HomeTech.fm - Episode 351 - StockAV

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

This week on HomeTech: Two weeks of HomeTech Headlines! SnapAV is going public, the streaming wars intensify, Zigbee wants to Matter, and more... All this and of course, the pick of the week.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 21st. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation and home technologies. I've been gone for like a week and was spending time in the beautiful state of North Carolina when all of a sudden we were standing around and realized, you know, gas, I'm getting a gas like there was nowhere to buy gas. I was driving by this gas station and noticed a large line. And it turns out there was a gas shortage. I made the news. Sure. Many of you saw it. People were filling up their gas cans and gas shopping bags, I guess. I don't know. I saw some crazy videos. Anyway, yeah, we were stuck.

We were on a road trip and we were stuck in North Carolina, which wasn't bad. Had a great week there. It allowed, you know, instead of running around and trying to do all sorts of stuff. We were able to, to go around and, and, and just like live at a cabin for a week. And then, uh, basically from there, uh, we were able to, to basically just like go out to little parks that were kind of around the house or the cabin we were staying in and, and do stuff there, like make fires, roast marshmallows, that kind of thing. So it was a lot of fun. What a relaxing week. But I did miss out on a bunch of Home Tech headlines. So why don't we just jump right into that? Well, big news last week. And actually, while I was camping, got a text message sent over to me from somebody that said, Hey, SnapAV is going public. So the big headline here, Wirepath Systems LLC doing business as Snap EV has announced that its parent company,

this is kind of convoluted there, has confidentially submitted a draft registration for the public offering of their common stock. They submitted the S1 form to the Security Exchange Commission or the SEC and they're proposing a public offering on the company's common stock. It should be interesting. SnapAV has been around since 2005.

It was started by an integrator in the industry. His name was Jay Faison, I believe. He realized pretty quickly that there was a way to buy stuff from China, kind of the commodity products that we have, and that he could buy them more profitably and efficiently from China in bulk and then use them in his own business, but also resell them to other custom integrators. That basically started SnapAV. I think really the biggest hit, and I will die on this hill, SnapAV made a website that you could order things from. And believe it or not, in the year 2005, 2006, 2007, I was still sending off purchase orders and faxing things over to my distributors to buy things. So buying off of a website was fairly uncommon, especially one that you could buy something and they'd give you a shipping update pretty quickly.

They'd give you tracking information. All of this has existed for many people for a very long time for our industry. It did not. And they kind of revolutionized that and kind of set the standard and set the bar a little bit higher. I sold the company to General Atlantic in 2013, and that was sold over to H&F, which is Hellman and Friedman, I believe. It was a private equity company back in 2017, so they've been in their hands for a while. In those 10, 20 years, they've developed episode speakers, WirePath, which is wire, I guess. Binary, which is the HDMI video audio distribution brand inside. Strong, I think it's mounts and racks, racking equipment. Triad, which is actually Triad came along with the Control 4 acquisition, but that's in more speakers.

Luma, that's the rebranded Hikvision stuff, but still good security camera systems to use. Wattbox, their in-house power and UPS stuff. PackEdge, which also came from Control 4 as well. Dragonfly, which is screens. I remember back in the day they would ship you a screen for free to try out. That was a long time ago. Aractus, which is their networking gear and Oversea, which is kind of their remote monitoring software that has been implemented in all of their in-house product,

electronic gear and product. So as I mentioned, they made some acquisitions over the years. Autonomic, which is no longer part of the company, they've been sold back out of the company, but Sunbright TV was picked up a number of years back. Vigilant, I actually knew Adrian way back in the day. He and I both started our, well, we both met each other at Claire Controls. So when he left there, he started Vigilant up, and Vigilant was snapped up by SnapAV. They've been on a tear buying distributors over the last couple of years. Allnet, MRI, Volutune, Custom Plus Distributing. This gave them a pretty big

footprint here in the States. And then, of course, they ship worldwide as well. They have offices in many other countries through EMEA and around the world. And then, of course, in 2019, they bought Control4 for $680 million and brought Control4 out of being a public company and into being a, back into a private company, which is quite interesting. And a couple of weeks back, they bought Access Networks, which is still kind of the head scratcher of all this, but you know, we'll leave that back. I'm still not sure.

I'll actually, I'll put a Snappy V explains why I bought Access Networks story from CEPro in the show notes and you can go read through that and see if you can glean anything from it. I skimmed it and didn't get very much out of it. So still not sure why they bought that. But, um, bigger questions for me would be first off, what, what's the, what's the stock some ticker symbol going to be?

