HomeTech.fm - Episode 281 - Catching up with SnapAV featuring Charlie Kindel and G. Paul Hess

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: We are joined by Charlie Kindel, SnapAV’s Chief Product Officer, and G. Paul Hess, SnapAV’s Chief Marketing Officer, to catch up on what has been a very busy year for the company. Our conversation covers the latest on the Control4 merger, the new NEEO remote, the latest on the OvrC remote management platform, Control4’s upcoming C4Yourself event, and much more. Don’t miss it! Plus the latest home tech headlines including: Netflix explains why certain older streaming devices will no longer be supported. Disney+ comes out of the gate swinging. Hikvision launches the most racist product feature of all time. Amazon patches a vulnerability found in Ring doorbells. 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, November 15th from 67 degree freezing Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. I thought for a second there you might have forgot where you lived. Pregnant pause. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How are you doing, Seth? Doing well, doing well.

I imagine it's a little bit cold. Well, I mean, any day that I don't have to turn on the air conditioner in the garage, it's quiet, is a good day. It's a good day. Yeah, that's right in my wheelhouse, man, mid-60s. Yeah, weather's been good here. More importantly, Seth, big week for Home Tech. Yes, yes, absolutely. If you didn't hear about, well, I don't know how you couldn't have heard about it, but we joked last week that we were going to do this Assistant Shield.

And man, we did it. We got this product out in record time. And it's on our website live. So if you go to uh assistant shield.com we got that domain premium domain it's the dot com it's not dot io none of that garbage no no shield.com head on over there and you can see the only complete security system that can block using, I'm going to have to read this thing we came up with. Jason, you patented this.

You copyrighted it and trademarked it. It's the Advanced Impenetrable Reflective Technology. It uses this reflective technology to mitigate from having those laser attacks that we talked about last week on your digital assistant. So yeah, get the assistant shield.com. Go pick one up, get one for the holidays, security at the speed of light, get protected pre-orders available. Now they're flying off the shelves, Seth, keep your family safe. I mean, your family is not safe right now. If you have, you know, it's funny. I listened to other podcasts and they're like, well, what could you do

no you can't do anything about this you can't do anything nobody came up with this idea but we did we came up with it jason it's and it's and it's for sale that's right it's uh 99 for the mini and uh that's the the model number for that is ass for assistant shield um mini dash mini and uh the ass dash max that that should hold the Amazon Echo, Google Home and like Apple HomePod that kind of thing and then it should, we haven't measured quite measured the HomePod

we hope it'll fit you can probably get it to work or you can just buy a couple of them and put them around it and do the same thing and then we've got another product coming out the ASS-WIPE and that's a nice put it around it and do the same thing and then uh that we've got another product coming out the ass-wipe and that's a nice uh you know uh cleaning cloth like uh one of those microfiber cleaning cloths make sure that your uh assistant shield is uh shiny you want it you want to have it shiny

that's right very important it's very important and you got to go for the video on the on the splash screen alone check it out yeah and these are ships this is a real product we're not playing around guys you i will i will ship as many of these as i need to 100 bucks for the mini uh 199 for the max protect your family you need one of these for every digital assistant you have in your house um and uh you know all proceeds go to so get one for the holidays. Yeah. Get yours today. All right. Well, on to, you know, matters of less import. I guess we have a show to record.

We do. We do. Turns out we had an interview to this, not only a big product launch, but a pretty big interview, Jason. Big interview. Very big interview. We're very excited. We had G. Paul Hess, the chief marketing officer over there at SnapAV, along with Charlie Kindle, the chief product officer at SnapAV, along with Charlie Kendall, the

Chief Product Officer at SnapAV. So dual guests this week on for a great interview where we really caught up about a number of developments. You know, it's been a very, very busy several months over there at SnapAV. So we, of course, went back and talked a little bit about the Control 4 SnapAV merger, talked about the new Neo Remote OS 3, got into some updates on Oversea and where that platform is headed,

talked about the C4 Yourself Day coming up. And so a lot going on and really had fun chatting with G. Paul and Charlie to get the latest from them. So definitely be sure to stay tuned for that. In the meantime, what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it.

Netflix recently announced its service would stop working on older Roku players and older Samsung smart TVs, but with only a brief error message saying Netflix will no longer be supported on a small number of older devices due to technical limitations. This was, of course, rather cryptic and people were wondering what was going on. Now the company has offered more details about why it is ending support for these devices next month. Speaking to Gizmodo, a Netflix spokesperson said the issue was that these older devices run Windows Media DRM, a digital rights management service which has since been replaced by Microsoft Play Ready. Netflix has used Play Ready since 2010, as it is easier to get content from

movie studios and other providers in that format. From December 2nd, these older devices, which are not able to upgrade to PlayReady, will unfortunately be locked out. Some super old technology getting a little update, it seems, because I remember Windows Media DRM, that's super old. And if PlayReady has been around since 2010, I mean, even if there was some time for that to mature and actually get out into the, I'm not sure when PlayReady was actually released, but if they've been using that since PlayReady since 2010, it's only a matter of time before some of the older devices stop working. Right. And this is one of those stories,

