HomeTech.fm - Episode 348 - More Remote News

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

This week on HomeTech: Apple's big event lands us with a new AppleTV and remote, Roku and Disney up their streaming game, is Amazon forcing Ecobee to fork over user data, and Nortek sells off Broan and Nutone... All this and of course, the pick of the week.

Oh man, here we go, here we go, here we go. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 23rd, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson, and welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, especially around the home, home automation, all that good stuff. We're having a good time over there at Home Tech Talks. If you haven't been able to join us, please consider checking it out. It's actually a really good time. Keep an eye out for that if you're in the patron feed.

I think I send emails out on that, and I've been sending the videos out too. This week, I think it looks like we're going to talk about RGB lighting. So if you're curious about RGB lighting, how it's done, DMX control, all that good stuff, might be a good time to join or check it out. One thing I'm going to do is put that into the feed for the, like, there's a way I can put it like a patron feed in there. So like those, like I can make a podcast out of it, like a separate podcast, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, I don't know. We'll have to see how that works. But there's a way I can do it. And I should be able to figure out the tech technology behind it and post that kind of around the same time I'm able to post the video. Because I've got the video, I've got the audio. I can post that in the patron feed as well. So should keep it, keep an eye on how that's done. Uh, home tech talks. If you, if you're a patron head over, if you're not a patron head over to home tech.fm slash support, go to the Patreon page,

which is home tech.fm. No, no, I'm sorry. It's patreon.com slash home tech. Yeah. That'll get you there and it gets you into the patron feed and you can log in and check out all that good stuff there. So a bunch of news this week. Amazon, Apple, Roku, Disney, kind of the main main characters that we always follow. Not much coming out of our industry, like not not out of the main industry. But I suspect everybody is not saying much right now with the shortages and equipment shortages and supply shortages. But, you know, there's CDIs in September, and maybe we'll have some news that floats around that time frame. I know that Control 4 has historically done stuff around mid to the end of May somewhere.

Like, remember in the past, we've had a couple of big announcements. So here in about a month, we might see a little bit more of that from Control 4. But yeah, industry's been pretty quiet. But got a bunch of news this week outside of it and kind of things lining up for the future. So let's check it out. Let's jump into some home tech headlines. All right. Well, this should be fun.

Nortec. How do we start with this? This is crazy. All right. Well, let's see. Nortec sold Brone, Newtone to Madison Industries. But it's kind of stranger than that because it's not like Nortec. It's not Nortec.

It's like Melrose. Melrose owns, well, they don't own Nortec. Nortec is just a brand that's over all this stuff. So there's a company called Nortec Air Solutions, and then there's Nortec Control, which is what we all know. Like, those are all the big brands and everything. So like Elan, Speakercraft, Sunfire, Zantac, 2GIG, all that stuff is brought under Nortec Control. Kind of all the old, like, core brand stuff used to be there too,

and they merged a couple of years back into being Nortec Control or NCS, I think is their called. So yeah, it's not that company. It's a different company back over on the other side, the sister company, Nortec Air Solutions, which is like a part of Nortec HVAC Global. And they have another subsidiary of them called Nortec Air Quality and Home Solutions. They are actually the ones that own Brone and Newtone, which sold to Madison Industries. You know, I forget all about this. We'll just call it like it is. $3.6 billion in fart fans have been sold

to Madison Industries. Congrats, guys. You have the fart fan company. And I'm proud of you. That's how I'm starting off the show. I don't care. That's great. Good deal. Good deal. I'm happy that's going on. That's the industry news we have there. There you go. Oh, man. All right. So according to a report from the Wall Street

Journal, Amazon tried to use its power to coerce Ecobee into using its smart home products to collect user data by threatening Ecobee's ability to sell its products on Amazon. According to the report, the online retail giant asked Ecobee to share data from its products on amazon according to the report the online retail giant asked ecobee to share data from its alexa enabled smart thermostats even when the customer wasn't actively using the voice assistant that's not cool ecobee reportedly refused to have its device constantly report back to amazon about the state of the user's home, including data on which doors were locked or unlocked and the set temperature. The reasoning being that enabling the devices to report this data back to Amazon would be in violation of its own customers' trust. Ecobee may have also been

