HomeTech.fm - Episode 349 - Blue Sign of the Times

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

This week on HomeTech: More streaming news including a spat between Roku and Google, ADT sues Ring, Spotify is raising prices, and Denon & Marantz throw in the towel on fixing faulty receivers... All this and of course, the pick of the week.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 30th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about all aspects of home technology, mostly home automation, all that good stuff. This week, we're going to dive into some home tech headlines, talk about a bunch of streaming news that came up again. I don't know. This is the season, I suppose. And, of course, we'll grab a pick of the week. But first, just a quick reminder again, as I try and do at the top of every show, don't forget about our Home Tech Talks,

which is actually turning into a really fun thing where a couple of guys get together and we chat a little bit extra about some of the news that's going on. But we pick a topic every week. Last week, I think we did RGB lighting. We've done home theater stuff in the past. We've got topics in the hopper.

This week, starting up a CI business in the year 2021. So if you ever had any questions on how to do that, this might be the one for you. You can find out how to join those over at hometech.fm. Any patron at any level gets you into those talks. And where you can participate in them, you can join them. It's just a Zoom webinar. You can hop on in. We'll bring you into the conversation.

Or you can jump right over. You can watch them. They're there. They're there on the the patron feed as well. Hopefully all the back issues are up. I don't know. Zoom does this weird, really this really weird thing where it records in like 4k. So for some reason, I have no idea why. It's like, I don't want to transfer a 4k file. And it's 4k, but the video is still 640 resolution or even worse 320 or something it's it's horrible i don't know why it does it so i have to transcode everything and it takes it takes a while it's an hour long video so anyway so pretty fun to check that out hey check this out um this week i picked up some some home technology some kit i guess uh this is the can i put this in

here it's the wemo stage smart Scene Controller. It's for use with Apple HomeKit. I saw this kind of hit maybe last week or something where they announced that it was coming out. I jumped on their website and grabbed a couple. It's kind of neat. It lets you control, it's kind of like a Pico, I guess, maybe with less buttons, but like a three-button Pico, I suppose, for Apple HomeKit. And it lets you do a couple of different things, like you can activate scenes, you can turn on and off lights, you can really control any particular thing you can automate

through Apple HomeKit with it. But it is limited to those three buttons. You can do, technically, you can do six different things by pressing, like, a long press on the button and letting go. I don't know. It seems all right. I have been promising my daughter that I would get her a button that she could reach and she'd be able to turn on and off lights. But now she's tall enough to do it, so she can just like stand on her toes and reach up and press the light.

So maybe she doesn't need this anymore. But I was going to program it for her and see if she would use it to go around and turn off the lights. One really neat thing about it, it comes with like a, I got one over here. It's open. It's like a backing, standard Decora style backing, but you can like, just like Pico's, you can glue it on the wall. It's got 3M tape on it, but it's got like a magnet catch to it. So you can just like snap the keypad in with 3m tape on it um but it's got like a magnet catch to it so you can just like snap the keypad in with a magnet pop it out when you need to use it so it's actually designed fairly well like uh richard's actually in the uh in the in the chat now uh saying that that uh he's

uh he needs to try it out richard i suggest you try it out it's actually not bad especially for wemo and i don't know what it's using. It must be using Bluetooth. It can't be using Wi-Fi. But it works really well. I was kind of surprised by the build quality and everything that it came in the box. It looks nice. I don't think I'm going to stick on the wall or anything, but to have like a little magnetic keypad that I can kind of stick, like I can stick one on the desk here on any one of the magnetic parts or pieces or like under frames or anything like that and have quick access to a couple of buttons to turn on and off lights or do automation things around the house. Not a bad thing. So check that out. Not a pick of the week yet because I really

haven't flushed it out, but I thought it was pretty cool. And I had it sitting right here on the desk, so I thought I'd show you. But with that, let's jump into some home tech headlines. Oh boy. Blue, blue sign of the blue side of the times. Home security company ADT is suing Ring claiming its recent designs are a brazen copy of ADT's octagonal blue symbol. Firm cites Ring's blue outdoor siren as a recent example. In the filing, ADT also listed a dozen of its trademark registrations

dating back to the late 1990s. A feature of a combination of a blue, let's see, a blue octagonal design. A bunch of them. If you've ever seen the ADT logo, you'll know what this, not the logo, but so much like the little like sign that people put out there, including me. I have the ADT signs out in my yard, not because I use ADT, but because I just got the signs off eBay. So

