It has to, otherwise it wouldn't be able to control it. So the data's already there and figuring out how to get that data over into the monitoring side is I think something we'll probably see at some point from

this as a result of this merger, because now you have control four and snap AV. And snap AV has never had a control system before so oversee didn't have that ability and and now with now with control four coming in we we may see that i think regarding the getting rid of like the separate external box i mean that only does so much like frankly the box is very easy to install you just plug it into the power and you put it on the network. So it's really not the, the physical installation of the box itself. It's when it comes to the physical installation, it's more an issue with power cords. And ultimately that's what we're talking about here.

Uh, and those outlets that you, that you put in, in our, in our chat room, uh, a viable solution. And I think I actually did spend some time sort of noodling this idea a while back and researched i think those exact ones and i think you can make them work the challenge though like take it one step further there's the cost thing uh which well what are they 33 for a four pack yeah 33 yeah so that's incredible that's very. So the cost actually isn't really the barrier there. But to me, it's more something that's natively integrated. So if you were to try to use these, you have to, first of basically set it up the old kind of the quote unquote old-fashioned way the way you do it today where you have to map things to the outlet and what i'm actually picturing would be picture that exact form factor but like the little button you

see on the side imagine that's like a pairing button and when you when you plug the device into it you go boop you hit the button and then the little app comes up and says, what device is this? And you say, family room TV. Done. Boom. Family room cable box. Like, just imagine being able to do that. It would be amazing.

And so there are ways to get that physical form factor in place right now. But getting that more seamlessly integrated into the monitoring into the monitoring app, I think is, is the next big opportunity. I, I'm surprised nobody's done that already. I wasn't necessarily pointing to these as like a solution. I was pointing to these as a, as an example of what can be done with $33. Right. Yeah. From a manufacturing perspective. Yeah. This exists right now. This is, this is something that's a bestseller on Amazon for $33 and number one bestseller in electronic outlets. Right. So go OEM these and tie them right into your oversee backend and watch the deployment skyrocket. barrier, that barrier to entry of the physical installation is one of the big, big areas where

people, where we're not seeing deployment as much as we'd like to as an industry. Interesting stuff. Well, I guess we will have to just kind of wait and see what happens on this one. It's, it's, it's going to be many years coming before we see the fruits of this, this merger, uh, show themselves. So, um, all the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 259. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which includes even further analysis,

as well as other industry news that may or may not have made the show. Again, that link is hometech.fm slash 259. Yep, absolutely. And don't forget, you can join us live in the chat room every Wednesday starting around 7 or 7.30 p.m. Eastern. Find out more by visiting hometech.fm slash live. We've got several folks hanging out with us in the chat room tonight. We really appreciate it. Jason, let's take a look at the mailbag this week. I got an interesting

question here, and I'm not sure I have an answer for Ian R I think is is what we have here Ian with the R he said what do you guys recommend for resolving intermittent communication delays between two smart home devices I'm using an echo skill to communicate with a harmony hub and experience intermittent delays between 10 and 120 seconds randomly about 30% of the time. That's always the joke. It works 30% of the time. The activity always completes, but it's randomly delayed. I think he goes on to ask about IP trace utilities

and the little pocket Ethernet device that I talked about on one of the Pick the Weeks one. I'm not sure that that he's looking in the right direction with that. But I'm wondering, I'm wondering, the only advice that I have for him, maybe like network related, like, what are you sure that you have a good network connection? Because it sounds like to me, Jason, it sounds like he's dealing with like cloud cloud related storm activities yeah that was that was where my head went as well yeah so i don't know that would be the first question i would ask ian if we had him on would be are are other parts of the internet experiencing this sort of slow slowness 30 of the time? Like, do you 30% of the time have a webpage

take 10 to 20 seconds to load, which would otherwise load like instantly? That would be the first thing to check. Presumably, if that was also happening, you probably would have mentioned it. Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to say. But I think it does sound potentially like that could be the issue,

is a connection to the cloud server. Because as we've talked about numerous times on the show, all of these devices have to go up to the cloud in order to then come back down and do what they need to do in the home. And it's actually remarkable when you stop and think about that, how quickly these things happen most of the time and where that data is going and coming back to make that happen is pretty incredible.

But yeah, this is, I'm sure, really frustrating. So yeah, maybe some network troubleshooting would be in order, but it could be an issue with, somebody in the chat room said, Harmony, start there. I wasn't going to say it. Oh, yes, I was.

I was going to say it. Yeah. So that, you know, it could be could be something unfortunately with the hub itself uh that could also be causing it so yeah i think you know i i don't know if you have any recommendations i nothing jumps to mind for me as far as specifically like if he does want to sort of go down this road of testing the network what's sort of like a good you know maybe a good or simple straightforward way to do that i think first it's probably a good idea to check maybe your dns check how well your dns is working a lot of people uh do the like the 1.1.1.1 and or 8888 is that it 8844 uh for the DNS. And a lot of people stick with their, you know, most people stick with their ISP's DNS,

which could be, you know, Comcast, Verizon, whatever. So maybe check out, the only thing that I could think that'd be really slowing this down, because it's not like Amazon servers are going super slow. They have millions of these devices out there. So I would kind of rule Amazon out, just not ruled out completely, but not my first choice is what the problem is. Harmony, you would think that you would hear a lot of issues about Harmony hubs taking 120 seconds

to respond to commands. So I'm wondering if you have maybe some DNS issues. And there's a couple of tests over on GRC.com. I listened to a Security and I, there's a, uh, there's a couple of tests over on grc.com. I listened to a security now podcast and they have a utility. I hear it is under their freeware and then utilities. They have a DNS benchmark tool. That's it's a windows thing. So you kind of have to get your hands dirty and run windows to run this, but, uh, it does work really well and it can kind of it can go out and uh check a bunch of different dns's dns servers for you and tell you which one's the fastest one uh that it that from your house out and that may solve some of his issues um i'm not really it could

