HomeTech.fm - Episode 286 - The CESpool

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

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, January 10th, 2020. From Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffey. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. 2020? That means we get jetpacks. Jetpacks. It's a new year, the new year time to look back and celebrate look forward remind ourselves of all of our broken New Year's resolutions

I mean after this week the dry of January people that it's just too late I've already got it here you petered out already You know, people that it's just too late. I've already got it here. You already start. Oh, you petered out already, huh?

I started drinking from the handle. All right, man. Well, it's Happy New Year. It's good to be back. Happy New Year. I appreciate you getting to show out while I took some time off. I was down in Arizona hanging out with the family. So I had a really good time and I'm excited to be back

right in time for a big week, CES this week. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. We'll talk about some of the TV announcements, which is always a little, you know, not a little. It's a big deal there and we have a lot of that. We've got plenty of other stories as well, really busy in the news. Absolutely. Well, what do you say we jump into those home tech headlines?

Let's do it. The HDMI Forum has announced a mandatory certification program for all ultra high speed HDMI cables. The initiative is designed to help ensure quality 4K and 8K HDMI cables reach the market tested and ready for use in homes and follows a similar certification trends from companies like U and dpl labs according to the press release all certified cables of any length must pass certification testing at an hdmi authorized testing center and then once certified those cables are required to affix an ultra high speed hdmi certification label to each package noting uh notifying consumers of the certification status of the product.

And I'm sure that you can't fake that label. Yeah. Or fudge the numbers or any of that. Right, right. Yeah. David Glenn here, president of the HDMI Forum, says, Ultra high-speed HDMI cables are the only way to ensure features and compatibility of HDMI 2.1 are delivered. Ensuring these cables are compliant

paraphrasing a little is essential to the ecosystem to which i say duh yeah yeah i mean i don't know like it it's almost like it's a numbers game right and now we're we're kind of like i remember all the headaches we did have, like back when we switched to 1080p. And you had to have a decent setup, a decent cable most of the time, but not all the time. And then sometimes a random cable that you had on the truck would be bent or something, and it would just mess everything up. And we seem to have gotten away with that. But I think that the tolerances, now that we're talking about 8K video AK HDR video, um, they're going to be so tight. There's really not any room for that. And I, I have a feeling that a lot of like the longer distance cables are going to go away or switch over to using fiber optics like they are now.

Like, so a lot of the 4k cables are like a hybrid, they're part copper. And then they have like fiber optic to move the fast data so it's kind of like a completely different completely different setup um but i'm just going over to amazon right now and searching for 8k hdmi cable just to see what they've got oh look they already exist jason i don't know what we're what we're worried about already got it covered they already they're already here 25.99 done free one day shipping yeah well i'll keep dreaming of a day when we all just plug our tvs into power maybe a separate ethernet cable and call it a day yeah i mean yeah not to mention there's no 4k content there's sure no 8k content but you know whatever you'll have the

cables you're ready for you well stay tuned because we've got uh we've got more on that speaking of 8k the 8k associationindustry group promoting growth and harmonization throughout the 8K ecosystem, has announced the 8K Association certified program for 8K TVs is now available. We've talked about this program on the show before. It sounds like it is available now. As part of the certification, member companies will be able promote 8k tvs under the association's banner including an official 8k logo which if it's what the one i'm looking at is looks like it was designed in the mid 90s i'm not sure what they were going for there uh but after of course each tv's models each tv models performance

criteria is validated by an independent certification program manager yeah uh 90s maybe maybe a little bit earlier i mean they the 90s were famous for those gradients right so you'd have like gradients yeah this is the full spectrum on the eight so it's it's got a rainbow eight with a strangely disproportionate skewed K. I guess that's really weird. Maybe they need to try again on that one. It's very odd. If I saw that, if I saw that on a package, I wouldn't buy it. I think it is the logo. I mean, I just did an image search and I see it pretty prevalent. So growing in a mess there. Exactly. One of the constant consumer complaints about 4k TV is the lack of broadcast 4k content.

This complaint will slowly be addressed this year with the official launch of next gen TV, a consumer facing name for the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard that enables 4k UHD broadcasting. LG, Samsung, Sony all announced new 4K and 8K TVs, incorporating ATSC 3.0 at CES,

which brought the grand total of TV sets out there to 20 for the start of 2020. It is expected that the next-gen TV will roll out to more than 60 markets in the U.S., covering more than 70% of the population. Broadcasters are moving forward with unprecedented enthusiasm and cooperation. Man, I've got to say, like, this sounds interesting. 70% of the population coverage could be pretty good. But, man, this would be good for, like, sporting events. I've always said the high definition HDR stuff

is good for sporting events and things like that. So I'm thinking like maybe hopefully Olympics, like we'd get the good broadcast for that. But man, I don't know. Like there's all this broadcast. Like if I go down to the local Sarasota TV station, am I going to walk in the door and find that they have an 8K camera now? Like, I don't think so. I think they're going to have the standard 1080p cameras

and that's what they're going to be using. Yeah, it'll be a while, but you know, it's a step in the right direction. I found interesting in the story as well that they talk about this technology will deliver an additional, it's built apparently on an internet protocol backbone. So it says it will deliver additional IP connected and customizable features such as voice boost and consistent audio levels, as well as interactive features such as the ability to offer audio channels and deliver detailed emergency alerts. So some extra features in there enabled by the fact that this is built on an IP backbone, which is kind of interesting. Yep. I remember them talking over the spec early on and there was a lot of these really cool features that they can do, or they said they can do now that

you basically have a computer built right into the TV. So I'll be excited to see those features come out more than I am excited about AK resolution, you know, coming to my local news studio. Just don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. Yeah. Yeah. Don't hold your breath. Eric in the chat room says, if you're lucky a lot, you know, that's if you're lucky, right. When you said 1080, it's a lot of the OTA channels aren't even 1080 I or 720 P. That's true. That's true. And a lot of them are replaying movies from like the sixties, which are, you know, probably somebody recorded on a vcr or betamax or something and they're just eating play and letting it go so yeah i mean matlock definitely

wasn't 720p right right well and then it just highlights like there's so many parts to the uh to the to the chain that all have to be in line for you to get the full benefit of it. Right, right. All right, well, shifting gears here, Sonos is suing Google for allegedly copying its patented speaker technology. The audio company claims that Google stole its multi-room speaker technology after getting access to it through a 2013 partnership.

