HomeTech.fm - Episode 269 - "Ooverseeopoly"

Episode Date: August 9, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: Jason and Seth are both back to discuss this week’s news in Home Technology

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm slash support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 9th. From Sarasota, Florida, I am Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How you doing, Seth? Pretty good. Pretty good. I just, I opened up my, uh, my flight app to see, uh, when my next flight is. And, uh, 35 days, 35 days, days, 35 days, looks like before I have to fly to Denver. That's right. And right around the corner, definitely creeping up on me once again this year, but really looking forward to it. It'll be fun to have Cedia back in my hometown. It's a great, great venue here in Denver. I've always felt like it's a great location for it. So I'm really looking forward to it.

The countdown is on. And I have a lot of work to do. Yeah, it's been a while. A couple, when was it? It's been in Dallas. It's been in San Diego. And then now is it back in Denver? It's got to be one other place it was, right?

Like maybe Atlanta or something? I don't know. Well, in recent years, those are the big ones. Dallas, San Diego, and Denver. Okay. Yeah, it's been other places before, obviously. But that covers the last probably five or six years. Yeah.

Well, you missed some big news last week. The Control Force, SnapAV thing happened. It did, officially. Yeah, officially. Officially, they're now just like one giant. I don't even know what. There's probably some like one of those opoly terms you know like not monopoly but like oligopoly or i don't know like there's probably some term that that that this uh type of company is uh should be qualified as i don't they're not there's competitors out there but like they're massive

now like just yeah stepping back and thinking about it but well i think i think if you only look at the cda channel certainly they are a beast in the in the cda channel but i think they're you know to their credit they're looking at the smart home as a very broad uh target and certainly when you look at the smart home as a whole uh no sort of monopolistic concerns there there's quite a quite a bit of competition indeed but yeah as far as our channel goes um definitely a force to be reckoned with no doubt about it there's there's definitely terms that that aren't i mean monopolies kind of there's negative connotations to that right but i'm not sure i'm saying that there's probably some economic term that describes this type of company that like is a behemoth and serves a specific industry.

There's probably something out there that, you know, a grad student could probably tell us. Oligopoly. Oligopoly. Yeah, that's a good one. A state of limited competition in which a market is shared by a small number of producers of sound. I don't know if that works either. No, no, I don't think so.

There's some sort ofopoly. Yep, there's got to be anopoly in there, a snapopoly. Hey, we cannot let another week go by without talking about this. Out of all of this, the biggest news to me when this video came out, some of the SnapAV executives started talking about the products and services that they offer, and executives started talking about the products and services that they offer. And they started talking about Oversea. But Jason, they didn't pronounce it Oversea. They pronounced it Oversea. And I cannot unhear it. You can't unring that bell.

No. It's going to be Oversea from now for me I've I've listened to the clip multiple times and I gotta tell you it definitely sounds like uber c I'm sticking with oversee I think it's a pretty safe bet all right all right I mean I'm just I'm letting you know that uh maybe it's like a play on uber maybe there's a brand rebranding coming this is like a hidden hint you I don't know like there was like two o's in it like o o r maybe there's a rebranding coming. This is like a hidden hint. I don't know. Like there was like two O's in it, like O-O-R, but there's only one O. So I don't really know. I know there's like, it has the two owls in it, but those are, that's, I don't know. Like the two I's of the owl are in it, but I don't know. It sounds like Uber-C to me.

So I think Uber-C-opoly is probably what we're going to have to name the episode, though. Well, of all the questions surrounding what's going to happen moving forward, I think the Oversea-Oversea debate is one we'll have to put on the back burner. Yeah, well, maybe at Cedia we can take a poll of the audience and get a feel for it. I like that plan. All right, well, what do you say we jump into some Home Tech headlines? Let's do it. Amazon stopped selling its dash buttons earlier this year, which spelled the death knell for the gimmicky product.