I think it gets a lot of attention because of the headline. But if you dig in, you know, we're talking about certain Samsung TVs from back in 2010, 2011. So pretty old at this point, some Vizio TVs, some older Roku devices. So again, most of these devices are coming up on a decade old. And you know what, you go out nowadays and buy such an inexpensive little streaming device to go solve this problem. So thankfully, not a huge issue, but certainly an inconvenience for people affected by it. Yeah. I mean, you can get a Roku device for like 30 bucks that will blow out of the water in performance, whatever you're trying to attempt to use the Netflix app on. So yeah, go get a new device.

It's time. It's time. Treat yourself. You'll have enough money to go buy an assistant shield. All right. Disney's new streaming service, Disney+, has already seen, I was going to say 1 million, but no, 10 million signups since launching tuesday the company announced on wednesday disney stock was up 7.35 on wednesday's close adding more than 13

billion dollars to its market cap which sits at 268 billion netflix shares went down 3.1 sorry um maybe maybe they should have waited on canceling those older players, uh, at six, at, uh, seven bucks a month or $70 a year. Disney plus is significantly cheaper than competitors such as Netflix, which charges 1299 for the most popular standard HD plan. Uh, Disney is offering a seven day free trial. So likely not all the signups represent customers who will continue to pay for the service. Disney did not immediately respond to a question about whether the 10 million sign up figure included pre-sales jason i know you and i took advantage of those awesome pre-sales and paid three years up front yeah uh for for roughly what

i think was like 70 or something it wasn't much have you had a chance it worked out to like four four or five dollars a month i think is is what the, so you saved, saved a 30% or something like that. I have not, not at length, but I have installed the app on, on my phone as well as on our Apple TV and had a chance to kind of swipe around and see the content and get a feel for the app. And it all looks great. We're, we're excited to have it. I think the kids will, the kids will really enjoy it. Uh, primarily there's certainly it's not exclusive to kids. There's plenty of content on there that we'll probably enjoy as well. But I know in our household, the biggest thing that, that, uh, we're excited about

is, is all the great stuff on there for the kids. Yeah, no, no, no doubt. Uh, my, my wife and I, we've checked it out a little bit. Uh, it's missing a couple of things that you would think, one of these table stakes things that like, um, if you go and watch a movie and you want to go back and pick up where you left off um the main screen doesn't have like continue watching like you have to go dig through and find i think we were watching oh like i hadn't no i hadn't noticed that yet but yeah that's a bummer yeah so it's like the little small stuff like that i'm sure they'll add back in later on as, but I did think the app was, you know, for the amount of content that it has in it,

they did a really good job of like organizing things and setting it up like where it's easy. Unlike Apple plus it's easy to find what you want to watch. So I was pretty happy with that. I haven't seen much. I saw, I watched the beginning of the Imagineering thing. I don't know.

It's a documentary about all the Imagineers. I saw that. I haven't watched it yet. I mean, the, the, the, just the interest intro to that gave me chills, like on the back of my neck, like, all right, this, this show is made specifically for me. I'm going to, I'm going to watch it. So I'm excited about seeing that one. Uh, and of course, I mean, there's, there's all sorts of good stuff on there. Uh, I'm just blown away with the amount of content that I have already canceled Hulu. So sorry, Hulu. Yeah. You're not getting our, our, uh, somebody had to go and it was you. Yeah. Yeah. So 10 million signups. Last thing on this, I wanted to touch on, I was curious when I read that number to kind of put that in perspective. Uh, it's obviously a big

number in a very short period of time, but just to frame it and put it in perspective, speaking of Hulu, it did say that Disney-owned Hulu claimed more than 28 million subscribers in May. And Hulu's been around for a while, so Disney's almost, what, a third of that already, basically? Over a third of that already. CBS says it took about five years to reach $8 million with their all-access and Showtime deal. So, you know, by all accounts, this $10 million is a very, very impressive number for what Disney's done in a very short period of time. And this isn't the last of these mega streaming services coming.

We're going to see a couple of these. Peacock is coming, which is the NBC version. We've got HBO. Now I forget whether it's Max. Is it HBO Max? This is like the Amazon music thing for me. I'm not going to figure out what it is over time. So HBO Max is coming.