I actually do monitor my house with and turn it and actually use it. I turn it on and off, but the signs are just there for deterrence. They work. They do work, but you don't have to have a security system for them to work. ADT is claiming that Ring's use of the blue octagonal risks confusing customers and misleading them

into thinking that two companies are affiliated or associated, and in its filing, ADT says, quote, the striking similarity is evidence that Ring is trying to, quote, reap and benefit the goodwill associated with ADT's brand and reputation. It adds, this type of confusion seriously undermines the goodwill that ADT has cultivated in its famous blue octagon. Those are capital, each one of those, famous blue octagon, okay, like that's a

thing, and irreparably harms ADT. And here's a quote I thought was funny from the lawsuit itself. Ring believes that when the public sees the solid blue octagon on a home, they will think of ADT. Completely ignoring the fact that they just can't read the actual three or four letters that are on the octagon. I don't know. Back in 2016, there was a spit about this as well, where Ring would, they came out with like their little signs and stickers and everything that you could get with their security box, security systems and cameras and that kind of thing. And ADT said something about it then, and the Ring solution was to make it less blue. And ADT didn't really do anything after that. They just kind of dropped the issue. But now it seems that, I don't know, this seems like a bit of desperation from ADT to

get some press or some money or a settlement or something. I'm not sure. I really don't think the two brands are particularly harmed. I was talking to my wife about this and she said, why would anybody do that? It looks just like, you know, this does look just like ADT. But from my perspective, it was kind of interesting to hear that perspective. From my perspective, working in the security industry for, geez, like 20 years, I mean, half the companies out there had these blue stop sign things, or not. They weren't blue because they, quite frankly, they didn't want to be associated with ADT, so they didn't make them blue.

But there's plenty of security companies, just regular local security companies that have that octagon. In fact, you can go on to any website, basically, and if you have a security company, or if you just want to buy some, you can actually get them. In fact, I thought about doing this. If anybody wants me to make this product here, I'm going to do this. This looks really cool. I have a blue octagon, uh, that I'm going to make and stick in front of my house. And it says listening to the home tech podcast and has home tech.fm on it. So let me zoom in there. So you guys in the chat can see that. Look at that bad boy. There you go. So I think we should make that and stick it in front of all of our houses and it may help people find the podcast. So it's going to be our show art this week for sure.

So we'll get that in. Hopefully ADT won't sue us, but I don't think they will. I think we're a little bit below the radar there. All right, in October 2020, Heinz Heiss online, a German electronics magazine basically, published a report concluding that HDMI 2.1 chip being rolled out in receivers from Denon, Marantz, and Yamaha is faulty by design. It results in a black screen for most 4K 120 and 8K 60 signals, and it may not be fixable by firmware. Six months later,

the HDMI 2.1 issue persists, and it seems like the companies are throwing in the towel. Sound United is now offering owners an adapter kit, which is a completely, you know, other box. It's given up on trying to, like, fix it with software. So if you've got, basically, here's a quote from one of their support articles. If you experience a black screen and no audio when trying to pass through a 4K 120 or 8K signals from a gaming device connected to the 8K input of the Denon AV receiver, this adapter will help you get a proper gaming experience. Yamaha has also acknowledged the issue and is recommending owners use HDMI eARC as a solution. So basically going directly to the TV and then coming back with audio from the TV for gaming and just kind of bypassing the receiver altogether. It doesn't sound too good. Just kind of putting this out there for anybody running across this weird issue.

This, yes, Craig is pointing out in the chat, this is great press for 8K. Yeah, it's not looking too hot. I guess there's not too much out there doing 8K right now. So PS5 has it, and the Xbox Series X may have it as well. But there really can't be that much content out there for it, much less the TV sets to display it at the moment. I suppose this stuff's getting more popular, but it seems like this is early days, and it seems like early adopters always get stuck running into these kind of issues. Oh boy, another one. Roku on Monday notifies its users

by email that YouTube TV may be forced off its platform entirely, alleging the anti-competitive demands from Google included requests for preferential treatment of its YouTube TV and YouTube apps. Roku says it's not asking for more money, but for better terms around anti-competitive demands from Google, such as being asked to favor Google products in the Roku search results. Roku also claims that Google is in the Roku search results. Roku also claims that Google is demanding that Roku make their hardware a little bit better to meet Google