After this month, you will not be able to instantly order household necessities when you tap the button. So they have not only stopped selling them, but ones out in the field will stop working. Customers can continue reordering products using their free virtual dash buttons on the amazon.com website and mobile app which are available for the same brands customers could order using the physical dash button end of an era like this is uh this is another product i'm gonna have to go out and find some of these for my for my uh what's it called the the home tech graveyard that that was one of my first thoughts when i read the story do you have a new addition to to the graveyard i know these were like people

really like these the people that did use them like them uh for what they did um but yeah i don't to me it always seems like this was like a means to the means to an end for amazon to release a product that demonstrated the abilities of like the tech side of their company the the aws side of the company to have these little devices out there that integrated so well that you could just press a button and trigger something to ship. And like, just, just thinking about the logistics behind all of that, press a button and something ships. That's, that's incredibly hard to do at the scale Amazon does it, especially, I mean, even at a smaller scale. I mean, that's what we do on a daily basis and it's, it's pretty

hard to do. So I, I gotta to say, it was an interesting product. It's still an interesting product and it's too bad that they're discontinuing it. Yeah. I always thought the notion behind it was pretty interesting, but I agree. I think for them, it was an experiment and a means to an end. After announcing support at CES 2019, Arlo has finally made good on its promise for HomeKit support for their pro and pro 2 wireless cameras this implementation is notable because it's the first time a battery-powered camera supports home kit albeit via the arlo base station logitech circle 2 offers a truly wireless variant but only the wired version of the camera is currently supported by HomeKit. This is from Dave Zatz

over at ZatzNotFunny. Yeah. Well, pretty cool. Another bonus there if you're already an Arlo user and certainly a compelling addition there for anyone considering the product. Moving on here, after a month's long wait, IKEA's Sonos-powered Symphonisk speakers are finally available. They're sitting in the furniture giant stores as of August 1st and should be available online soon. There's more to come in the future as well. Ikea reiterated that you can expect a physical remote control and integration with its trod-free smart home app sometime in the fall. Still very cool. I need to get to Tampa. The nearest Ikea from here is 45 minutes away or so.

It's a solid 45-minute drive, depending on if someone forgets how to drive and does something bad on the way. That's right. But it's 45 minutes out, and we go there occasionally, so I need to save some money up for one of these $100 bookshelf speakers. You're not going with the table lamp?

I know you love the table lamp. Not going with the table lamp. I don't know. No, I'm not going with that table lamp. It's almost tempting, especially at $179 to see what it can do, but again, it's a 45-minute drive, and if I don't want it, I've got to drive 45 minutes to return it. Like a savage.

I thought it was funny. Somebody was posting shipping for the $99 bookshelf speaker. And Ikea charges $99 for shipping. So I thought that was hilarious that you'd have to pay $100 for this speaker. The math doesn't really work there. No. Just drive to Ikea and pick it up. Plus, you get to go to Ikea.

Yeah. There's hot dogs and cinnamon buns and the meatballs. It's not a bad thing. Yeah. The meatballs, got to get the meatballs. Yeah, absolutely. This week, Josh AI announced a collaboration with two longtime custom integration firms, Sonance and Truvig. The alignment with Sonance enables the convenience of Josh AI's natural voice control and privacy focused approach to the home automation platform to the home automation to fit into any architectural aesthetic. In addition to new integrations with Sonos amps, Josh and Trufig have partnered for a new in wall flush mount for the Josh micro saw this. It was pretty cool. Yeah, it looks like a good deal. They've got, you know, good partnership here. And it's always great to see stuff like this in the custom space.

Josh and Sonance are no doubt both part of a similar footprint, a lot of overlap there. Same installs would be getting a Josh AI system would be getting Sonance and Truefig. Lots of overlap in the footprint there. So to see them partnering up and working closely together is a great thing. Win-win. I think this is like one of those bellwether things. Like this is something we're going to see a lot more of in the future

with the smaller, well, the smaller everything. Like everything is smaller now than SnapAV Control 4, right? Like everything is smaller than SnapAV. That's true. It's a relative term. I'm curious as to like there's there's definitely going to be some some backroom conversations this year uh between some

of the smaller companies like josh ai and sonan i see sonance but like if you have to think about it sonance being a smaller company uh right so like make strategic partnerships in this space because man there is a behemoth out there and they're not stopping. They're not stopping. Yeah. Well, like you said, Sonant's part of Dana Innovations, pretty big company. I know they've got a fairly large footprint outside of the residential space. But yeah, like you said, it's kind of a sign of the times that we're even having that conversation about the relative size of their company.