concerned about Amazon collecting all that data to build competing products, which they've done that in the past. They have a reputation for taking non-public sales data and running that through their own processes to develop new products and services through their, you know, they have that Amazon Basics brand where they sell just about everything under the sun there. As of now, Ecobee's products are still available to be purchased on Amazon, but the Wall Street Journal claims that negotiations between Ecobee and Amazon are ongoing. I really wonder what this is. I want to

say I was listening back to one of Richard and Adam's show, the Smart Home show. And I want to say that Adam was talking about one of the things that Amazon does and Google does is they ask for this data to be reported into the system so that the Alexa system or the Google system or whatever could understand or hold on to what we call state. So is the light on or off? And what that helps with is when you open up your app, you see instantly what the state of the light is at your house. Now, the other way of doing that is

to go out and ask that device, what is your state? Are you on or off? That kind of thing. And that's a lot slower of a process. So what I know a lot of these companies were doing, and this is a little while back, was they were asking people to report or developers to report that data up into those skills and report that data in. So I wonder if it was something along those lines. And you could be said, yeah, no, thanks, especially what's weird is that the customers not actively using the voice assistant. Well, I don't know if you've got the Alexa thing turned on. I think they were wanting that data anyway. So I don't know, it would make sense in that respect, like from a development point of view and from one of those

skill set point of views. But it doesn't make much sense for like, I just have the Ecobee on the wall and yeah, it's got the Alexa thing built into it, but like it doesn't need to report to Amazon what's going on all the time. So it would be understandable why Ecobee would hold out. Their reputation would be much more damaged by the press than Amazon, clearly. Because if you think about this story here and just simply flip the names, right? Like, say it was the other way around. I think every tech outlet would be dragging Ecobee through the mud for her wanting all this data.

And Amazon would have free pass, you know, and clearly, you know, it's hitting the Wall Street Journal, but I don't, I didn't really hear much about this story reported anywhere else in the news. You know, it's kind of got a one here, a little, a little right up here at the verge, but that's about it. Like, it seems like it's one of these things that, that if it was the other way around, it was a smaller company like Eaglebee. I mean, they would be, people on Reddit would just be losing their minds. It would just be absolutely going crazy. So I don't know, kind of, kind of one of those things to think about. I can understand why Eaglebee would want to stay away from that if they could and not report all that data back up to the, uh, the mothership in the cloud there.

So we'll have to see how it plays out. If the Ecobee thermostats and everything disappear from Amazon, we'll know what happened. Yeah, Richard is reporting, and kind of what I was thinking, sensationalist. Yes, this is how the ecosystem works. And that's what I was thinking too. That's what I was kind of running in my head. Like, this seems like this is how it works, but I wonder what the negotiations are here. Like why, why this is coming up now? Because this seems like it's an older story to me. Like, you know, this is, like you said,

this is how the ecosystem works. This is what they were wanting those developers to update to in the past. So yeah, we'll have to see how this plays out. If Ecobee is holding out for leverage on Amazon, which that's kind of interesting. They are. Roku is officially getting into the original content.

The set-top box maker announced Roku Originals, a new brand, press release today. Roku says it will debut over 75 original series and films this year on its free ad-supported network, the Roku channel. And while quite a few of these original shows will come from the Quibi library of Roku, not all of them are.

So they're actually going to be making their own original content, which is kind of cool. So you think about original content, you think about the Disney and the Marvel stuff that they're doing, you think about Netflix originals. Roku's in that game now. So with the Quibi content library, obviously that stuff will probably air first

because it was probably in the production pipeline before Roku did all this stuff. So you'll probably see the Quibi content air before any Roku stuff goes out. And I think it'd be interesting to see how that works because Quibi was, you know, Quibi had that gimmick, that thing that they were doing where you could watch the content in horizontal mode, like landscape mode with your phone.

But if you turned your phone into portrait mode, you could get a different perspective or a different feed altogether. Like there was one show called The Nest that had like if you watch it in landscape mode, you get the point of view of the main character. But if you turn into portrait mode, you get like the view of the security cameras that are in the home that the character was in. So a pretty interesting concept. And I can think it's like as a creative, the creative people behind that probably want to see that still exist, but you can't turn your TV on its side easily. So it'd be interesting to see how they do that. All the new Roku originals will air on the Roku channel alongside all the episodes of this old house and over 40,000 free movies and TV shows

that Roku has already paid to license. So pretty good deal there if you have a Roku. Moving on here. Streaming news as well. Disney and Sony Pictures. What's funny, the graphic that I have there up on the screen, Spider-Man Into the Disney-verse, I had the same graphic last week. It just said Netflix-verse. But Disney and Sony Pictures have signed a multi-year content licensing agreement that

will bring new Sony theatrical releases, starting with its 2022 films, to Disney-owned platforms. So basically how this deal works is new sony films will hit the theaters first all right then they'll go to paid rentals and purchases just kind of how it normally works in the before times right then they go to netflix because this is the agreement that we talked about last week that netflix signed and inked for a billion dollars. Dun-dun-dun, yeah. And then finally, after all that, it heads over to the Disney platforms, including, possibly including Disney Plus. And Hulu's in there too, so think about that.