specs, a move that could possibly increase the price of their products. For their part, Google says they're just trying to work out a deal with Roku and that Roku claims are baseless. Here's a quote from their response. All of our work with them has been focused on ensuring high quality and consistent experience with our viewers. We have had no requests to access user data or interfere with search results. We hope we can resolve this for the sake of our mutual users. So, fun. It seems like carriage disputes are now for cord cutters. We've seen this in the past when it comes to like a satellite dish company, I think dish network and like Fox sports always had those, those spots where you would potentially lose, uh, you know, you'd see it pop up like during

baseball season or basketball. So you don't lose the next game, you know, contact direct TV now or vice versa. You know, they, they would, they would each put up their own advertisements. And I don't, I don't really know who, if that ever works, but you know, who knows, like in this case, like either one of these companies, who do you call? Like, who do you call at Google to complain? Like, it's not like, uh, do you just send someone an email and say, please don't turn off my YouTube TV on my Roku. You know, just give in. I really don't know how this works in the age of digital companies

that have no support services, but here we are. Carriage disputes have made it into the digital age. HBO Max is getting ready to bring in live hockey. So streaming news continues here. Thanks to a seven-year deal between the National Hockey League and Warner Media's Turner Sports. Alongside HBO Max stepping into the sports spotlight, Turner Sports has also announced that TNT and TBS will air the Stanley Cup, three out of the seven years outlined in the deal.

So 2023, 2025, and 2027. And the remaining years will be hosted on ESPN Plus and ABC. Just to kind of give you a price breakdown here. Let's see. ESPN Plus costs $6 a month or $14 a month with bundled with Disney Plus or Hulu. HBO costs $15 a month. So kind of on par there. NHL TV, it costs $35 for the all-access pass, or you can just do one team, all of one team games for $30 a month. So good news there for hockey fans. HBO Max really isn't, HBO in general is not really known for sports, you know, outside of like the documentary, a couple of documentaries that they have out there. But we're seeing all of these streaming services start to expand

what they offer, their offerings, and broaden their scope to help attract more customers and keep the people they have subscribed. I mean, there's no... You're not forced to stay on AT&T. You're not forced to stay on HBO Max. You can cancel every month. But if they can keep you around, if they can bring in the hockey game. Here it is, hockey game.

Stanley Cup champs right there. Then, yeah, they will do what they can to keep you around. So, all right. Spotify is increasing the price of mini subscriptions this week across the UK and parts of Europe with a little bit here in the US for family plans. Subscribers to the service have started to receive emails informing them of the changes and they will affect the student, the duo and family plans across most Europe and the UK and other markets as well. And this is all starting on April 30th. So here's kind of the breakdown. Spotify family

is increasing a whole dollar from $15 to $16 per month in the US. And so over the UK, Spotify student is increasing from five to six, sorry, pounds per month. And the Duo, which is a subscription for two people moving from 13 pounds to 14 pounds a month. And UK Spotify family is going to go up two pounds actually from 15 to 17 a month. So kind of interesting to see that Spotify's price increases come just months after the company revealed that it has more than 150 million subscribers. That's huge. Despite this, they still had a loss of 125 million Euro in the recent quarter.

So we're probably going to see kind of, there's an earning call, I think tomorrow, Thursday, as we record this on Wednesday, earnings call will be tomorrow. So we'll probably find out a little bit more on, on why they raised these rates then. You have to keep an eye on that one. Netflix is finally rolling out a feature called Play Something on TV devices with support coming

to mobile soon. Netflix has been running the test on this since last year. And the idea behind this is, well, you don't know what to watch and you get tired of scrolling endlessly through their lists of shows yeah here you just open up the netflix app you see the button that says play something you click it you're watching something who knows uh it's gonna it's not completely random it's just gonna give you something that netflix thinks you want to see um but you also have an option to kind of like skip something by clicking none other than the play something else button. Uh, if, if that option doesn't bring up that you want something that you want to see. So, um, there also be a 10th row on the homepage.

Um, so you can scroll down and kind of look through that, uh, to see if anything appeals to you in that list. So again, the streaming services are trying to figure out how to keep you on their site and watching things. I've actually had this problem recently with Netflix. There's really not much to watch on there right now. And, you know, pandemic is kind of catching up with us and our viewing habits. I'm not finding much that I want to see right now. So I'm kind of switching back over to movies and watching a lot of older movies that I either missed or didn't see in the past. But I don't know. I'm just, I'm not, there's not much on Netflix right now that I find compelling. At least what they're suggesting, there could be something hidden away and maybe

this random watch button that they have might get me in the ballpark a little bit better. All right, big news from Sony. Sony's new line of Bravia XR television sets will allow customers to watch and stream movies at some of the highest quality available in consumer market through its new Bravia Core platform. This is all according to Sony. The Bravia XR owners will be able to choose from a number of Sony picture titles and watch them using Sony's PureStream technology,

which achieves near lossless, ultra high definition, Blu-ray disc quality, according to Sony. PureStream also allows for streaming up to 80 megabits per second, which if you compare to the other streaming services out there, somewhere between 15 and 25 megabits per second, which if you compare to the other streaming services out there, somewhere between 15 and 25 megabits per second to achieve 4K Ultra HD streaming quality. So this is huge numbers from Sony and probably going to wipe out your data caps. At least they would on mine if you watch too many Sony movies.