It's got a huge catalog backing it, plus all the HBO stuff on top of it. So, I mean coming. It's got a huge catalog backing it, plus all the HBO stuff on top of it. So I mean, over the next couple of years, I mean, it looks like you could get a ton of your content from like three or four of these apps. So it should be pretty cool. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, shifting gears totally here, Hikvision has marketed an AI camera that automatically identifies Uyghurs on its China website. We'll get to that in a second if you're not sure what that is. And I did pronounce that correctly. I'm shocked. I'm shocked. Only covering it up days ago after a website IPVM questioned them on it. The AI technology allows

the camera to automatically track Uyghur people, one of the world's most persecuted minorities. Hikvision's product description states this camera supports Uyghur recognition. Hikvision quickly deleted the product page after IPVM inquired about it, and the new link now shows an error. So this is, you kind of shake your head at this one. This is the most racist thing I think I've ever seen out of the technology world at all. Like I was kind of laughing about how Hikvision has been banned in the US, but now they can just go burn in a fire somewhere.

I mean, because this is literally a persecuted group that is in concentration camp cities and persecuted for their religious beliefs. And I mean, the marketing stuff that they had was pretty disgusting, too. So stop using Hikvision. That's that's my political stance on it. Right. Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

We don't we don't get into politics on the show much. But yeah, this one is really on the pale. It really is disgusting. It is beyond the pale. It's a great way to put it. Um, so, you know, from a technology perspective, it is thought provoking in the sense of like where AI is going and where video detection is going and what some of the possibilities are there. Uh, and, and the whole conversation that can, um, spin out of that about the morality of how this technology is going to be used, how presumably already much of this is probably being used and where that all goes. And again,

the morality of that is an interesting and important topic. It's something we're going to have to face because we know these types of... I mean, the way this was marketed was just disgusting. I mean, and clearly like aimed at like the Chinese government and what they're doing over there. But that said, like nothing stops someone from developing a system very similar here in the U.S. that targets another minority, you know, that may have similar issues, not similar issues, but maybe similar issues to for law enforcement. Uh, nothing stops a private company for developing a product like this. So again, man, this is, this is one of the bigger questions that we're going to have to grapple with as we move forward with this type of stuff and AI and, and, and the things that these cameras claim to do. I be hard pressed to like actually say that it actually does this, you know, like I really questioned the, uh, the accuracy of something like this is not just like

falsely identifying people just, um, you know, this camera told me you were this person and now you're going to go to jail for the rest of your life. Like that's, that's where my mind goes. And I just, I don't trust, look, I'm a programmer. I, uh, I know how things get done. Um, you, you hack something together and you put it out and you really hope it works. And, and that's about as far as you can go with it. And, uh, nothing a human makes is perfect. And, uh, to, to rely on something like this that was made by people is, is to, to do these types of things, I think is a, is a big mistake as far as, you know, um, the morality goes, like, I think it's definitely even a bigger mistake for, for them to use it in this manner. Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So important story, uh, we wanted to touch on.

And again, I think it's a, it is an important question for us all to stop and ponder every now and then about where is all this technology headed and what are some of the bigger questions of morality that we're all going to have to face. There's some chat. I mean, this kind of stirred up the chat room a little bit, but I mean, there's Matthew saying that the government official there in australia wants ai and cameras to authenticate people for axing accessing adult websites so i mean that's that's a crazy crazy thing like this is technology uh it can be used for good things like securing your home and checking out what's going on you know outside your house and it can be used for kind of awful things like that. Invasions of privacy or identifying people based on racism and that kind of thing. So like,

it can go either way. We just, you know, as humans have to figure out how to be good about it. A security flaw in Amazon's Ring Video Doorbell Pro devices could have allowed attackers to exploit the internet connected doorbell to intercept the owner's Wi-Fi credentials, giving hackers unauthorized access to the network and potentially other devices on it. The vulnerability has been disclosed by researchers at a cybersecurity company, uh, who note that all ring doorbell pro cameras have now received a security patch to mitigate the issue. That is cool. Uh, I'm glad they found it because I think I have one of these. Yeah. Not that it matters too much, but I have one. I'm glad this is a because i think i have one of these yeah not that it you know matters too

much but i have one i'm glad this is uh how this stuff should happen they should find it report it have it fixed boom all done yeah no that's right and and to again kind of put it in perspective the vulnerability appears to be related to when the device is first configured to a local network so the ring smartphone app needs to send the wireless credentials over to the ring servers. Um, apparently that was being done in an insecure manner, uh, which could have been intercepted. Um, so the article goes on to talk about how an attacker might sort of spoof or, or I shouldn't say spoof, but kind of artificially create that situation, uh, by tricking the user into believing that their device is malfunctioning, things of that nature. So it sounds like it was a kind of an involved

exploit that would have had to take place in order for anybody to be affected by this, but still all the same, like you said, this is how it's supposed to happen. These things get discovered, they get patched,, you know, the cat and mouse game continues. Yeah, absolutely. There's never going to be a completely secure system. Again, I'm a programmer. I write this stuff. There's always bugs. There's always problems. Something like this being patched is good, but it also, you know, it's one of those things where they find a bug like this and they patch it and that patch could introduce a problem. So like it, there's always a cat and mouse and just a continuation of this stuff because you're layering code on top of code on top of code to get things to work.