But I agree with you. I think seeing more creative partnerships like this is actually one of the side effects, I think, that we're going to see out of all the mergers and acquisitions, especially with these bigger companies partnering up now. Moving on from there, speaking of partnerships, Leviton and Alarm.com have joined forces speaking of partnerships leviton and alarm.com have joined forces to create new leviton smart lighting controls which allow you to control your lights directly from compatible alarm.com security panels four new dimmers switches and outlets make

it possible to integrate your smart lights into existing alarm.com security systems it's all very cool i i think uh i have one of these alarm.com systems and i think the like the doing the smart home stuff off of it like lighting control and triggering locks and and and that kind of thing it's actually pretty easy like they have a fairly nice setup inside of there uh and it looks like you know adding leviton and these are these are z-wave lights so uh you know anytime that you have this type of system, any Z-Wave product, I have a Z-Wave lock that I would have liked to use with another hub in the house. Well, once you integrate with Alarm.com and the Z-Wave panel, it's dedicated to that.

I think this is going to be the same way where there's only one hub to rule everything. And it goes through that alarm.com. And they want to keep things secure, right? So that makes sense that they'd be that way. Well, and it's also probably not a huge deal breaker for a large-ish portion of the user base. Yeah. Certainly more for more of the prosumer level types of users who may have

other z-wave integrations in the home that is clearly something to be aware of right right if you if you already have something set up that you like the hub and how it works like moving over to this system i mean you're basically changing your automation system at that point one last note on this in addition to controlling from the panel you will be able to integrate the lights into your security system. So for example, motion sensors could trigger lights, etc. So a nice feature to have there for anyone looking to partner up with these two products. A new report indicates that more than 25% of US households won't have a traditional pay TV subscription by 2023. But cable and satellite providers

don't appear to be worried. With the cost of maintaining and licensing large bundles of programming on the rise, TV providers are increasing prices for bundled TV plans to the point of pushing away subscribers, only to have those subscribers pivot to the company's similarly inexpensive

but significantly more profitable broadband internet service. Yeah, no kidding. You don't have to send a guy out with a cable box that doesn't work in a truck, in a beater truck, to service this stuff. Yeah, it's going to be hugely more profitable to just do internet. Right, right. And we've talked about this before. We've mentioned a couple of stories in the past where I think it's easy with all of the headlines to sort of get caught in the assumption that cable providers must be shaking in their boots with all of the subscribers leaving. And ultimately, probably not true for the vast majority of them. They're simply altering their business model. So they've got plenty of other opportunities.

5G, one that's not really mentioned in this story. And then, of course, their existing broadband services, which have much higher margin. So really, the question remains, is that strategy sustainable? Ultimately, a lot of their revenues have certainly come from TV in the past. So it is a big shift away. But again, as the story talks about, not something necessarily these cable companies are caught off guard or necessarily scared of. Yeah, I was listening to the Smart Home Show with Richard and Adam. And they were talking about how they, I think Adam was talking about how he cut the cord,

and he mentioned something I thought was pretty funny. He says he notices that they watch a lot less TV now, and I've got to say, I'm kind of in the same boat, and I was kind of curious as to what, so now that you've cut the cord, are you watching more or less TV, do you think, or it's kind of like undetermined at this point? I think that I

probably watch a little bit less. I didn't watch a whole lot prior to cutting the cord, which incidentally was one of the reasons why we finally did it. Um, because I just found that I wasn't watching TV and when the TV was on 90, 95% of the time it was streaming something for the kids. Right. Right. And other than bronco games during football season and maybe the evening news occasionally there was very little that i watch but i would say that that's that's even gone down more since i cut the cord i i just find myself i don't know what it is if there's that extra sort of we we were joking about it with the hulu conversation, and there's kind of that, the yada, yada, yada button. There's like this extra sort of friction layer now of like having to think more about what I'm going to watch.

And I find myself, as silly as that sounds, like just instead picking up a book or, you know, doing something else, going outside, I guess. I'm not sure, but yeah yeah i wasn't watching a ton before but i'd say probably marginally less now that makes sense i mean that makes sense because like entertainment you want to be frictionless you want to just sit down plop down not think turn off your brain and have the tv just work and and show you something funny and uh you've got it like me, if you present an infinite scroll view of Netflix choices, I'm going to sit there and watch every single preview before I figure out what I want to watch. It's the paradox of choice. Yeah, exactly. It's exactly what it is.