The original partnership would let Sonos speakers support Google Play Music, but the company allegedly used patented technology in its now discontinued Chromecast audio device, then continued to use it in the Google Home lineup of smart speakers and the Pixel product lineup. Meanwhile, Sonos says Google subsidized its own products to sell them at a cheaper price while using them to extract more data from buyers. It sounds like Google did Sonos dirty here. Yeah, and the list of the products is pretty long.

In addition to the Chromecast audio and Google Home lineup, it includes the Chromecast, the Chromecast Ultra, the Nest Mini, the Nest Hub, the Nest Hub Max, Nest Wi-Fi Point, and Pixel phones, Pixel Slate tablet, and Pixelbook laptop. And Sonos is also asking for, in a completely different lawsuit, for a sales ban on all Google laptops, phones, and speakers in the U.S. through the separate lawsuit through the ITC, the International Trade Commission. So things are heating up between Sonos and Google.

That's a pretty big, uh, pretty big swing there from the Sonos legal team. That's a, it's interesting to see how this one plays out. Can you imagine? I mean, that's, that's incredible. You know, they do these things like they, they come out of the gate with like these huge, ridiculous overreaches so that they can give ground so it will be interesting to see where this one ends up sounds uh it sounds juicy it does it does well comcast has unveiled a new x5 advanced gateway which according to the operator is its first device capable of delivering a true multi-gigabit speeds in the home it makes makes Comcast one of the first ISPs in the U.S. to offer a Wi-Fi 6 certified product. The Gateway will begin rolling out to customers

that subscribe to Xfinity Internet speed tiers of 300 megabits per second, are faster in the coming months, and will be available to those who lease the company, XFi Gateway, at no extra cost. A 2.5 gigabit per second ethernet port that's pretty cool will support wired speeds greater than one gigabits per second yeah gigabit was all the all the rage now and it seems like we're we're already moving blowing right past that and it's

cool to see wi-fi 6 getting out there yep i know um the story talks about devices based on this new technology are capable of lower latency better better wireless coverage, faster speeds. These certifications began in September of 2019, but with products from the likes of Ares, a longtime Comcast partner, AirT, Soft at Home. And those are the three they list that have made it through the gate. So good to see this getting out to market in this way yeah i mean you'll need your your devices like your computers and your phones don't have wi-fi six yet uh most of them right and and your computers definitely don't have a 2.5 gigabit per second uh ethernet port right so you're going to need to to have a little dongle or something plugged into your computer if you're a a Mac user, that's normal.

But they're not expensive. I was looking at them on Amazon actually earlier today. A 2.5G is like $29 or something like that. So it's not a terrible add-on, but it will get you those internal speeds of faster than gigabit speeds inside the house. So that's kind of cool. Right. I will say, like, this is, what's frustrating about this is that, like, these speeds are great, but Comcast is one of these companies

that has, like, a nice terabyte limit. And I think we were, Adam and I were joking about this on the Fireside Chat when we were talking about streaming and how fast you can get to that terabyte limit when you're watching 4K video over Netflix or something like that. Basically, all Comcast is doing here is giving you that that way to get there faster you know you have the bandwidth but they they do put caps on their on their product unfortunately i i don't know why like you're paying for a service you should get it's not like water there's not a finite resource to to bits of data They're just made up whole cloth out of air. I don't know.

We're running out of bits. Yeah. Yeah. Better start charging more for them once you get over a terabyte. Yeah. You mentioned phones and stuff a minute ago. I went and looked because I was curious. Looks like iPhone 11 as well as like the latest Samsung Note, Note 10 and 10 Plus do have Wi-Fi 6.

So these are starting to um trickle out yeah hit the market but yeah obviously many of us don't have the newest iphone or newest samsung so uh something to be cognizant of for sure all right well moving on from here seth we did want to spend a little bit of time getting into uh the the the cesspool. That's a great one. Yeah. Thank you. Credit to Eric for pre-show chat room. I'm not going to steal credit for that.

Uh, the CES, you know, it's one of those shows that you got to talk about. If you're into the smart home, you gotta, you gotta keep an eye on it. It's a lot of fun, uh, to see what comes out of there. Um, certainly not, um, uh, as much maybe, not as much maybe quality, should I say, as the sort of stories we talk about coming out of Cedia, for example. A little bit tougher to separate the wheat from the chaff, I think is what I'm getting at. But we've got a couple of stories here we're going to rifle through, just do kind of a drive-by on CES here. We'll spend a little bit of time on TVs as well. But some of the bigger gadgets and stuff to come out, I shouldn't say all gadgets, you know, some of these are legit products and we'll spend a few minutes talking about them. But

Seth, I think the big one for me this year that I was really looking forward to coming into the show and, you know, know ces just wouldn't have been the same without it a smart toilets yes yes you can now flush them without just waving your hand over the that's right handle yeah yeah that's right so you know life is good now kohler's got its touchless toilet uh they've dabbled in this area before, but they are making... So it's just like a public restroom toilet. Tremendous strides, yes. You don't have to touch them. Yeah, right. And it's funny, because in a public restroom, this would be awesome.