Disney owns Hulu as well. So quite a bit of streaming news and Sony not having their own platform. These are the kind of deals that they're making to get their content out into these main streamers here. So getting their content out to Netflix and Disney in an orderly fashion. Like, I don't know if it... Disney looks like they're setting this up for the long term.

They want to be like the Disney vault, right? They want to have all of the older videos and everything in there for everything. Netflix just kind of wants to have that rotating list of things to suggest for you at the top, it looks like. So we'll see which one people like and which people like more. I like a bit of the mix,

but I will say that this actually caught us. My wife and I were both watching all the Marvel movies. I kind of, kind of turned on Iron Man one day and just started watching it. And, and she came in and she's like, Oh, you're watching Iron Man. Like that's a really old, it's a really old movie at this point. Like, yeah, I haven't seen this one in a long time. It's a fun movie. And we thought, why don't we just try and watch all the Marvel movies like back to back in, in release order, so to speak. And we got, why don't we just try and watch all the Marvel movies, like back to back in release order, so to speak. And we got further along and we're like, wait, where did Spider-Man come from? Like Spider-Man just came out of nowhere.

The Tom Holland Spider-Man. I remember there was two Spider-Man movies, but they weren't on Disney Plus. They didn't exist in the Marvel tab. And they should. But since it was done through the Sony Production Studios and Spider-Man was owned by Sony, they weren't there. Now they will be, which will be great. I won't have to go out and find those other streaming services. And I can just go for one-stop shopping.

So good for Disney, good for Netflix, good for us. Good for everybody paying for these services. All right. Big news this week in our standard segment, the remote news, because it's all the same we've been talking about. But Apple had a pretty big spring event on Tuesday and they announced a number of new things. So let's kind of like drop into the high level. I'm just going to add on some bullet points that I wrote down and notes that I took on this. They launched with Apple family, Apple card family. So it allows people to co-own an Apple Card, which I mean, that's good.

That's good. I can see how that's like a good thing for Apple and good thing for people trying to get credit and that kind of thing. So yeah, good. Apple Podcasts, kind of a huge update to the Apple app, including paid subscriptions for premium content. Go see how that shakes out. There's already some noise just glancing at the newsfeeds today about, uh, Apple taking out the URLs on the, their API for, you know, the external URLs for, um, external podcast players to, to, when, when they go through and, and look at the library that Apple, Apple has hosted for what, 10, 15 years 15 years now, the external feeds aren't provided in that API anymore, which is basically going to, you know,

knock the knees out from underneath all the third-party podcast apps. You know, they won't be able to get access to the content that's there on Apple Podcasts. Now, I did see that there could, that could be a setting and for, you know, podcast, uh, podcast owners, I guess, what is, what are they called? Podcast studio. I don't even know what it is. Me, I would have to turn that on. So it, it may be a setting that I just need to go in and turn on, but you know, to me, hopefully

to me that that would be checked off by default. Cause I don't use the Apple podcast app, I use Overcast, or, you know, something else, because it has a bunch of features that I like better. But, you know, podcasts, people like them, people listen to them, evidently. And Apple is updating what they're doing in that in that realm. So hopefully, that turns that turns out to be a good thing for podcasting. I really hope it does because this is a fun hobby and I hate to see people kind of turned away or not able to find what they're looking for in the world of podcasting because there's a ton of content out there

and there's a lot of great stuff for everyone to listen to. The iPhone 12 now comes in purple. So if you're looking for a purple phone, Apple now has one. The eye tags were finally launched. They look nice. Nice little like quarter silver things that you can engrave with emoji. Decent pricing, $29 each or $99 for a four pack.