They can't get snap. That's taken. Wire is taken for wire path, I guess. Um, so yeah, uh, wire is like, Oh, I forget the name of the company. It's a wire wire company to make copper wire snap, of course is, uh, Snapchat. They're not going to get that one. Uh, so what is their four letter symbol going to be? Uh, unless they go in with like oversee, I, I'm really, I'm really not sure what it's

going to be like, what do they change the name of the company? Really, really not sure. Um, to Eddie saying in the To Eddie saying in the chat, hey, I really want that stock. Yeah, it might not be too bad. The next thing is, my question on this is, what will the store and company look like once they go full public here? Wall Street is going to expect growth out of this company, and they're not going to get growth in the walled garden that they've purchased everybody in now. We've got no other customers to sell to. So I think and I've been hearing rumors that they are planning as part of this is to opening up their store to the public and open up the catalog, the private brands that I mentioned above, to be sold to the public.

So Greg is suggesting that they use OOSK, which is out of stock. Man, it's rough right now buying any electronic gear. But yeah, that would be a funny one. Uh, but probably not one that Wall Street would, would appreciate it very much. But, um, yeah, back to their store. Uh, I, I, I really think that the only way they're going to be able to show Wall Street the growth that they're looking for is to open up their brands to public and sell, you know, at retail pricing, SnapAV retail pricing, um, to the public and make those products available online. And that kind of puts them in, I don't know, it kind of puts them in competition with maybe

like monoprice? I don't know. They would still have an immense amount of markup in something that's sold online rather than through distribution. So I don't know. Is the money there to do something like that? It's questionable. We'll have to see.

We'll have to see where it goes. I did hear a couple of rumors that that's what they were looking to do. So we'll have to. It's one of those things we'll definitely have to wait and see. So I got a couple of stories about this one kind of hit as I left and walked out the door. But a Belgian security researcher who's known for pointing out faults in Wi-Fi security has discovered yet another vulnerability. This time, it's known as a series of attacks that are called frag attacks, and they're believed to

be pretty widespread and stem way back from the Wi-Fi standard, dating back to like 1997. So this is probably in, if you have Wi-Fi in your house, these defects are probably in there unless you've gotten an update anytime soon. If exploited, the vulnerabilities would allow an attacker within radio range to steal user information, attack devices, change the DNS, you know, all sorts of fun stuff. But the chances of the flaws, according to the researcher, being abused should be very low as it requires user interaction or some weird network settings. So on the risk level, it's pretty low. You know, public Wi-Fi, things that don't get updated all the time, maybe something to keep an eye on. And also, you know, update your your your firmware on your devices as they become available.

There's no evidence out there, according to anybody, that this is being used in the wire used in the wild right now. So, you know, when the updates do come through, go ahead and get those updated. So some interesting news out of Eufy. 9to5Mac first reported that a huge Eufy privacy breach had resulted in both live and recorded cameras being shown to complete strangers in the Anchor Eufy accounts. So the bug also allows for complete access to the account, including control

of the pan-tilt cameras. Kind of a weird situation here that happened. And it was kind of over and done with fairly quickly. I think it was because of the way that Eufy reacted to this. Here's what they had to say. Due to a software bug during the latest server upgrade, starting at 4.50 a.m. Eastern. A limited number, and it turns out only 712 customers were able to access video feeds from other users' cameras. Our engineering team recognized this issue at around 5.30, so about a couple minutes later, and quickly got it fixed by 6.30 a.m. So, you know, about an hour and a half later, everything was all good to go. No more issues. This affected, like I said, 712 customers

in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Argentina. Wow, I don't know where that came from. And users across Europe remained unaffected. Sounded like this was a bad server update that was deployed out. And so early in the morning started affecting people who were awake at that point in time and kind of using their product. So I've always said these types of things are excusable.

Software is written by humans. It can only be tested so much by humans. When you put something in production in front of millions of people, bugs just appear. You just don't know why. So those things are going to happen. What's important here is how a company reacts to these issues. And Eufy did a great job here. I mean, they recognized it was an issue,

whether their engineers were surfing on Reddit or 9to5Mac or whatever and found this or just kind of caught it off guard, caught it immediately to only have, you know, 0.001% of their customers affected. It's pretty good. I mean, there's, there's really, there's really nothing that nothing more that can be said about that. There's, there's a couple of other follow-ups that they had that they're going to, um, apply for some kind of like, uh, certifications, like outside audits basically. Uh, and they have updated some of their practices on how their infrastructure gets upgraded. Maybe updating their infrastructure would help as well. I don't know. Like I said, mistakes were made, uh, but you know, no big deal because, uh, you know, it's how they react. If this had gone on for a week or two and there was no comment from the company,

different story completely. So, all right, the Zigbee Alliance announced an organizational rebrand with the company shifting names to be called the Connectivity Standards Alliance, or CSA. In addition, the organization announced a rebrand for the project called Connected Home over IP, CHIP, as we've been calling it. I think everybody's been calling on the show. Now that's going to be called Matter.