But at home, I just don't know that I need this. I kind of don't know that I need one more thing to worry about breaking or not working correctly. But to their credit, it's still got the handle. So if you're into the analog feel of flushing your toilet. Tactile control. Tactile control. You'll still have that option. Thank goodness.

Absolutely. That's great. That's great. I've noticed a lot of lighting products. I know we made fun of them a while back. That's C by GE. Yep. They've come up with a lot of, we made fun of them for their on, you know, they had this on-off thing to reset their product.

If you ever got it froze up or you needed to do a factory reset on it, they have this like insane video on how to reset them. It was basically turning them on and off multiple times at different seconds it's very strange to watch but anyway um they do have a ton of decent looking product coming out uh which i was kind of impressed with they've got like smart switches that that don't require a neutral wire they've got motion sensors out right now so um very happy to see a lot of stuff going on like lifex li fx that lighting line uh released a bunch of new stuff um so i'm glad to see that uh the lighting stuff is still kind of like um moving along and we're getting more smart products uh brought in i mean we'll talk about them later but ring also did some like outdoor solar powered, um, path lights and, and, and, uh, some, they

actually do doing light bulbs too. So like the lighting seems to have, uh, to kind of up the game this year and we're getting more, uh, product, uh, in the door that looks quality, quality looking product. Uh, not, not this Kickstarter stuff that we've had for the past couple of years. It's like, it's basically been like Kickstarter and, uh, Lutron Caseta, right? Like you, and there hasn't been much in between, but now I feel like, uh, especially for DIY, you have a pretty good chance of, of running to a product, uh, that, that has control built by a well-versed company like GE or Leviton,

uh, or Lifex. And, uh, like now it seems like you can get a decent amount of, uh, smart lighting devices that all could possibly integrate with each other, um, for, for a decent price. Uh, cause some of this stuff is not expensive. Right. Yeah. There's, there's, uh, indeed quite a bit going on in that space and, uh, really, really cool stuff to see, um um see all these coming together i did see that c by ge1 three wire switch no hub no neutral wire required that's kind of nice i know for yeah uh oh and we gotta we gotta plug connect since because uh they have their their uh wireless in wall outlet switch i've got two of them here 15 and 20 amp um yeah no that it's uh it is a treat to use this

product i'm actually really surprised by the build quality and everything on it like we touched them at cdia like we touched the the front of them at cdia but like i've actually held it in my hand and put it in a box and then everything um and been very happy with that but those are shipping now like if you need those so uh go check those out absolutely all right i got another good one for you seth all right home security drones how much uh you know the low low price of ten thousand dollars is that all well i need to come that's it i need to protect my compound with a drone so yes it's got a b b e BEE drone that watches your property. I'm sure your neighbors are going to love that, by the way. Yes, yes.

It's not like they're noisy or anything. Yeah, so the Sunflower Home Security System, $10,000 price tag. It's got a B drone that watches your property, complete with GPS and collision avoidance. Also comes with a Hive, which is a charging station, uh, keeps it protected from the elements waterproof contains the system's AI brain. And so this contains a system includes quote sunflowers, which are, uh, sort of like motion, smart motion sensors you place around the property. I think we've talked about this one before, actually. We had like a pick of the week, I think, of this a while back. And if it senses motion, it sends that drone up and wakes up your neighbors and everyone's going to love you.

It reminds me of those, uh, there's videos out there. Um, you know, like if you're having a wedding or something and they have these videos of like, uh, like it's a drone video of the drone going down the aisle and kind of, you know, the videographer is doing this thing. Well, they've like, they've, they have typically have muted the audio out of that and put over, you know, some nice music, but like, there's videos out there of the actual drone sounds and what it would sound like, uh, with the drone, drone in a church going down the aisle. It's full-volume drone sound. It's great.

That's really good. Yeah. That's funny. Good stuff. Lots of cameras. I've seen plenty of smart doorbell cameras. I think ADT has ADTt blue they're rebranding their line um a couple of others i saw arlo arlo had a couple of them come out

chamberlain had one that goes on your garage door opener so i thought that was kind of interesting timing because i know uh you were you were telling, I've got one of those Chamberlains. I shamefully still haven't installed it. But you were telling me, like, one of the big things is you want a camera with that because you want to be able to visually verify. Now Chamberlain has their own camera. Abode has a new video doorbell. There was one I saw called Lockly that looked a little, no, that's a smart lock, sorry. But that looked like it had some interesting features. So a lot going on around the front door.

Yeah, including August had an August favorite of many people. I've never actually used one, but I've seen them. And they're pretty big. It's like this big disc that you can install over the top of the lock that you have. Well, they've made it smaller. Like it's now a smaller package and everything, which is helpful. It's still a big, giant growth you have to put on your door, but it's smaller. So there's that.

Giant growth. It's a smaller growth. Yeah. You know, it's trending in the right direction. 45% smaller, they say, which is good. Yeah. So, hey, have you ever tried a robot vacuum? Do you have one of these?

Have we talked about this before? I was, you remember the website Woot.com? Yeah. Okay, so Woot.com would frequently feature the horrible version of the Roomba that would kind of run around and get stuck on carpets and that kind of thing. So I bought one of those because, you know, you waited for it to go on Woot deal and you get it for like $100 off or something like that. And so I had it for years and it probably used it a half dozen times because it just did not, it never did a really good job.