It's not the cheapest finder. I think Tile has like some sticker things that you can get four for 60 or something like that, but, um, bundled up in the Apple ecosystem for four for $25, basically. I, uh, I don't see it. I, they're pretty compelling. I mean, the find my, find my ecosystem is great. And there are millions and millions of iPhones that are going to interact with this. Um, all features that they've, they've put in, they're hammering hard on, because I think right now they're kind of the only company that has doing that, or at least promoting it. So would suspect that Tile will kind of, kind of step up to the plate and introduce some features like that in as well. But I don't know. Remains to be seen. I think these are,

these are a pretty good deal and I'll probably pick up a four pack or maybe two four packs and tag things that I always lose. Actually, what I need them on are these AirPods. So like these little AirPod things, I've lost two of those during the pandemic. How that happens, I don't know, but I can't find them. One of them is the expensive one too. Now, I think I've lost my third pair, which is the AirPod Pro. I don't know where that thing is. This is an old pair that I happened to find in a backpack that I hadn't used for a year. So there you go. There you go. New iMacs also come in colors and they had rocked the new M1 chip

which is awesome updated 1080p FaceTime camera on the front of that thing so you can get some decent zoom video and I think we're going to see a lot of effort being put into new like work from home technologies you know there's a whole new reason

to have decent computers and decent cameras and decent video conferencing stuff at home now so I was glad to see that new iPad Pros get the M1 chip as well. It's kind of huge. I wish I could justify purchasing one of those things because they look amazing. And the big news for us is there's a new Apple TV 4K. So same name, same branding, new remote, right? SpecSheet says there's a thread radio built in so get on talk

about a little bit about that more later um hdmi 2.1 as the rumors said uh a12 bionic chip will drive hdr content at 60 hertz so not 120 like the rumors were saying, but 60 Hertz is better than what it was doing before. Uh, so that'll be great for that. Uh, and I, you know, kind of thinking of thinking about it through, it's like the hardware is there for it for 120, I guess, but iPhones are only filming HDR video in 60 Hertz. So there's probably no reason for them to update that until the phones can do 120. So if you see the phones do 120, I suspect there's not, there's going to be an Apple TV update after that. Um, they had a little conversation in the, in the hub, like why I think Greg was actually asking, why do you need, uh,

120? Uh, what, what, what's so special about that? And 120 is pretty, uh, pretty good for a couple of reasons. Uh, one, it, One, it really messes with your mind. So when you see 120 HDR, it's going to show, it's going to look like you're there, like you're standing there. And it's further along, it's more, the human mind can't pick up anything that high. So it's further specs than the human mind can't pick up anything that high. So it's further specs than the human mind can process. So it really does trick your mind and do all sorts of messing with your mind to make things look like they're actually in front of you.

This goes back to when we were watching interlaced stuff and we moved into HD progressive and you're like, oh yeah, it looks a lot clearer. You're like, yeah, well, you're a lot clearer. Like, yeah, well, you're not looking at interlaced. You're looking at progressive. It's the entire frame is on screen, not just every other line.

So I think this is going to be a jump a little, you know, in that direction that you'll definitely be able to notice whenever it does get there. 120 also divides by a number of important numbers, like 60, 30 and and 24, all evenly.

So you can actually film in 120 if you wanted to, and then you can publish it in those frame rates without having weird artifacts. Like the math is even, so you don't have strange frame rates. Like if anybody remembers the 3-2 pull-down dance that DVD players used to have to do, artifacts. Like the math is even, so you don't have strange frame rates. Uh, like, you know, if anybody remembers the three, two pull down dance that DVD players used to have to do, um, to put content on TV screens, like things won't look jittery. You know, the, you can, you can fake the motion blur with even math. You can't do it with odd. So, um, it's, it's good. It'll be a good thing and we'll eventually get there. Um, but from what I understand,

TVs are flaky on that one 20 as well. So, you know, maybe it's just not time right now. Maybe when the specs on TVs and there's more content available right now, there's no pipeline for filming in 120. So it's one of those things. The content has to arrive first. I think we'll see it. New remote. Now, this is great. I'm going to buy one of these because you can buy them standalone for $59 and you can use them with the previous generation of Apple TV 4K and the Apple TV HD. I think I've got one of each of those. It's got the touchpad is gone. So the ugly, the horrible remote that this thing is here, hold it up. The touchpad is gone. So the ugly, the horrible remote that this thing is, here, hold it up. The touchpad's gone and they've replaced it