And, uh, you know, eventually it kind of just like catches up to you where you're just like, there's a bug 300 levels down. And, and, uh's causing up here 200 300 levels up something to happen that you didn't expect to happen so i that's right i'm glad this is how it's supposed to work though uh when something's found like this yeah they can push out a patch and uh then these researchers can disclose that they found them so this this is good yeah Good stuff. Indeed. All right. Well, all the links and topics that we've discussed tonight can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 281. 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 the great things going on

here in the world of home tech. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 281. And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live starting Wednesday, usually around 7, 730, sometimes a little bit later with an interview that we had tonight. You can find out more at hometech.fm slash live. All right. Absolutely. Well, without further ado, Seth, what us on the show this week to talk about all of the things they have going on there over the last couple months, of which there are many. So we look forward to presenting this conversation to you.

We hope you enjoy, and we'll come back out after the interview with a few thoughts of our own. Hey, G. Paul and Charlie, welcome to the show. How are you guys? Hey, guys. Thanks for having us. Doing great. Yeah, we understand you're taking a little bit of time away from an executive event there at SnapAV to come join us. So we really appreciate you taking the time.

And we're going to jump in to a whole bunch of different topics related to SnapAV and everything you guys have going on these days, which as listeners to our show will be very familiar is quite a bit. But before we do that, why don't we start by giving just some personal introductions to yourselves here before we jump in. So maybe we can start with you, G. Paul, if you could just give our listeners a quick introduction, talk about a little bit of your background and what role it is you play today over there at SnapAV. Happy to do so. Thanks again for having us on the show. My background is a long

time in the industry. In fact, dating back to the mid-90s, working through college and selling audio-video gear for Circuit City, and then progressed into owning a dealership and was actually in that dealership for about 10 years before exiting that. It's an ongoing entity. It's still a customer of SnapAV today and moving into the manufacturing world. So my first stint in manufacturing is with Elon Home Systems in a sales role. And nine years ago, I was very fortunate to join SnapAV and lead product. With our recent merger, my role has changed and shifted into leading all the marketing. Awesome.

Well, we appreciate that. And Charlie, all of our listeners are probably going to be familiar with you by name. With our recent merger, my role has changed and shifted into leading all the marketing. Awesome. Well, we appreciate that. And Charlie, all of our listeners are probably going to be familiar with you by name, but if you would just give kind of a quick recap of your background and again, fill us in on the role that you're playing over there today at SnapAV. Yeah, I've been playing around with this smart home, connected home, home networking stuff for a long time, both personally and professionally. Blessed to have been involved in the development of quite a few successful commercial products in the space, both at Microsoft and at Amazon. I've been with SnapAV now for a year and a half. And I'm responsible for somewhere around 4,700 products that we design, manufacture, build, and sell under 18 brands now. So I'm responsible for all product development and

couldn't be more excited about it. Awesome. Well, it sounds like a pretty full plate and I'm sure both of you guys are very busy these days. Again, I alluded to it a minute ago and quite a lot going on over there at SnapAV. So let's jump into some of that. Now, I know you guys both alluded to the merger, and of course, that'll be sort of top of mind for many people. This story has been out there for a while and has developed, but I'd love to spend a few minutes just chatting about it and getting your guys' perspective on how you're seeing the world today and moving forward. So talk about how this merger, um, and I'll throw this out to either one of you to jump in here. Talk about how this merger really plays into, uh,

the vision. I saw a post from John Heyman, of course, the CEO over there at SnapAV on LinkedIn the other day, talking about really the importance of building a platform for the connected home and the difference between sort of piecemeal solutions of putting together various products from different manufacturers versus what you guys over there at SnapAV are trying to do, which is really build that profitable, sustainable, long-term platform for the connected home. So talk about that vision and how, with regards to the merger today, how that all sort of fits together. Well, the merger was really a result of recognizing the industry's leading companies who offer the two best platforms. And we think of a product platform, which Charlie will speak to, and the dealer OS and all those products and how they interconnect.

But also there's a very important part, which is the dealer platform. And that's all the tools and services that a company like ours can offer. It's not just the web portals we have, but it's marketing capabilities, partnerships with our certified showroom dealers. It's tools that we have on our web portals to help dealers and integrators design and support systems. It's oversee. These are the dealer side of the dealer OS

or the dealer platform that we're working very hard on. And as a result of looking at, you know, the two leading companies, we've been number one and number two together for a number of years in the industry. When you see CE Pro, for example, if you use CE Pro Awards as a proxy for who supports the dealers and who's delivering the best products. Excellent. Yeah, I can imagine there's a number of symmetry, synergies, I guess is the best word I could use there between what Control4 has and what SnapAV is bringing into the table for the industry as well. You mentioned, you know, a number of initiatives that you have are got to be like complimentary. I'm thinking more,

not so much on the like product standpoint, but from even a logistics standpoint. I mean, there's got to be expertise that SnapEV can bring a company like Control4 to things like shipping product and getting out into dealers' hands and that kind of thing. Yeah, it goes both ways. The two companies were very complementary in so many ways. And if it wasn't product, it was in services. If it wasn't services and support, it was in fulfillment. And it truly is two world-class industry-leading companies. And they fit really well together in so many places. Yeah. And I'll just add that we're at this point in time now where we're actually operating now as an integrated company, I think I have a schedule. And for now, moving forward, it's a single company.