So that's the customer facing name of CHIP, Connected Home over IP project that has been in the news all over the place for the past, you know, year or two now, I think, just because the big players are all involved. Apple, Google, Samsung, everybody, huge, Amazon, everybody is involved with this thing. And they're trying to make a one unified standard on basically how to set up and control a system. And if it works, it would matter. But as Greg points out in the chat, it doesn't really matter. No, it doesn't, doesn't matter. But as Greg points out in the chat, it doesn't really matter. No, it doesn't, doesn't matter. It's kind of, kind of my thoughts on, on the whole thing. Um, we'll see if it does. I don't, I'm not, I'm not too hopeful that it, that it, that it will. So, um, one thing I,

that popped up while I was reading things on vacation is this link from, uh, from Nilay Patel over at the verge. He posted a review on the SpaceX Starlink, uh, that a system that he's been testing and, uh, the review isn't all that great. Um, but he does admit, so let me just read a couple of lines from here. He said, but now, right now, Starlink is very much a beta product and is unreliable, inconsistent, and foiled by even the merest suggestion of trees. In reality, it must be emphasized, is very irritating. So as many listening to the show know, going back a couple of years now, we've been following this Starlink saga. This is SpaceX's attempt to make an internet service provider out of satellites, out of a constellation of thousands of satellites. It could be in the neighborhood of 20,000 when they're all done.

But this piece is, I think, the piece to read for anyone interested in Starlink. And it's just an exceptional piece of journalism from someone who's covered like every single aspect of this particular, like, I don't think there's anybody better suited to write about this other than, uh, Nilay over there at the verge. He's covered the technology. He's covered the, uh, the, the, the, the, the regulation, everything on this over, over decades. And I, I think this is, this is probably one of, one of the best review that, that just, that I've read that really covers everything. It covers, it talks about the wonky modem that they provide all the way to the scientists that are just not happy about the night skies being clouded by, you know, thousands of

satellites that block telescopes from viewing the far reaches of our cosmos. So check this out. I'm putting a link to it in our show notes over here at hometech.fm slash 351. It's very much worth a read. And he also really blasts telecom providers in here, especially here in the States. Let me read a couple of lines here. And lastly, if you're a telecom executive or regulator in the United States, you have a couple lines here. And lastly, if you're a telecom executive or regulator in the United States, you have no choice but to see Starlink, its execution, and its unrestrained excitement and hype around it as a direct indictment of your rhetoric and efforts to properly connect this country to the internet over the past two decades. Broadband on

the ground is so wrapped up in lumbering BS of monopolistic regulatory capture that it seems easier and more effective to literally launch rockets and try and building a network in the sky. This is crazy. He's right. This is absolutely insane. He says Starlink isn't the result. Sorry, Starlink isn't the happy end result of a commitment to facility-based competition. It's thousands of middle fingers pointing at us from the air. It's what happens when there is an utter lack of competition. And I could not agree more. Please go read this article.

It is absolutely amazing and gives you a really good idea of what Starlink is and what it can do and probably what it won't be able to do. All right. All right. Big news from Savant. Savant has finally announced the release of its Ring X-Line integration with Savant Pro app. Last year, Savant and Ring announced a strategic initiative where they would let Ring X-Line bundles be available to integrators through the Savant stores and also that they'd have an integration. Well,

now with DaVinci 9.4, Savant has delivered on its promise to bring Ring integration to the Savant home experience. The integration includes live view of all Ring video within the Savant Pro app, homeowner created notifications based on camera activations, recorded video and clip playback, which is pretty cool, and the big one, two-way audio communications. So it's really cool.

It's almost like you're using the Ring app within Savant. All in all, really great looking integration. I've had, you know, Blackware, we developed Control 4 integration years ago, and we've had similar initiatives under our belt for the past six years, but haven't been able to make much progress on them because Ring does not move. They say, here's our API.