So I don't think this is something that's going to replace Netflix or HBO anytime soon. Uh, it's just Sony catalog. Some, some of the movies in Sony's catalog, but it should, I think this is, this is more of a play on just to show what the TV could do. Um, this is, this is something that, uh, it's kind of like, it's kind of like you, you, you buy a sports car and you only drive it around town. Well, Sony's, Sony's giving you the, uh, the track here and they're, they're letting you take a little test drive on the track, uh, to, to see what the, uh, the TV could do. So we'll, we'll, it will be interesting to see, uh, what all kind of goes into this.

Um, and how, how many and how many people use this service. I don't think it's going to be too popular, but again, it's just a couple of Sony titles and kind of their own streaming thing. But being in this super high definition Blu-ray quality, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's going to wipe out your internet pretty quickly. And I have a bit of a follow-up on the projector caliber, or this is, sorry, the calibration that we talked about last week for the Apple, the new Apple TV. It's not only on the new Apple TV, it's only on the old Apple TVs too. So if you have a 4K or an HD, you can actually run the calibration using your updated phone and updated Apple TV. And here's actually, I have a video of me kind of going through this here. See if I can bring that up. There we go. So this is my

awesome projector projection. This is my theater in my garage. You can see my garage there. But I ran across a tip and a trick that you can actually wrap like parchment paper around your phone and stick it up there in the blue dot facing the projector and what it'll do is it'll pick up the light now I I'm not very smart and I realized that like I thought that I had turned off my phone but no what the phone this phone screen will turn off when it detects light being shine shined at the camera so just make sure that you wrap up the uh the uh parchment paper there pretty tightly around it. So it gets a nice clean image there. Uh, you can see that it kind of goes through it's, um, it's a little red, green, blue color swatches. The white does its thing.

Uh, it does white a couple of times. It does a different, like a white and like an off white, a little lower white, maybe, maybe three or four times. And then boom, uh, there you go. Color balance, balance complete, uh, which is kind of cool. I thought, um, you could actually, you know, here's actually on my horrible projector screen, the difference between original and balanced. And I did notice a difference. So there is something there. Uh, but it just goes to show that this feature that all I only thought would only work on TVs on the latest, newest Sony, Sony, sorry, not Sony, Apple TVs worked on the older Apple TVs. And there you go. Do you, Greg says, do you have to provide the values of the parchment paper to compensate? I have no idea, Greg. I think what they're just doing is getting in the ballpark with the light that's coming off the colors there. And it's the colors that come from your TV, right? So they're just looking at the levels of those

colors that are coming off. So my screen is white. The parchment paper is roughly white too. And I think that they are just taking that lux map and basically applying it back onto the picture and just identifying what levels they're going to send out at what speed. You can use whatever paper you want, toilet paper, tissue paper. I think it'll probably work

as long as the light shone through it a little bit. So Greg's asking if you can tell if there's a difference or is it any better? Not on my horrible projector. I can't tell. I did it on my 4K TV inside

and I did notice that the color levels were better. And I had ballparked that with a THX app as well. So that I did notice that that that it had gotten a little bit closer, like skin tones looked a little bit better. I was it looked like I was off on maybe the reds from when when you toggle back and forth, but only so much. It wasn't really that much. So anyway, a really cool feature. It gets you in the ballpark, and it shows off more of what your TV can do.