But from what I understand now, these things have gotten like really, really smart and have radar and LIDAR and all sorts of stuff. They can basically map out your entire house. And I've seen the new ones that exist out there, and they look a lot more compelling than the $100 special thing that I got off Woot a couple years ago. Yeah, I think they've come a long ways.

I'm not sure how to pronounce this company name. Trifo? Trifo. They have a Lucy robot vacuum. Mm-hmm. and this one is interesting i'm not in the market for one of these i i cannot imagine how this would work in my house given the amount of crap covering my floor all the time with two little kids uh you know toys and clothes and you know god knows what else um so i'm like just not even going to go there right now but um this is

interesting it's uh combines a robot vacuum and and some home security elements so it's got a surveillance camera day and night surveillance cameras built in so like it can patrol your home according to this story there you go and i thought that was kind of interesting. If you're in the market for a vacuum combo robotic surveillance unit, here you go. But it also, you know, speaking of what you said, Seth, it does say that it uses these cameras to better avoid obstacles and things like that in its path. Eric is posting a link in the chat room right now from Mashable. Another Roomba ran over dog poop and then proceeded to, quote, clean the house. I've seen those videos. They are not for the faint of heart.

So do not click on that video if that's a trigger for you because it's exactly what you think it is. And they don't detect that they've run over the dog poop. And they will continue cleaning the house until... Well, and it's ironic because I'd say the majority of people I know who have purchased one of these are dog owners. Yeah, but you get the fur, right? Anecdotally, the people that I know just anecdotally the people that i know who have bought these are dealing with a fur problem right so next generation sensors indeed eric they need to get a whiff get a whiff of what they just ran over and cease halt all operations immediately

i don't i don't know if you saw the, I know we talked about Bluetooth toilets, but Kohler also came out. This was kind of early on CES. They came out with a Harman Kardon based speaker inside of a shower head. I did see that. $229. It has Alexa microphone built into it. So you can talk to Alexa when you're in the shower i i actually for a second i was like i want that and then i was like first of all how do you i have no idea how that installs it's got to have electrical right yeah it does now that you say

that it does have to have i have to think that would be a big project and number two like the only reason i want it is because I want music in the shower and there, I'm sure I can go buy like a $20 Bluetooth speaker. Hank, let me hand over to Amazon right now and search for Bluetooth shower speaker real quick for you. Oh, I'm sure there's gotta be a ton of them. Yeah. Um, for like nothing.

Guarantee you it's not $229, whatever the Amazon choice comes back. Oh, four. Let's see. You can get one for $29.99. I'm sure there's more in here than I haven't. Oh, yeah. Yeah. $10.99.

Amazon Prime one day. Yeah. So you're good to go. I can get you hooked up with this nice pink one here. There you go. Perfect. Yeah. You don't have to spend.

Maybe it's hydraulically powered yeah that would be that would be smart right they would just use the water to like generate the electrical needed to run the little amazon speaker but then it would have to run it would turn off or like if you didn't run though you'd have to run the water you couldn't say turn the shower on great it's like oh man we didn't think about that yeah yeah exactly so i i this pink speaker you sent me is beautiful yeah there's no alexa integration with it but it does have bluetooth 4.0 built-in mic a suction cup four hours of play time so boom four hour if you're taking a four hour shower we have other problems

but and i can buy 20 of them for the price of one i just throw them away after the batteries as soon as they stop working which won't be long yeah i mean i think it's a like this is one of those things that's interesting but not for most people i mean i guess if you had it'd be nice to listen to something in the shower i suppose but like this doesn't to me doesn't seem the right way of going about it the one thing that i really want want and i'm interested in they've got to be out there but i'm sure they're probably more than i want to spend is some sort of smart device and this is not it by the way I'm shifting gears a little bit. But when it comes to water fixtures and intelligence, I want the ability to say, for my kids especially, get a bath ready at X degrees.

Whatever that sweet spot is that you want for a kid's bath. And you do the thing where you got your wrist under the water because you're trying to get the temperature right. That would be cool if you could just set it to a temperature. Those exist. I, I, in fact, I mean, those have existed for a number of years where they've had little control panels on the side of the shower. And I mean, but they're super expensive. Yeah. Because they, they, they require, well, one, they require electrical.

And, and, and typically like when, when, when I saw them installed, they had like more than one fixture available for the shower. Like you could have the rain, you can have the side shots, you can have the front shots, the back shots. I mean, it was, it was like everything, um, all in one. It was like a massage shower when you got in there so they have that but it also had that built in like make it make the shower or the the tub whatever you're in um i don't know what's it i don't even know what the degrees that come out of the the shower tub are is it 100 degrees is it 90 i don't know frame of reference yeah i don't know it's warmer than than what the pool would be so uh most of the time yeah yeah no i gotta be in the 90s eventually you'd figure it out yeah anyways the things that

i think about and then never take any action on yeah i mean you haven't installed a um a 30 dollar or what was it eight dollar uh garage door opener kit thing. Um, I don't, I don't foresee you spending thousands of dollars on a shower fixture head thing and getting that installed anytime soon. It's one of my new year's resolutions. I'll have it done before this time next year. So speaking of TVs, Jason, how's that TV? Uh, is it, is it still in the box behind you that I see right there? Nope, nope. It's in. It's in. I'm loving having it down here. Yeah, it's nice.