with like a five-way rosette. I always called them Rosetta style control. And it's got some touch sensitivity to it as well. And there's also a scroll wheel, a touch sensitive scroll wheel around the edges. So it's almost like, this remote is almost like the old, um, front row remote. I don't know if anybody, you probably remember those as little like gum, little, little gum sized

remotes that came with the original Apple TV and this horrible remote, like had a baby. And that's, this is the offspring of it. So it's, it's got, I think what is the best of both worlds. I don't know. It depends on how much you like the touch, the touch remote. So it's, it's got, I think what is the best of both worlds. I don't know. It depends on how much you like the touch, the touch remote. Um, I, I didn't mind having that touch wheel or touch pad on there very much. Um, but the buttons were horrible. Picking up the remote to use it was awful. I did get this little silicone case and I, so it's a El Lago, E-L-A-G-O. Um, Jason and I both bought these when they came out. They've got magnets on them so I can stick them underneath the desk here when it, when it needs to get out

of the way. And I always know where it is because it's under the desk and it's easy to grip with this thing. It remains to be seen if I'm going to need anything like that for the, for this new remote. But it has a number of things that I, that I just automatically just out of the box look better. First of all, when you pick this up and you're not looking at it, you're going to be able to tell that, you know, what in is up with the origin, this other remote, like out of the silicone case, the touchpad felt just like the bottom of the remote. Like you can't really tell. And the buttons were directly in the middle. You couldn't see in the dark what this thing was supposed to do. So it was a very difficult remote to use. They tried to update that and put a little like white circle around one of the buttons once. Just never worked out right. And the Siri button has

been moved to the side on the new remote. So that's great because I was always tired of just randomly mashing on the Siri button. And in its place, guess what we got? A mute button. Oh my God. It's like somebody designed this remote who actually watches TV because what do you need when you're watching TV? You need a mute button. Great. Smart. There's also a power button on there that's new. Uh, that lets you turn on and off the TV. Uh, this is a huge improvement overall. Like I said, $59. It's a no brainer. I'm probably going to buy one for the garage Apple TV that I use out here when I'm watching TV in the garage. No real reason, since it's on like a 720p projector, there's no real reason for me to buy one of these 4K Apple TVs, which they are still going to be selling in two flavors.

So they've got the 32 gigabit version and for, sorry, the 32 gigabit is for 179 and the 64 gigabit is for $200. I have no idea why anyone would buy the 64 gigabit and spend the extra $20. I have no idea why. Usually there's a compelling reason for that. And like, if you look at their computers, there's the base model. And then there's like the one step up that's usually probably about $200 more. There's always a good reason to buy that, that step up on the computers, because there's some part or piece that's unupgradable. But I still do not know why they need to have 32 and 64 gigabit flavors on this, gigabyte flavors on this. It doesn't make any sense to me. Somebody in our chat was saying that if you're playing games on it a lot, the saved data from those games can build up

over time. But that seems like, that seems like an Apple problem, not a me problem, right? Like they already do this with the phone. Like I have like 300 apps on my phone. I use like seven. So the ones that I don't use very much are like offloaded. And the other day I went to load one of them on and it, you know, it says, well, you have to wait. I've got to download this app in the background. And when I'm done, then you can run it. And so I had to sit around and wait for the app to get downloaded, installed, and I run it and my user data is all there. But like, it just seems like that's an Apple problem to solve, not a $20 problem. Why not just have one SKU of these things and just roll with it?

So, and the biggest feature, I think, I think this is the biggest feature. Maybe it's the second biggest feature because the remote is, is pretty good. These new Apple, the new Apple TV 4k will have a calibration built into it. So you can use your iPhone and I got a picture of this thing. I think, yeah, there he goes. The, you can, you can use your iPhone to, and you hold it up to a spot on the TV and the TV will output colors and brightness levels and that kind of thing. Um, the iPhone will use the front facing camera to tell the Apple TV how to optimize the output. That's great. This, this is amazing. Um, and you know, it has a couple of downsides. Like if you adjust the color settings on your TV, then you've got to go rerun this little color balance thing that

they're going to be putting in as well. But if you're like me, I suspect most people who are using these types of streaming devices, this has become the input one. You're not really changing off of that input very much. And when you are on that input, you're watching movies. So this is going to be great for doing that. Um, when you switch to it, the Apple TV has optimized its output for your TV and, and, and for your room. Um, and I think this is huge. This is something that we always talked about inside the industry is calibration and how important that is. And every time I turn on a TV, I actually break out that THX app that you can download from the Apple TV and kind of just run through the basics on it. It's just basically color balance and that kind of thing. There's a fight now inside the chat. Greg is saying no one adjusts