There's a single product organization, a single marketing organization, a single sales organization, a single support organization. And we've kind of put the merger behind us. And now we're in execution mode. And it's pretty exciting to be in that phase. And a lot of the hypotheses that were formed early for why this made sense have come to be true, and we're pretty excited about that. Excellent. So when you guys say you're – it sounds like you're making great progress,

sort of moving forward, putting the merger behind you, and really looking forward to executing and producing results, frankly. I'm sure that's in the pre-show we were talking about that. And I'm sure that's what your you really at the core of this new operation moving forward, looking forward to most in terms of delivering to your dealer base? Well, you know, I'll start at a kind of a high level, Jason, which is we exist to serve the professionally served home technology space. And the businesses that are out in the world serving homeowners and small businesses with their technology needs need a partner. They need support in order to be successful in themselves. And we view it as our mission to make them successful.

And as they're building their own businesses, they need to make some bets on who they're going to bet on from a partnership perspective. And every day we wake up and we want to earn that trust and be the partners for those dealers and integrators. And we think about that along two lines. We talked about platforms before. Another word for platform is flywheel. And we feel blessed to have a business that is moving forward, is built around these two platforms or flywheels.

And as G-Paul mentioned, the first of those is the platform for the home. It's centered on the brand, the Control4 brand, and on Control4 Smart Home OS, and all the products that go into homeowners' homes that serve the family and deliver that delightful integrated smart home experience. And then the other, and there's an entire platform and ecosystem around that. And then the other platform or flywheel is our platform for the dealers themselves and to make their businesses successful. And that ranges for everything from our e-commerce website and our portals to our local stores and the ability for technicians to just, you know, drop by in the way to a job

and pick up something they need, um, and get local, uh, uh, sales help. Um, all of those things come together into that platform for the dealers. And over the next couple of years, we're just going to pour more and more fuel, um, onto those flywheels to, uh, deliver more and more value. Excellent. Got it. Well, I think we've alluded to it multiple times in terms of this platform and serving the professional channel, which I think both companies coming in and moving forward, I suspect no difference will continue to do very, very well. Zooming out just a little bit, you know, one of the big topics going back several years now into the industry

is this whole concept of kind of DIY or do it for me versus the established professional channels. And there's a lot of different narratives that go around about, you know, what's going to happen to the pro channel. And I know that you guys at SnapAV are very bullish on the professional channel and the prospects for that channel, for this channel moving forward. Talk about why. What is it about the professional channel versus all of the DIY and piecemeal solutions that I referred to earlier? What is it about the professional channel that you think remains compelling now and into the future?

Well, some people may have seen my presentation where I talk about the five levels of the smart home. And, you know, when we think about what it really means to have an environment that a family lives in where technology is invisible and ambient, and it's just a home that you want to live in. It's not necessarily even a smart home, but everything works in a highly integrated way. That's the dream, and that's the level five smart home activity today across the broad industry is very piecemeal. It's ad hoc accessories that are bolted together with very limited integration. And it's really clear that if you want to really live in a complete smart home, you have to have a much more integrated experience. And the only way that's ever going to happen is with local professional help. And so we believe that, that, you know, just as, you know, the household painting industry, you know, used to be the people,

you know, did all their own painting in their houses. And, you know, now it's almost all professionally served. And we think the same thing is going to happen in the technology space around people's homes. And we view it as our mission to make that happen and delete it. And so that's how we think about it. There's some really simple facts here. I mean, there's going to be more homes in the future. There's going to be more technology in the future. And that's going to drive the need for the professional to help even the most tech savvy individual deliver those best experiences. This merger exemplifies how bullish both of the legacy companies are in this space. There is nobody that is better positioned to invest more in this channel and to invest more in the pros to support that mission.

And that's exactly what we're doing at SnapAV. Yeah, absolutely. Sounds good to me. And I'll add on to that, like, thing that happens in my house is, unfortunately, I come home. Well, I'm at work at home and something doesn't work at the house. I may be out on the road. I'm the CTO of the house, right? I have to fix whatever's here.