And I think for getting this kind of technology into more people's hands and at least having more people go through that process, maybe getting a better picture essentially out of the TV is good for everybody. I mean, it's going to, you know, the rising tide raises all ships. I think it's going to be a great idea for that. So there's definitely some questions about what, two-ply toilet paper. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, guys, you guys can try whatever you want. I used parchment paper cause, uh, I found a little thread on Twitter that said it worked and sure enough it did. So, uh, uh, check out the video there on our, our links as well. Um, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on the show notes at home tech.fm slash three 49. well. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on the show notes

at hometech.fm slash 349. Wow, almost to 350. If you want to join the show, you can join us live in the chat, like five or six people. Wow, there's a lot of people here tonight. Not usually this many. Starting sometimes on Wednesday between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more on how to do that at hometech.fm slash live. Anybody who listens to other podcasts like ResiWeek may know my position on vinyl and how I don't think it's very good at all. But here is how you can listen to some really old digitized vinyls. This is the Internet Archive archive digitizing 78 RPM records, um, from wow, the late 1800s all the way up to like 19, the 1950s. Um, that, that was how music was recorded.

I mean, there's a couple of like Edison cartridges that you can get. Um, but most everything was pressed into vinyl and on these 78s. Um, so they're, they're, they're working to digitize over 250,000 records. Or they've actually done that, 250,000 records. They preserved them and then archived them. And they actually run them through iZotope RX7 to clean them up. So if you go and browse the Internet Archive and see all of these albums that they've digitized. You can actually pick a restored version of the song, which is really cool. And they go to great lengths to get a decent recording off of these records. You can see here in the video that they released that they're cleaning. They go through and clean the records off,

they vacuum the channels out with a little vacuum thing. They photograph, they categorize all of them. And then they actually have this really cool custom rig that'll come up here in a second that has four, it's like a record player, but it has four cartridges on it. And, you know, people in their cartridges, they think one is better than the other. There it is. There it is. That's really cool. So this custom built turntable, they put it on, you got four cartridges, each one of them reads it in. And when you're looking through the archive, you can actually listen to each one of these cartridges in two different ways. You can listen to it EQ'd and you can listen to it just raw if you wanted to.

So from a technology standpoint, what they're doing is just absolutely stunning. And I can't believe how much they're able to do here. This is really cool. It's a partnership with George Blood LP, and they've been working since 2016 to digitize thousands of these 78 RPM records. So check that out. I will put a link there in the show notes to the Internet Archive and the thread that they have on Twitter where they kind of go over all of the steps that they make and all the stuff that they've done to digitize these early recordings. So it is really, really cool. Um, and what I haven't found and I didn't have much time

to dig, um, was a way to like, listen to these just live. Like you could just press play on them. I don't know if there's like a, like a radio station or like where they stream out and it may just be that they don't have money to do that. I don't know. Um, but it'd be really cool to just kind of like hit play and listen to old, you know, folk music recordings from the early, early, early 1900s. Some of that music could just be lost to time if not for these recordings. So it's really cool that they they've done this. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or great ideas for the show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at HomeTechech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback, fill out the online form. And I do want to end the show.

We want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support through the Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge 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 at the Hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather there every day to talk about, oh, what have we been talking about? We talked about Winamp.

Winamp, as I ran into that, the internet archive actually has a web-based Winamp that is scary, scary. It didn't have like the visualization plugins, but I hit the little llama button and Greg's asking there in the chat, yeah, what about the llamas? I hit the button and man, it was just like I was transported back into the, I don't know, late 1990s, early 2000s. Winamp was such a great program for playing MP3s. And just extremely, I mean, extremely well written. It never crashed.

I never had a problem at all with Winamp. But man, it was really just weird seeing that on the web page. And they have a web-based version of it that you can go through and play these songs on. It's really cool. So yeah, check that out. If you want to help out the show but can't support the show financially, no problem. We appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. And with that, that wraps up another week of home technology news here.

Thanks, everybody, for joining us here in the chat. Live chat's been lively tonight. Really appreciate that. We've got home tech talks coming up tomorrow around three o'clock Eastern. And if you want to join that, head on over to the patron page and use the link to sign up for that. But I think this one's going to be pretty fun to talk about what it takes to start a CI business in the year 2021. Do you even need to be a CI? Can you just hang TVs for a living? I bet that's probably a pretty good thing. But there's been a couple of conversations floating around the hub about, you know, when do you start your business? At what point does the hobby become your full-time gig and how do you make that transition? And, um, you know, there's a lot of different answers, uh, and, and, and to

that and a lot of different advice that I just, that was popping up in there and I thought was too good. We, we just, we've got to capture it for one hour talk. So if you're interested in that, join us tomorrow. Um, it will be recorded and I'll try and get it posted back up if it doesn't record an 8K because my receiver won't decode 8K 120 or whatever. So hopefully I'll figure out why Zoom is doing that and fix it a little bit better. But with that, everybody, have a great weekend. Thanks for joining the chat and we'll chat with you next week.