It's very nice. I don't use it frequently, but, you know, it is nice to have it down here when I just want to turn something on. So I've enjoyed it. Yeah, it's not the 6 Series. We really love it. We use our 6 Series heavily up in the family room. But this one's the 4, I think, is got okay yeah cl4 series yeah i mean guest bedroom slash your office slash just yeah totally yeah it was like and for the price i mean you just you just can't beat it but uh you know speaking of tvs like you said this is the super bowl ces is like

the super bowl for tv manufacturers and Seth, we're not even going to try to get into all of the different manufacturers out there and different models and prices and sizes and things like that. But I thought it would be good to at least spend a little bit of time talking about the big three, Sony, LG, Samsung, see what they're doing. They're kind of a bellwether for really where things are headed anyway. So jumping into Sony first, one of the things I thought was interesting is one of the big stories that came out about Sony, you know, for years and years, it's always been bigger, bigger, bigger. Those are always the stories. And one of the stories that was of note this year with Sony was actually smaller, a 48 inch 4k OLED. And OLED. And this is a story because it's going to be more affordable as an

OLED. They call it a, quote, condo size in the story that I read. And it's the Master Series. It's the A9S, a really nice panel in a 48-inch size. So I wonder how popular this will be. TV that nice, you just think most people are going to want like a 55 or 65 at least. But I thought it was interesting that Sony came out with it. You can get nine of them and make a video wall. I mean, that would be... Now you're thinking. I like it.

I mean, the 55-inch video wall, that would be absurd. But, you know, this one's getting back down into that range. The technology to the x950h this is um technology that was previously only available on the two larger sizes um and sony claims this technology improves color and brightness for off angle viewing which is kind of a you know that's a's a nice thing. That's a big deal because in room of any size, if you've got more than two people, or even two people for that matter, watching a show, you're probably going to be sitting a little bit out of the sweet spot. Although it's certainly gotten way bigger with TVs these days. But having that extra boost of color and brightness on the off-angle viewing sounds like it could be a nice feature yeah i'm thinking about all the times that i walked by the sony booth i'm like really never noticed that i mean their stuff is so bright and vivid every time it's just kind of like is it really that i mean unless you're like really off axis and like looking at it you're standing you

know almost at the edge of it and looking at it on that way do you notice that the the colors go off and and the brightness dims down but i mean as soon as you get kind of mostly back in front of the tv um it's pretty good but you know i notice it yeah it's always good to have good this the the off-axis viewing it's always yeah this was a much bigger concern in older uh flat panels i think if i recall correctly plasmas were especially susceptible to that one of them was yeah for sure because i i remember i mean you would i have i have a little garbage tv that i have down behind me that i use to like randomly hook up sometimes when i need to like have a TV in an emergency. And like, it's, um, it's only like a 12 or 13 inch, like LG. And if you get off axis on that thing, everything's green and almost inverted colors, but like in front of it's fine. Yeah. But I mean,

right. Yeah. Right. So rounding out, uh, yeah, sorry. Rounding out Sony here, uh, Z eight H and X nine 50 H series get hands-free voice,free voice via Google Assistant. So it sounds like they're adding that to some of the existing panels. And then, you know, this is a story this year, but I think this is one of those things that's really moving into the territory of table stakes with TV manufacturers. And I think by next year, or certainly the year after that, this idea of Amazon Alexa and Google Home being built into tvs is it's kind of it's almost assumed right uh in the near future uh all the sony tvs they'll also have apple home kit and airplay too which is uh pretty interesting yep that's uh well we've seen that already on sony

for a while i think back they backported all the 2018 tvs have that. Yep, we talked about that a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, and so it's nice to have, I mean, one, two, three years of lines of TVs that possibly have all of this compatibility built into them for smart assistance and integration into your house if you're going that route. So it's pretty nice to see. I have friends that love that stuff, that absolutely, like, they you're, if you're going that route. So it's pretty, pretty nice to see. I have friends that, that love that stuff, that absolutely like they have a control force

system and, uh, they will, they'll be like, no, I'm just going to use the Samsung remote and I'm going to talk to Alexa and tell her to do this. And she does it. And I, I can't, um, I can't fault you for it. If that's what you like doing. Yeah. It works for you. Yep.

I think the control aspect is just, you know, at the DIY end of the market is just going to continue to get more and more robust. So it'll be interesting to see how much the big control systems like Control 4 have to evolve and be more sophisticated or move into different parts of the house to maintain relevance or or augment because that's what right we're able to do we're able to do some special things with the control for system at his house that he wouldn't be able to do with just amazon totally so yeah we're able to augment and introduce other devices that he can control that just do not exist in the amazon ecosystem with control 4 yeah for sure all right well pulling it back to tvs here shift to uh to lg a big ces for them 13 new models these are led by three new art inspired gx gallery series tvs now seth i know you and i

talked about this trend at cdia and it's certainly possible that some of the TVs we saw there are going to overlap a little bit. I don't frankly remember if it was the GX Gallery we saw at Cedia or not. But interesting trend that just seeing this more and more TV manufacturers really being more tuned in to the fact that the TV needs to look good when it's on, and it needs to look good when it's off, to the extent that it can. And you're seeing a lot of that from TVs. So the story reads, this is from CE Pro, says LG's 2020 TVs are meant to integrate effortlessly with any home decor. Again, this minimalist gallery series uses an ultra thin form factor paired with an included wall mount the 55 65 and 77 inch hang completely flush with the wall transforming the tv into a piece of art so i haven't seen that wall mount i'm not sure how it works it's always the million dollar question with cables and everything that you got to manage behind there in the real world do these actually

mount completely flush or is that just something you see on the on the showroom floor yeah and the super popular ones like the like the samsung the the ones i'm thinking with the frame tvs they have those big giant boxes that everybody's trying to figure out what to do with now and i'm seeing like structured wiring can companies are like advertising that their structured wiring can can this Samsung smart box or whatever it's called. And I just like, yeah, all the brains and guts can't be in the TVs when they're that small. They have to be mounted somewhere else. And Samsung's solution is to make this big box.