And I'm at the point where I'm just like, I want to hire somebody at this point to come in and fix all this stuff that I've set up over the years. So let's talk a little bit about hardware and products that have been coming out. There's been a couple of really exciting products from the Control 4 brand come out over the last couple of months here. I'm thinking of OS 3, which was announced right around Cedia time. And then, of course, we have the new Neo remote that has just come out in the last couple of weeks here. I guess let's bang on the OS 3 first. And do you have any updates of the rollout on that and anything that dealers and customers are taking away from it that they like the most about it?

Yeah, I think that what the Control 4 brand has delivered recently is just more evidence of how we're accelerating. You talked about OS 3 and the CD time frame. Actually, we launched OS 3 in May, and we've had several updates since then. We launched another one at Cedia, and it's going very well. The one thing you didn't mention was the CA10 controller that we launched. This is a controller that is going to scale to the largest of jobs. And now we have an entire family of controllers from the starter projects where a homeowner can get a Neo remote control and an EA1 controller for about $1,100 MSRP, spend a couple hundred more dollars with the dealer to have that professionally installed. And for just a couple thousand dollars, they're in a control for powered smart home all the

way up to the, you know, the the mega mansions with with multiple controllers in them. And so that's that all happened over the summer. And just last week, we launched Neo. And I'm pretty excited about that launch. It's going very well. Neo is a premium handheld remote control with a touchscreen and hard buttons. And it's deeply integrated with the Control 4 smart home operating system. One of the things that we've invested heavily in with that is making sure that existing Control 4 customers can get NIO in a very friction-free way. There's no setup required by a dealer or the homeowner to make NIO work with

an existing Control a smart home. As soon as it's powered on, just get it on Wi-Fi, tell it what room it's in, and all of your control for smart home operating system favorites and devices all just come through automatically. And we're pretty excited about that. We're also really looking forward to, and we're already seeing it from dealers, how the sexiness and refinement of that remote,

you know, it's Swiss engineered. And, you know, if you ever get a chance to hold one, you can just tell every detail about the hardware and software has been crafted. And we think that's gonna to drive a lot more interest into control for smart homes. I do have one quick question about the name. You kept the Neo brand. We did.

We recognize that this is the beginning of a whole new set of devices that we'll be bringing forth for interaction within the home. And the key thing that's happened over the last four or five years in the tech industry is customers' expectations on the refinement of the devices that they hold in their hands or they see in their house has gone way up. And with NEO, we are setting the stage for the future and demonstrating the high-quality bar that we're going to continue to drive for. Yeah, just an add-on to that. Next week's a really exciting time for us and our certified showrooms. We have a See for Yourself Day on November 21st, and that's where we have worked very hard and very close with the certified showrooms

to have their customers come in and experience the Neo experience live and in first person. And this thing is so cool. As Charlie said, they can leave, homeowner, um, in customer can leave that experience and take one home and connect it to, to their OS three system. Right. I, I, I can't explain, uh, people, people who listen to the podcast. I mean, we, we have a mix of pros and we have a mix of, of, of DIY and then people are just casually interested in home technology as well. So it's kind of hard to explain this to a lot of people, but first of all, a $600 price point remote of this nature, of this build quality, virtually unheard of in our industry, even up until recently. And second of all, even if there was another competitor at that price point, you're not going to get programming for

free. You're not going to get the labor for free, right? Um, like just identifying it into a control for system gets that, um, it gets all that programming built into the, the, the, the remote and you don't have to sit there and waste hours and hours adding a button to the remote, adding a new page, adding another button as a programmer and a product guy. I appreciate that immensely. It's a, that's an excellent feature, um, that, uh, in a smart, a very smart way of, uh, integrating the Neo hardware into the control for ecosystem. Well, guys, I want to jump in here. Uh, you, you guys, you guys alluded to it a couple of times as far as this sort of being, uh, just the beginning, right. And, and, And the future for these NEO products.

And so, you know, I have to ask the million dollar question and if you guys can't unveil anything, then that's totally fine. But what is the future? These are beautifully designed products. Seth and I have both had a chance to hold NEO remotes in our hands and agree that the fit and finish on these things

is really top notch. And is there any sneak previews you can give us about coming attractions from the NIO family? No, we have no shortage of great products right now to talk about and for dealers to be successful in building their businesses around SnapAV. And we want to just talk more about those. Fair enough. All right.

Well, I had to ask the question. Let's shift gears here and talk about one of the topics here that's near and dear to my heart. And that's, of course, the Oversea platform and the remote monitoring and support capabilities of that platform and what the future looks like there. So this is a space that I've been following very closely. Listeners to our show will be familiar. A couple of years back, did a deep dive study on this. And at the time, there was really four major players. You had IHG, Backpack, Oversea, and Domotes.