the color on their TV. And then, of course, Eddie is saying, yeah, we do. So yeah, I mean, I think every TV I put in, I always grabbed, just at minimum, grabbed the little THX app and put that up on the screen. And yeah, you're right. That's why we're here as an industry. That's true. Um, I walked, I walked into someone's house today and saw that, um, the auto motion plus was turned on on their Samsung. And I was just like, I can't, I can't, I can't deal with this. Why, why, why, why is this like this? This unfortunately is not going to fix the, the, the picture smoothing that Samsung tries to do. So to go on from that, but yeah.

Speaking of, the Thread Radio is built in there, and I want to mention this article that Stacey Higginbotham has written over on her Stacey on IoT website. She had a few interesting updates about Project Chip, which is a connected home over IP project that all 180 member companies actually are all behind now. But they had a virtual event on Tuesday, members from Apple, Samsung SmartThings, Tuya, which is actually a huge company. You really realize how many people actually use Tuya until you start getting requests for drivers from companies that are all using Tuya as the back end.

Comcast, Google, and more shared a few details about the new standard and how it would handle networking device models, how existing gear would be integrated into the system security, and what device types we'd be expected to see certified first. So kind of just kind of pulling from the article here, a couple of a couple of bullet points, 180 member companies, so it's up 10 from what we heard last. The standard will use Bluetooth low energy for device provisioning, but it sounds like that's not required. I don't know, it sounds like you have a number of different ways of doing this, but there's, because there's nothing set in stone about the provisioning process. And I suspect the reason behind that is every company is probably going to approach this differently on how to get things set up, but it'll all be kind of under the same standard. So if you buy, say a smart light

bulb from Amazon, you can bring it into your HomeKit environment. But if you got tired of using HomeKit one day, you can want to just switch over to environment. But if you got tired of using HomeKit one day, you wanted to switch over to Amazon, you wouldn't have to go buy new Amazon bulbs. You could just use the same chip bulb and go through the provisioning process with Amazon and get it set up that way. Device types we're going to see first, lighting, blinds, HVACs, TVs, access control, safety and security products like security systems, access points, smart home controllers and bridges. That's going to be first.

And the topology of it, she's got a little picture on the website, like a screen grab of one of their slides. It looks just like Zigbee. And that's because Thread is kind of like pretty much Zigbee. It's like if you're familiar with Zigbee and how that lays out, so you've got the device, it goes to a Zigbee bridge essentially, or Thread bridge in this case, plugs into Ethernet or Wi-Fi, goes out to the cloud and does its talking that way.

Yeah, it's a ZigBee network. On the device side, it can mesh with other devices and talk. It's ZigBee through and through. So there's really nothing special there, and I don't really see anything wrong with that. Like it's, it's just kind of a rebadged Zigbee looking network at this point, um, with some sprinkle, sprinkled magic on top, which I guess all Zigbee was at that point. Um, older devices could gain chip support with a bridging device. So if, if a company wanted to, um, they, if, if somebody wanted to,

they could plug in a, um, a bridge that could talk to older devices, uh, and that bridge would have a chip certification. And it looks like security is going to be baked in with AES 120 bit encryption. So that's pretty good. That's going to encrypted again. None of this is new. If you've been dealing with Zigbee for any amount of time, all this is like, okay, well that's okay. It's Zigbee again. Um, what is interesting here? Here's another, um, here's another, uh, is a quote from a Comcast employee that says chips will use blockchain technology to authenticate and devices compliance. Um, so anyone, here's a quote here from the article, anyone can read a product ID and a vendor ID on the device and check if it exists in what he called the chip compliance

ledger. And so this means that manufacturers can update the metadata about a device, such as an updated URL where the new firmware updates might be found. And this ledger would let anyone read it and figure out if that device is certified and has implemented the necessary security updates. So this could be pretty interesting. We always think of this blockchain thing as cryptocurrency or whatever, but the technology behind it is very, very, very much more basic. Like it's just basically a database. Like you say, blockchain, it just means database. Um,

and what's, what's nice about that database is that it can be distributed out. So other, other companies can kind of hold that database and And it's basically hashed. Each one of them is kept up with a mirror copy of each one of them. So one doesn't get behind the other. And if it does, it's fairly obvious that it does. So this actually might be an interesting update to this. This kind of seems like a frill, like one of the things that's not really needed, but an interesting way to work around something like this, the security updates that don't take place on some of these