But just a whole other problem of figuring out where to put that big giant box so you can run the TV. But I do love that we've gone away from uh tvs that stick off the wall and are curved and are have giant bezels uh thank god yeah to to this um to this uh to this style where it's very minimal uh you may or may not even notice i saw some of them have bezels that were just like barely noticeable. Like the screen went all the way almost to the edge. So yeah, I'm glad that we're kind of in that era now where flat panel TVs are just that.

They're just flat panels. And we're finally getting good video on them and they look good when you're putting them in a room. Yep. Two other quick things on LG here before we shift to Samsung. The big technology for them that they're talking about this year is the NanoCell TV lineup. So go read up on that. This is kind of their flagship technology, highlighted by four real 8K TV models, 75 and 76 inch included in that.

So that's kind of their big flagship. And then one of the other things, Seth, that I thought was interesting, and I feel like we might have talked about this before too, filmmaker mode. Oh, yeah. This is supported by Hollywood's leading directors to deliver images as they were intended, and it disables certain post-processing effects such as motion smoothing noise reduction and sharpening preserves correct aspect ratios colors and frame rates and is designed to faithfully replicate the original vision of

the director love it more more of that please more performance yeah sure like reference level picture um so when you when you see you know there's gonna have to be a way to switch that back because those those crazy processing things are great for sports but um not not good at all for your soap opera effect in in your favorite movie that you're trying to watch where you're just looking at it going, wow, this is so clear. These superheroes, people look really like just dumb actors walking around and it just suspends your disbelief. It's like, this is just dumb. Why am I watching this? So yeah. That's a great, that's a great way to put it. I haven't heard anyone phrase it quite like that, but you're right. It looks too real. And it's like you you're not you're not

lost in the movie anymore just like the whole reason you sat down in the first place yeah exactly so more more of that i mean video focusing on the video and the quality uh the real quality not just like numbers like 8k and hdr and 444 like focusing on on making it easy for uh the the panel to deliver a quality look and feel, that's awesome. I'm glad to see that. Faithfully replicating the source material, for sure. Cool. Well, moving quickly here to Samsung. Big focus I picked up on the stories about Samsung this year and their focus at CES. AI-based innovations designed to make the viewing experience more immersive and connected features, which make consumer lifestyles more integrated. So translating that

into more feature language. A lot of focus on smart home integration in Samsung. Also focus on a new initiative of theirs, Samsung Wellness. And this is a new like health initiative. I haven't read a ton about it, but, um, you know, any, anytime companies can do anything to promote, actually it's called Samsung health. I apologize, uh, is what it's called. Um, so integrations there, um, leveraging the power of machine learning to optimize audio video and smart home capabilities. So again, kind of their their messaging and sort of big thrust to try to differentiate seems to be really revolving this year around that sort of bigger picture smart home integration lifestyle enhancements where's my bixby speaker

you had to ask i mean it's been out for a long time but i like like we're we're i need to get one of these how am i i gotta know now bixby ces uh one day ago uh let's see samsung's 2020 keynote wrapped up last night and was wild rapid fire showing of things that may or may not even come to market sam called samsung called its keynote the vision of the future of tech and innovation so i guess these are concepts and not products uh blah blah blah the bixby speaker lives they're saying so i um i'm hoping that we get the galaxy home sometime soon there's there's it says early 2020 so um i cannot wait for this guy to come out. I need the little strange legged speaker thing for my collection. They had like a robot, like the size of a tennis ball,

like a little ball robot thing as part of their keynote, I guess. It was supposed to be like your buddy that you'd carry around the house and he'd do things for you. So typical CES stuff. Yeah. Vaporware and dreams, dreams and vaporware. But there's at least a chance that we'll see that before we see Bixby.

That's so true. So anyways, we're taking bets. Uh, the, on the more specific side like panel technology display technology from samsung looks like the flagship this year is the q950ts this is their q led technology 8k tv um first tv to combine premium 8k picture quality with surround sound audio and

an ultra thin form factor is what they're claiming yeah that's the one i was i was talking about that has little i mean it's it's screen edged edge like um i don't know how any greasy installers are going to get this put in without getting the fingerprints all over those the screens because that that that was always our greasy man yeah i mean you get face prints and everything on the screens so oh that's funny i don't know how they're gonna put these in uh it's got a next gen quantum processor alexa google assistant again those things are kind of becoming more and more common and then again there was this big emphasis on samsung wellness so a little curious about that probably Probably go read into it again.

Didn't read into that one before the show, but I'm generally a fan of companies like, you know, Apple has their health initiative and Samsung and I don't know how much they actually help, but they certainly can't hurt. So yeah, a lot of it is tracking. You know, if you're looking at the numbers and you're confronted by those numbers,

then you're actually more apt to do something. Kind of like counting calories, right? If we all counted our calories, we wouldn't eat the donut. That's right. Then it's like 500 calories and that's like a quarter of your day gone right there. So like, yeah, once you know, then you start correcting your behavior. And that's, I mean, that's always good. It's always good to see. Indeed. You can't manage what you don't measure. Exactly. Hey, that's pretty good. That makes sense. Yeah.