And now, of course, three out of those four, IHG, Backpack, and Oversea are all under one roof. And so that landscape has changed dramatically. And I'd love to spend a little bit of time talking about that. So I know you guys shared some updates on the Oversee platform back at Cedia. For anybody who may not have caught those, what's the latest with Oversee? Again, part of the enabling dealers and integrators to run their businesses in the most effective way to be successful. Our commitment to that is evidenced through our continued commitment to deliver amazing

remote monitoring management. And what we announced at Cedia was we are going to have a single remote monitoring management solution moving forward. And as we do that, dealers that have bet on any of the existing ones will know that we will bring them forward as we continue to innovate in monitoring management. Yeah, absolutely. And I know that is a big question. And as two very dealer-centric companies that have come together, I certainly have no reason to believe that anyone would be left behind. And so, you know, glad to hear that.

Glad to have you sort of reaffirm that. Just looking at Oversee, though, in isolation, can you provide us with some of the updates there? I know, again, you guys released some new features or were talking about some new features there at Cedia, some enhancements to that platform to continue to kind of make that technology really stand out. And I'd love just a quick update on, again, what's sort of the latest with Oversea? Yeah, the Oversee platform continues to accelerate in adoption from dealers. It's simply incredible to see the number of homes coming online every single day with the Oversee platform. on supporting the scalability of that platform and addressing latency and any speed issues

that someone may have come across in the past. So there's a lot of work happening kind of below the surface, but on top of the surface, there's a lot of feature enablement that happens across the product lines. There's more support in MoIP. There's more support for third-party products. And we've got a very deep

roadmap of new features and things to come. Yeah. And one of the things that I love about this part of our product and services offerings is that because it's cloud-based, primarily cloud-based, we have the ability to constantly innovating on it. And the team is deploying improvements constantly. And so the platform is always getting better. Great. All right. Well, we are starting to bump up against our time here, so we'll start to wrap up. You guys alluded to this a few minutes ago, and I want to give you another chance to talk about it for anybody who may not be familiar with the event or maybe the timeline of when it's coming up. It's the C4 Yourself event, and I love this one. Tell us a little bit more about what that event is. And I

know you said November 21st is when it's coming up. The one thing that we know about technology in homes is that for homeowners and family members to understand what's possible, they need to experience it in person. We have 225 certified Control 4 showrooms around the world in 80 countries in the world, or 80 cities in the world in 80 countries in the world or 80 cities in the world. And on November 21st, we are holding a special event called see for yourself day where anybody existing customers or prospective customers can visit a local showroom and see the full experience of what a control for smart home is like. And at each of those showrooms uh the neo

remote will be there um uh for customers experience as part of that solution and um in many of them uh customers will be able to if they're existing control for a customer to be able to take one home with them awesome well i think that's a great. And I know ties right into the C4 certified showrooms, which is a big thing that has been going on for a while now. And I completely agree. I think the importance of allowing consumers to really see and interact with the technology in person can't be overstated.

So I love that you guys are doing that and wish you all the success in the world with that event. We'll look forward to seeing how that goes. And once again, we want to thank you both for taking some time to come on the show and get us all caught up on what has been a very, very busy time over there at SnapAV. If any of our listeners wanted to connect, learn more, what would be the best way for them to do that? Well, if they want to learn more about See For Yourself Day, control4.com. It's very discoverable. All the information on the event is there. And if they want to learn more about the broader company, snapav.com.

Excellent. We will include links to both of those in our show notes at hometech.fm. G. Paul and Charlie, thank you so much again for taking the time, and we'll look forward to connecting with you guys again soon. Jason and Seth, thank you guys. Jason and Seth, see you later. That was a good interview, Jason. I got to say, how do you feel that 50% of the podcast was made up of Circuit City alums? That may be a first. well no it's not a first technically every week that you and i are on it's it's 50 well that's true that's true actually yes if you look at it that way uh every episode is like that yeah uh yeah yeah some some circuit city roots there i know g i've had a chance to

chat with G Paul about kind of his history, uh, and, and sort of coming up through the ranks of, of circuit city and then owning his own, uh, company. So he's, uh, certainly brings a, brings a wide, um, uh, diverse background, I should say, uh, to his role over there at SnapAV. And then of course, Charlie Kendall, a name most of our listeners are probably very familiar with in terms of his background over there at Amazon and in the work with Alexa and the smart home. And then of course, over to Control4 and now with SnapAV. So really happy to have had both of them on the show and I enjoyed the conversation as well. Also, it's Oversea. It's Oversea. I think we've confirmed that. It's not Oversea.

Not Oversea. Overseaversea. I think we've confirmed that. It's not Oversea. Not Oversea. Oversea's a lot more fun to say. I don't think it matters what it's called, really. As long as the service works and it does what it's supposed to do. They could call it anything they want, but I think Oversea doesn't matter. I think it's a pretty cool product. Oversea it is. Yeah.