devices a lot of the times. And I, oh man, I listened to a lot of security podcasts and there's always something going on, um, with even super low level, super low level, like firmware can, can, they can find vulnerabilities from that. And it's like, well, these devices have been produced for the last 20 years using this firmware. It's not like they can go back and burn new firmware into these devices. So it will be interesting to see how this works in, in the long run. It looks like there's still a lot, according to this article, it looks like there's still a lot of work to do, but I think there's a lot of wind behind this arrow and it's going to be up to these companies to launch it right and make sure that

everything's working now and into the future. I've got a lot of experience with Zigbee. So I don't think there's any problem with the technology they mentioned other than the weird, you know, blockchain thing, which just could be, like I said, layered on top, just a frill. You know, I've dealt with Control 4. There's a lot of people here that have dealt with Crestron. Most every professional company was already using Zigbee. So, I mean, it's a great product. I think the technology has been fleshed out.

So it's all going to boil down to onboarding and quality of devices and how many compelling devices are out there for people to buy. And if people buy them, like that's, that's what all this is going to come down to. Um, but it seems like there's still a lot going on and no one has angrily stormed away from the table, you know, like Amazon hasn't picked up their chips and gone home. Uh, but I don't know, like, it seems like there's, it seems like a good thing. And I'm, I'm just going to say optimistic on this one. When they first announced this, I got to admit it's, it's one more standard, you know, to talk about, but, uh, yeah, I, I don't, I wasn't too bullish on it now. I, I guess, um, I guess I will keep, keep appraised of it and just keep an eye out

and see what's going on into the future here. So start with this. All the links and topics that we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 348. And if you want to join us live in the chat room, like Eddie and Richard and Greg are over here, still talking about the TVs, it looks like. The TV balancing. you can join his life

starting in starting on wednesdays somewhere between 7 and 7 30 p.m eastern a little bit later tonight but had some stuff going on had to bump it back you can find out more on how to do that at hometech.fm slash live all right anybody knows me knows me this, this was going to be a shoe in for the pick of the week. Yes. Yes. It is the Mars helicopter. I couldn't, I couldn't pass this up a little ingenuity helicopter, um, as it takes off. Uh, so perseverance Rover landed. I think that was also a pick of the week. Uh, then the it drops off this little helicopter, essentially a little drone on its way to do more fun things, science. And it turns around about a football field away or so

and takes this video. Look at it, just hopped up in the air, hops down. They're gonna do a couple more of these flights just to see how it works. And I think the batteries on this thing die off. Like it has a solar panel to keep things going. Um, but I think the batteries on it will die and, uh, it, it's just going to sit there in the Martian desert, uh, for, uh, future aliens to find, I suppose. But, uh, yeah, this is really cool. There was even a photo of its shadow that like, that it, that when it was looking down, it took a picture of. So

hopefully we'll see more of these little videos. I think this is great. This is automation to the extreme. Like I've said before, it's on a different planet. They're, they're flying a little rover. They're driving a rover around and they're flying a, it's on a different planet. They're flying a little rover. They're driving a rover around and they're flying a little drone around on a different planet. Just absolutely amazing. Absolutely amazing.

So blown away by that. And like I said, hopefully we'll see, get a little bit more and see a little bit more out of that in the future. If you have any feedback, comments, questions, picks of the week, or any great ideas for the show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm,

or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. And I 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 that, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day to talk about, it looks like RGB is going to be a big topic. There's a lot of votes

on that one. So we're going to pick up the, we're going to pick up the conversation in the Home Tech Talks, which everybody gets an invite to at every pledge level. And after that, we'll probably be discussing it there in the hub. So if you want to help out with the show but can't support financially, we totally understand that. But appreciate a five-star review in iTunes, as long as it's open and free for everybody to use. I don't know.

Really hoping that doesn't go away. And, uh, or positive rating in the awesome podcast app of your choice. I use, like I said, I've used overcast and use last cast all great. I'm not a big fan of the Apple podcast app, but I don't know. We'll have to see what they do in the future. And with that, I want to thank everybody for joining us over there in the live chat. Thanks for joining for the show and keeping me entertained, trying to keep an eye on the chat feed as it goes by. A little bit difficult there, but thanks everybody for joining us this week. And we will talk to you next week. Have a good one.