It's overwhelming sometimes. And I really find myself struggling with that. So I don't know. Maybe that has something to do with it. It's our first world problems over here exactly I feel like terrible even complaining about that but I guess it's a good thing right it's got me read it's got me reading more so I'll take it that's good yep good deal all right well speaking of ISPs today's kids have had the internet since they were born and

they're used to 24-7 access Comcast is giving parents a little more control over this with a new feature that can automatically pause a kid's access to the internet once their daily time limit has been reached. So this is a new offering that you go in. I guess on the main X-Fi page, you can select the account or profile and go down and edit active time limits for weekdays, weekends, et cetera. You can also pause and unpause the settings or adjust limits on the fly. So an interesting offering. I'm not totally clear on how it works. I mean, obviously it's recognizing devices. I think two thoughts for me. Number one, I find these offerings interesting by ISPs. I think there's a lot of pressure on these providers to continue adding more and more value to justify the recurring monthly fees that they're getting. So you're seeing add-ons like this. You're also

seeing them do these interesting partnerships that we've seen where, you know, an ISP will partner with like Spotify or Amazon music or whatever. There's been several examples of that. So that's an interesting trend to just kind of keep an eye on. But number two, probably the bigger thing, I think, to consider if you're thinking about these sorts of offerings is the glaring hole of cellular data. And ultimately there are ways that can be controlled too. It's a little more, there are offerings out there that make it easy. Or if you're really technical, you can get into, I think they're called like profiles on the iPhone. Like there are ways to sort of work on that but if you're a parent and you're thinking that this xfinity control is sort of a cure-all well most likely your teenager spends 90 of their online time

on their phone anyways and they can just switch over to cellular data yeah i i i've seen a couple of people i know install these uh there's there's different versions of this kind of thing out there right now. I think Disney Circle is probably one of the more known ones out there. There's routers that definitely have this stuff built into it as well. And this is just kind of one of those add-on. Like, this is not a fringe thing by any means. Like, this is something that's existed outside of ISP world in Comcast for a long time. But Comcast, like you said, needs to justify their exorbitant fees for basic Internet that they call broadband in this country.

So they have to add on these these little packages like this to justify it. And this is just, you know, if the entire smart home system and security systems are kind of the same idea. Like, this is just like an extension of that through Comcast or through these ISPs like that for these types of products and devices. And going back to like what you're saying about you don't know if they're like, there is a hole with cell phones, but you know, sometimes that doesn't like you can, you can, uh, you can keep them off of, uh, you can keep them off wifi or, or lock up the phones or something like that. But you can, you can also, um, I think a lot of the parents that I know that have installed this stuff was like, they were just really trying to keep the, uh, the Fortnite playing and then the Minecraft playing for me, I guess it's not Minecraft, Minecraft's for the old people. Like the Fortnite,

they were trying to keep that down. So the kids didn't play video games all night because, you know, that'll ruin your mind. And yeah, that's generally what they were trying to do is just like make sure you do your homework and then we'll turn this back on where the Xbox services work. Yeah.

And like you said, I mean, there are plenty of solutions out there. And I think as long as you're conscious of the fact that one solution is not going to solve all of the problems. And presumably most listeners to our show are pretty savvy and are tuned into that. But I think it's, you know, every time I see these stories, I think about that because, you know, Xfinity is, is targeting a mass market and a large portion of, of customers who see this may or may not think about that. For some of them, it might solve the problem. Uh, Greg in the chat room is talking about Minecraft and Fortnite. And like you said,

I mean that getting them off of the xbox or the playstation certainly that that helps but yeah simply being aware uh that there are other avenues to access the internet right and thinking through that researching options for that as well yeah i mean it there there's definitely that part when i was at uh claire we we had this like long, lengthy, lengthy two day discussion on, uh, like access control. You know, there, there's a lot of these, like in, in, in the GUIs that you, that are generated by these control companies. There's, there's a lot of questions that come up along the lines of, well, what if I have guests come over

and I don't want them to like get into the rest of the house? Or what if I have kids and I don't want them turning off and on and off the lights in their in their their brother and sister's home you know room or whatever and um there's only so much that you can do and with technology and eventually like my argument with him is like eventually it comes down to just parenting like we you can't you can't solve parenting with with technology you can to an extent aid it's right you just can't solve parenting with technology. You can to an extent aid it. That's right. You just can't solve parenting with technology alone. Yeah. There's that inconvenient fact that at some point you just have to hold the line. Right, right.