Oversea it is. All right. Well, let's move on here, Seth. We got another pick of the week. Uh, another gem you've been uncovering some good ones, uh, lately. This one, uh, I think came from, uh, from Matthew G who's with us in the, in the live chat tonight as well. I think this came from him. If I am reading your note correctly, 1967 educational film predicts the technology we'd be using in the future. And I know we've got a couple of different clips, so we'll certainly post this up, hometech.fm slash 281. I watched Seth, the shorter of the two, that I think had some of the highlights. And gosh, it's just always fun to go back and see, you know, how accurate or inaccurate these predictions were.

And then just the, the styling of things, right. So there's somebody who's kind of sitting down at a, at a computer and, and purchasing, I think it was like sprinkler or irrigation parts. Yeah. And so just talks about how you could get online. They didn't use the phrase online, but how you could, you know, sort of connect to this portal or whatever they called it and look at these devices and then insert this sort of magical credit card. And, uh, I, I always, when I watch these things, I just think about,

man, you know, how the technology of 20 or 30 years from today is going to look. Yeah. When you, when you just see how magical this all seemed, uh, 20, 30, 40 years ago. Uh, and now it's just so assumed for us, right?

This, this stuff is just so commonplace. Right. Uh, I, I'm, I'm not sure about this. So I've tried to look this up and trying to figure out where this came from.

Uh, so you, you said the, the, the, in the, in the description of this, it said ARPANET already existed. So that's like the precursor to figure out where this came from. So you said in the description of this, it said ARPANET already existed. So that's like the precursor to what we know

is the internet now. So it wasn't too big of a mental leap to go from like unconnected computers in the house to, you know, they're all connected together and you could have a big global commuter network. But I found a couple of like comments in the comments on that YouTube page. This may be a fake. I'm not sure if it is. It's really, really well done. And I'd like to believe that it's a it is a true, true to think because it definitely looks like something from the 60s. But fake news. Yeah. Fake, fake videos. But also duped, duped by the fake news. I don't know. It could be real. But also there's a there's a longer one that you alluded to, and we'll link that in there as well.

I think that was actually like a Coppola thing that he did. It's super long. It has a crazy concert at the end from a Puerto Rican artist, like a bongo concert that everybody kind of sits around and he dials up on his big giant dial remote control TV table. It's pretty wild, but it still looks pretty close to what, you know, we do today with few, there's a lot of video conferencing going on and looking up recipes on TVs. So it's pretty close to what we're doing these days, kind of what we're doing right now. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, you know, it's worth a watch either way. Um, not sure. So Matthew's in the chat room saying, I think this was made in a local neighborhood to connect to others. Uh, it was a test bed with video calls to next door. Yeah. So, so hard to say it's an entertaining watch and certainly we we've seen some of these videos before in terms of the, the older videos and kind of looking forward at the technology.

And I think it always does. It's always thought provoking to watch those and really think about, you know, what does this all look like 30, 40 years from now? They're both good. They're both, like you said, thought provoking. It doesn't, I don't know. It doesn't really matter. Like, I think these are definitely kind of maybe elements of their time. i'm definitely not sure about the first one being fake or not or real i'm just kind of curious as to where it came from because it's definitely like part of a longer

story um that you see put together like that westinghouse one we covered with the giant thermostat on the wall um so i i i just want to see the rest of the video. So it'd be kind of cool. But definitely if you have 25 minutes, check out the 1990 in house of tomorrow. It's, it's worth the watch in the concert at the end. Pretty good. Pretty good. There you go.

The, he, it was a 3d video. He's like, yeah, do you have 3d? I'll give it a copy of this in 3d. And the guy's like,

well, I have 40. It's like, okay, whatever. Yeah. And the guy's like, well, I have 4D. I was like, okay. Whatever. Yeah, and Don says, cameras with AI looking for communists. I don't think anyone was forecasting that one.

But I could be wrong. I could be wrong. Yeah, yeah. You know, I wouldn't put it past us as humans. All right, well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or ideas for a show topic or guest, please do give us a shout. All right. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or ideas for a show topic or guest, please do give us a shout.

We'd love to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Again, that's feedback at hometech.fm or visit the website at 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 support to learn how you can support

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let us know how we're doing. And Home Tech is a proud member of the technology.fm collective of podcasts. You can find other great shows like Home On, The Smart Home Show, and DTNS over there at technology.fm. All right, Seth. Well, that'll do it for our show this week. I hope you have a great weekend and that you don't freeze. Try to stay warm in that mid-60s weather. I think the cold weather is over tonight. I don't think it's going to get... I think it gets on to the 50s. We've got the space heaters out. We're doing our thing. Light a fire. The fire pit has already happened. When we get weather like this, you can get outside and there's like no bugs or anything because they all die in the cold weather.

Like it's well worth it to get out there in front of a fire pit and go somewhere. I'd imagine. Yeah, for sure. So, hey, one more plug, assistantshield.com. You know, if you want to protect your family. Yeah. Make sure you get over there. Get protected.

Lasers. It's real alright Seth have a great weekend man we'll talk to you next week you too have a good one alright take care