All right, cool. Well, Seth, I'm going to let you tee this one up. I know you've dug in a bunch. Ring has quite a bit going on at this year's CES. Pretty cool stuff here. Yeah, they announced a bunch of stuff right out of the gate this year. They had new six products, including a new gate controller see what i did there see what i saw that yeah well played the access controller pro is what they're

calling it is a wall-mounted box that lets you pair any electronically controlled gate access gate with your ring camera over ethernet or cellular connection enabling control of both from inside the ring app and the access controller pro is available today costs 2.99 it's a pretty interesting device yeah um they're they're leveraging the the this is like one of the first i can't figure out where this product came from like did this come from amazon or did it come from ring um because they're pushing inside of this product the key by Amazon service where they can open your door or open your garage door,

or in this case open your gate and drop off your boxes. They're pushing that service inside of this pretty hard. So I will be curious as to see how exactly this all gets set up at the end of the day. Like, is that required? You can actually use this product without having any Ring devices, and you can use the Key by Amazon app. Yeah. So it's almost like it's an afterthought.

I wonder. Yeah. I wonder. I know that Ring has been pretty consistent in their efforts to continue making more products that are better for the professional market. And I know that access control, this sort of a product, is certainly something that in the professional market will be welcome. So, I don't know, my bet, if I had to bet, was that this was kind of more pushed from the ring side of the team, and adding key in there was just a thing of convenience.

But who knows? Yeah, the instructions. As a good geek, I'll go look at the instructions, right? The install instructions are very strange. It says it operates four doors or four gates. If you go look at the connections that they have, there's like two RFID card reader connections on there. So possibly could use it for learning in cards or something like that. So it's very strange. What they have on their website right now is very strange as far as instruction goes. I suspect once this starts getting out in the hands of people,

it'll probably be more evident as to what it actually does. But kind of weird. Amazon's pushing their pro install service is pretty heavy for installation and recommending a pro install, install this thing because it's, you know, it's kind of, uh, it's kind of, kind of tricky. It's not too tricky, but it's kind of tricky to put, put these things in. So, um, I do like the fact that this has like cellular on it, right? So like you can put can put um this out at that gate 300 feet away from the front door of the house and have it hooked up there without any running any new wires out to it and you get like i think it runs off at&t or something like that um i want to say it was included uh when i was looking that up so but i do like that it's got cellular built into it for $299 pretty nice

oh it's very nice looks like amazon is also pushing the pro install services so that makes sense this is not um probably going to be the type of thing that uh a lot of people are going to do with themselves unless they're really in you know if you're into it it's not that hard to do yeah but your but your typical uh target market for this sort of thing from from amazon's perspective and ring's perspective isn't isn't going to do diy so that makes sense right yeah this is this is the only edge of what most pro installers i know are comfortable with they always hated getting out there and doing the gate integrations like i never thought it was that hard uh to go find where the relay inputs were on the the gate integrations. I never thought it was that hard to go find where the relay inputs were on the gate

and hook them up. But when you're working on the job site, the CI, the custom integrator, is never the one that's putting in the gate. It's always the gate company. And you're always hesitant to deal with other people's equipment. You don't want to get in there

and put a screwdriver through a board and mess it up. So I understand that, being hesitant to do anything. But if you know what you're doing, this is a relatively easy install to do. They're also getting in on the smart lighting game, Ring is. They have some Alexa-enabled LED light bulbs, which can be remotely activated through their app. You'll also be able to do the basic stuff like remote activation, brightness adjustment, plus you'll be able to turn them on if a camera detects motion,

which I use that. I think that's pretty cool. Between two Ring devices I have at my house. There's no pricing on these, but it'll be on Amazon Ring and Home Depot April 1st. Very cool. And they also announced a bunch of new outdoor solar solar lighting i think we touched on this earlier uh solar floodlight solar step light solar path light uh there's no word on those but they'll go on so later this year so they are not slowing down yeah they uh ring is definitely um you know you can see you you can see the the the sort of manifestation of Amazon's smart home strategy to the extent that there is one, anything like that from Amazon. In Ring, though, really Ring is becoming the embodiment of that. And money.

And lots of money, right? I mean, that's what having the resources of a company like Amazon behind you will do. So it's cool. I like what they're doing. I mean, every product that I've seen come from Ring over the last couple of years has felt like a very logical, linear sort of progression. And they're just steadily coming out with more and more and really have a, nicely rounded offering now. Yeah. They also came out with a security dashboard type thing, uh, either built into their app or that will be available soon where you can kind of like make sure your account is secured and locked down. Um, talked about a lot of the

ring things last week, uh, when I put out the show kind of like right at the beginning of the year. So like, I'm not going to go into that. If you want to hear what happened, go back and listen to that. But, um, they're doing something're doing something so you know whatever helps you understand how locked down or unlocked down your account is uh the better it shouldn't be confusing to set these things up it should be easy uh to set them up and secure them so glad they're doing that uh another thing for custom integrators out there that they're going to be doing which i thought was pretty cool kind of announced in the midst of all this but gets lost in the shuffle because this is a consumer electronic show, is the Ring X line. X line is a bundle of existing devices and services designed with the professional installer in mind. They're going to

be competitively pricing them so the customer installer can get them and be able to sell them alongside Amazon and everything else. But these will come with the ring protect basic plan for the lifetime of the vice, along with a three year warranty, which is better than I think the one year warranty you get. And I, I've heard that you get access to like support for warranty and all that stuff,

like a special support number that you can call. And that program and the X line is expected to launch March, 2020 in the United States and Canada. So good for them. We've heard about them trying to reach out to the professional installer and vertical, I guess, and get in and start helping them out a little bit more. And this is step one. Yep. Step one is getting a product line that a professional installer can