Yeah, fair point. All the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 269. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter which includes even further analysis as well as other industry news that may not have made the show again that link is home tech dot fm slash 269 and don't forget you can join us live in the chat room on wednesday evenings we typically record around 7 or 7 30 p.m eastern find out more at hometech.fm slash live well jason no nothing in the mailbag this week but we do have a uh an interesting pick of the week which is just so happens to be a

a video interesting is one way to put a video of the week yeah yeah this is a uh this is a nest cam uh capture of a of a kid a kid that is hiding from the police. And, man, I've got to give this kid credit. When he committed to hiding from the police, he committed. That's the right word. So it starts off with this beautiful view of a little cul-de-sac in a subdivision. And there's three trash cans there. And you see this kid run out from the bottom of the screen and he's got to hide. And he sees those three trash

cans. And he's like, it's just like, which one are you going to pick? You're going to pick this one? Nope. It's going to be the one in the middle. I can fit in that one, hops over the top and closes the lid. And there into the trash can, he goes, there he sits. And then a couple, couple of seconds later, later the the officer comes through looking for him and you can hear him yell somebody hit somebody on something at somebody down the street and they haven't seen this kid run by because of course he's hiding in the trash can you just walked by and uh man this is this is great and then at the bottom of the screen it says 30 minutes later and the little kid you see the little lid pop up and the kid hop out and run off down the

street and into freedom but uh yeah what you can't see i don't know yeah go ahead but what you can't see is that it was a 90 degree day and the garbage can was full of baby diapers and cat litter scoopings can you imagine i i can imagine him going in there it was me i would go in and just not come back out i'd be dead in there i i don't know what kind of crime this kid committed or how serious it was but assuming it was nothing too serious then i i i think he earned it i think he earned a pass on this one yeah dude he gets the the pass around the jail from the monopoly yeah like good for you yeah oh my god he looks all of like what 13 12 it couldn't couldn't could have been that bad uh yeah it was probably like a shoplifting

or something who knows but yeah you see him come out of there and casually kind of walk away and then start, there he goes, running off into the distance, into the sunset, as one of the commenters said. Runs off into the sunset. Oh, that's beautiful. 1.4 million views on this. So it's gone somewhat viral. And Zach Pierce has this published, and he is kind enough to offer licensing or usage information if you want to license it.

Well, we're linking directly to the source, so we don't need to license it from him. That's right. That's right. But if you're interested, that is pretty funny. All right. Well, hats off to him. He definitely earned a mention here on the Home Tech Podcast this week, so we'll give him that. If you're listening from Bend, Oregon,

well done. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, ideas for a show topic or guest, give us a shout. We'd love to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Once again, that's feedback at hometech.fm or visit the website hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. And 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 $ dollar a month any pledge over five dollars a month gets you a shout out on the show but every pledge gets you an invite to our private slack chat the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for inside baseball conversations about all aspects of home technology absolutely and if you want to help out in other ways we'd love to have you take a few minutes to leave us a review on itunes or in your podcast app of choice those reviews definitely

help other people find the show. So if you're a fan or supporter of what we do here on the Home Tech Podcast, please take a minute to do that. We would really appreciate it. And one more thing. Did you know that Home Tech is a proud member of the Technology.fm collective of podcasts? Well, you can't.

We are. We just fail to mention it quite often. But you can find Home Tech and other great shows like Home On the Smart Home Show and DT&S over there at technology.fm check it out, the other podcast has been plugging technology.fm for a while

and we've kind of let it slip and keep forgetting about it but it's over there check it out, it's pretty cool yeah it's a great resource if you enjoy what we do here there are other shows over there that you will uh you will enjoy as well so we appreciate you tuning in seth i hope you have a great weekend glad to be back after a couple of rare weeks off and we'll look forward to reconnecting with you again next week

sounds good jason have a great weekend all right take care