this could be anything i mean it could be yeah it could be your ISP is giving you a bad connection. And I mean, I really don't know. But I would start with this DNS test too, just to check it out. Because everything that's done, literally everything that's done in the internet starts with the DNS lookup. And if your computer takes a while to make a specific call out to the internet, it's usually because of these DNS things. So I would check there first. If anybody in the audience listening

has any recommendations, shoot them over to us at feedback at hometech.fm and we'll try and get back to this one too if we see anything that looks promising. Yeah, and one other quick thing that Ian, you could try is domotes. Like if you want to roll up your sleeves and get a domotes device and put it on your network, that at least would give you some basic network monitoring. And I know like I was having

a problem. It turned out to be the modem itself with my ISP was going bad. And we couldn't tell what was going on. And we had the Domotes device, and we could see that the network speeds were just randomly dipping like way down by like 80, 90%, just randomly throughout the day. And ultimately, you know, that was plugged basically straight into the router. So we knew that, you know, there was something going on there. And so, you know, looking into a, we were just talking about RSM and systems, you know, remote systems management and those, those sorts of options out there that, that could be an affordable option. They have a D I think they still have the, the self-install option for the route there that

you could, yeah, that you could look into doing, uh, put that on your network. And that would give you some, some charts of over over time how your network is looking. And if that's all looking good and steady and your speeds are solid and you're not getting a bunch of disconnects, then you've probably got an issue with the hardware. Yeah. Or the local network. It's a tough one. Yeah, I would say local network. It could be hardware.

This is a tough one to really track down and see what's going on just because there's so many variables involved here when you go outside and then back in. And that's why you're seeing a lot of these companies, even Google. Apple's inside the house. Google is coming back inside the house and locking their platform down. But when you're running Harmony or Alexa, you're going to be having to

deal with going out to the cloud and back. And that's going to introduce latency. 120 seconds, though, is not something I would like very much. So I wonder if a general reset on maybe the Harmony hub, if there's a way to do some kind of like complete reset and then load all your programming back on there. Um, I'm, I'm not sure, not familiar with the line very much. I'm sure there are people in our hub that could tell us, but, uh, if you could just like flash that back to the factory settings and then rebuild your, your system easily, that may be something you could do too.

Yep. All right, cool. Well, thank you for reaching out Ian. And if we hear anything from our listeners, we will definitely pass that along. Moving on here, Seth, a gem of a pick of the week this week coming to us from a friend of the show, Chris Gamble over in the UK. And the quote here is, my fiber broadband isn't as fast as I'd hoped. And the picture goes on to show a fiber i forget what these things are called ons or ont ont it's the it's the ont on the side of the house or the point of entry for the

fiber and it's got a a splice with like the little jelly bean the 3m splice 3m yeah 3m splice uh things on a on a fiber connection. Clearly someone came in not understanding. Someone tells me that's not going to work. The little 3M jelly connectors aren't going to go from fiber to copper very well for you. Chris didn't tell me. He said this was on Facebook somewhere, but he posted it in the hub. It looks like it was moved over, and somebody came along and said, well, these look like those little telephone lines that we always use. Right. Splice right into them.

Yep. Not going to work, guys. Yeah, that one probably didn't work out very well. Good find. Chris Gamble, thank you so much for sharing that with us. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or ideas for a show, guest, or topic, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Once again, that is feedback at hometech.fm. Or hop over to the website, hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. We want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our

Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge gets over $5 gets you a shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack channel, The Hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and post pictures

like this that we've seen. That's right. People can just splice fiber optic cable with copper. Jason, we actually, I know Don is a supporter of the show. I just can't look back historically and see what he's done. But Don Kearns updated his pledge to $5. I don't know which direction he's coming from without logging into Patreon and figuring it out. But as part of our robot invite system,

if you update or delete your pledge, we get a little notification in our Slack channel too. So it's interesting. I don't know which way it came from, but thank you, Don. Thank you very much for supporting the show, the $5 level. Well, Don just so happens to be in the chat room with us tonight. Oh, okay. And so a couple of updates here.

Scotchloks, apparently, are what those little jelly things are called that we were talking. And yes, they do not work on fiber. Scotchloks, though, if you're curious what we were talking and uh yes they do not work on fiber um scotch locks though if you're curious what we're talking about and uh yeah don don said he updated that his his his card was expired i think don was a five dollar supporter before but hey bonus don we'll give you a second shout on on air because we really uh appreciate you taking the time to do that uh the support means a lot to us so thank you so much thank you Cool. And if you want to help out the show, but can't do so financially, we would definitely appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in your podcast app of choice. Those reviews definitely help more

people find the show. So if you're a fan of what we do here on the podcast, take a couple of minutes to leave us a review. That would go a really long ways. Sounds good. Jason, next week, we got an interview coming up, it looks like. We do. We do. We've got Christopher Carney. He's the CEO and co-founder of Abode, a very popular DIY security system. So definitely look forward to diving in with him.

DIY security is definitely one of those categories that's really just exploded in recent years. And I don't have Abode at my house. I've got a DIY system, though. And I don't have a boat at my house. I've got a DIY system though. And I love the category. I think it's a really interesting entry point for a lot of people who are looking into the smart home. So look forward to chatting with Chris and learning more about abode systems. Sounds good. Well, Jason, have a good rest of the week and a good weekend. We'll talk to you next week. All right. Sounds good, Seth. Take care.