get and, and, and put together and, and make a little bit of money on it at the same time. Yeah. No, it's, it's really interesting and it's good to see. It's good to see Ring continue to move in that direction. I think it's to the benefit of everybody. I think that Ring as a company seems to know that, that, um, DIY isn't going to be the be-all, end-all, and that there's always going to be a segment of the market, both for technological reasons, like more sophisticated installations, as well as simply a segment of the market of people who just don't want to do it themselves. And so for them to continue developing and doing their best to bridge that gap,

which is not easy for manufacturers. I mean, there's not a ton of margin and room to give away product margin here. So, you know, anything they can do to help the pros make money, we're in this to make money at the end of the day, anything that they can do is good. So happy to see that. Yep. I thought it was a pretty good plan. I'm curious to see what it looks like in a year or two, but I'm glad to see that they're

making some strides and efforts with it because you got to start somewhere and this is somewhere. Right. Cool. Well, that'll do it for our CES and news this week. All the links and topics that we've discussed on the episode here can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 286.

While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll send you weekly 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 286. And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday, starting sometime between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more about that at hometech.fm slash live. And now that I'm reading that out, I think I forgot to start the chat room up

other than the Slack side of it. I forgot to do the link. So sorry about that. If you're listening live, I'll get that going here. You need a robot, Seth. It should be automated, right? All right, well, let's move on here. Pick of the week this week we've got uh pretty slick redesign

of uh of the home app i think seth you you uncovered this one i'll let you i'll let you dive in yeah this is this is really cool a lot of times uh designers will kind of put together a project or take on a project um to show their skills. And this one, Seven Ahang or something like that, has redesigned the whole map. It looks like he's been working on these concepts for a while, and this is kind of like the big project that he kind of put together for himself at the end. He put all this online. It's really fun to go look at this and just kind of see what uh the idea is uh the idea is that he's kind of captured behind all this of what a the home app the apple home kit app could look like as a

dashboard for controlling various uh various smart home devices um including some devices i don't think it controls currently like the google home but maybe it. I don't know. But he's got a bunch of different mock-ups and screenshots and ideas and icons and things that look really good. So I definitely love this kind of stuff. Love the design of this. What's neat about this is I don't think, aside from things that are like on the Apple level that he kind of has put in here, there's not much other than talent and effort that would stop somebody from actually putting together an app like this for HomeKit. The way HomeKit's designed, it's just kind of reading off a common database of values. And any developer could come along, just whip something up like this. I say whip this up. This is a ton of work. But put something together and make a HomeKit app that exposes a lot of these elements. So

of course, you wouldn't get access to like the dashboard stuff or, you know, the stuff that pops up on the home screen. But like, this is something and I think this is a, this is a really good example of what Apple could do with their interface. If it, you know, if it was a dictator, you can look at the home kit app and he's like, yeah, this was designed by committee. Like this is, this is like, they had to do this. So they did this this way and um they're just trying to you know do what they can for the most broad uh people the broad-based installation

which i think for the most part they've nailed that like it's a super easy app to use and i'm i'm it's fast it works so uh i don't i can't complain about the Apple HomeKit app, but I would like to see some of these elements brought into it because I think this is a pretty cool idea. Yeah, good find and a good share. Definitely go check that out. Again, hometech.fm slash 286 if you are into good design. I always respect good design anything anything graphics or anything like that is so so far out of my circle of confidence it is like not something

that i've ever been good at or inclined to try my hand at in any meaningful way but when i see cool you know this is like it it's just a sleek, really modern interface. And I definitely appreciate that. So good find. Again, we'll have that in the show notes, hometech.fm slash 286. If you've got any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, ideas for a show topic or guest, give us a shout. Our email is feedback at hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out our online form.

And we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show by listening, 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 and you can learn how you can support Home Tech

for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over $5 a month gets you a big shout-out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat at the Hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for the Inside Baseball conversations about CES. I mean, that's what we're talking about, right? Cesspool. The cesspool, right?

That's right. Yeah, and if you're looking for other ways to support the show, we would really appreciate if you took a few minutes to leave us a review on iTunes or your podcast app of choice. Those reviews definitely help other people find the show. So give us those five stars. That's what we're aiming for. We'd love to have you take a minute to do that and and help spread the good word. And Home Tech is a member of the technology.fm collective podcast. 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 this week. Happy New Year again.

Happy New Year. Glad to be back in the saddle here. Absolutely. I'm going to go buy this $10,000 drone to protect my family from the fox. I got an alert while we're sitting here from the Ring app, you know, the little neighbors thing that they have. Somebody said, I think we have a fox in the neighborhood. And I was expecting something else, but I watched the video, and there was a fox that walked about a mile away from my house,

walked around through the guy's thing. I've never even seen a fox, never even knew they existed around here, but it looked like a fox. You need a drone with lasers. Yeah. I've got to have this $10,000 drone. It'll sit out there, make beautiful sounds all night, probably wake up my daughter. Soothing.

And yeah. That's right. Go back to sleep, honey. It's got a search light on it. It's outside just roaming around. Shining in her window. Yeah. That's funny. yeah so i'm gonna go check this uh drone thing out and see see what i can do i it would be

interesting if somebody comes up with like a competing product for this because this seems so absurd like it does 10 000 somebody's gonna come out with like we made a five thousand dollar drone what are you gonna do what are you gonna Security drone. Start the race to zero. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right, Seth, well, have a great weekend and look forward to connecting with you again next week. All right. Have a good weekend and I'll talk to you next week. All right. Take care.