You use it. You know, if you can't use it, too bad. And then, you know, we're not first party like Savant, so we can't really change too much on the low level part of Control 4, URC, and WAN, that kind of thing, to rewrite their backend video code. And clearly, Savant thought it was a great idea to do this and spent the time and effort. Must have been pretty tough to do because it took them about a year to figure out how to put that together and get it out into dealers' hands en masse.

It's easy to show a one-off demo, as you might do at a dealer conference. It's a whole other thing to deploy it out to all of your installs and not crash systems and check all the edge cases. So Savant's done a great job with this. I can speak from experience. This is not something that's easy to do.

So kudos to the Savant team for making it happen. And if you aren't using Savant, check out our, you know, my integrations that we put together. We've got Control 4, Elan, URC, and coming soon, RTI. So check those out. We have those over at Blackwire. All right. I'm sure Jason's going to see this video here and say,

thanks for using the meme, Seth. But I saw this story. It's pretty huge. One Vision Resources has launched new services designed to fill the resource gaps that many small and, quite frankly, large integration companies wrestle with every day. Adding on to their service operations offering, the company is now providing HR and hiring services to help integrators with the hiring, like the entire hiring process, figuring out what roles and everything that you need all the way through the employment process. Just wow. Really cool. Really cool. They also are offering a new virtual CFO service, which can help you with everything accounting wise, all the way from accounts receivable to payroll. So really cool that you can sub a lot of this stuff out as an integrator.

I really wish that this had happened a long time ago. This is, this is really cool to see coming from a company like one vision. And, and finally, they also have a leadership development, uh, service that they're going to be, you know, as part of being in one vision that can help integrators grow and expand their business. Um, this sounds really awesome. I don't want to spend too much time on it cause I know a guy and I probably can get him on the show to tell us a little bit more. So keep tuned in for that. Hopefully we'll get Jason on the show to educate us a little bit more on what OneVision is able to offer these days. So AT&T has announced that it's spinning off its Warner Media division and merging with Discovery in a $43 billion deal.

The company will combine assets, including Warner's film division, HBO Max, and the Discovery Plus streaming service in putting it in a better position to compete with Netflix, Disney Plus, and other rivals. The agreement unites, here's a quote from John Stankey, which we accidentally called him Stankey a long time ago on one of our shows because we can't pronounce names very well. But John Stanky, CEO of AT&T, said, This agreement unites two entertainment leaders with the complimentary content of strengths and positions.

The new company will be one of the leading global direct-to-consumer streaming platforms. So, yeah, big deal. I'm sure this will only confuse customers when HBO Max Ultra Plus Plus is announced in a couple of weeks to add on to all the HBO Max properties that AT&T has kind of pushed out over the last couple of years. All right. Amazon is reportedly offering to buy film giant MGM for $9 billion. If this deal goes through, Amazon would own James Bond, The Handmaid's Tale, Rocky, Stargate, Rogue Global Cop, Lely Bond, Vikings, and a massive catalog of films dating back decades.

An array of production and distribution companies and the content network Epix. So these are all just rumors right now, but the fact that MGM has been up for sale since December 2020, and the news about AT&T spending off WarnerMedia and combining with Discovery, we just talked about, pretty surprising if Amazon and MGL didn't make the deal. So in December, Guardian reported that MGM

has a library of 4,000 films and 17,000 hours of TV. So quite the big buy if Amazon can pull it off. Could be fun to see all this. The streaming wars have begun, I guess. They're still on. So hey, boring concerts for $15. Here we go. A little late to the game.

Spotify is entering the virtual concert business just as in person content concerts are becoming more of a possibility around the world the company is set to announce or the company announced that people can now buy tickets up to five different concert streams which will air throughout may and june initial artists include the Black P's, Jack Anthoff, Bleachers, and Leon Bridges. The streams all are pre-recorded and only be viewed at a given time, specific time, through the web browser. This seems like fail all over the place, sorry. The shows aren't available on demand and they aren't, aren't accepted, aren't accessible through the Spotify app. So you can only watch this online

in a browser on your laptop or iPad or something. I don't know. I think this idea would have been great if they had done it during the pandemic at minimum, but like, I don't know, this seems like they're missing the mark here on a couple of the technical issues. I think they should offer more avenues of viewing. The app is great. Why not throw them to the app? Why just the browser? It doesn't make any sense. I think $15 is a great price for some tickets, but I think they could also work to combine,

you know, merch sales in there and you'd be able to buy, you know, t-shirts and that concert t-shirts and that kind of thing through the app as well. It'd be really cool to see them do something like this. I just think there's more to be offered here. And I think you could actually do this live as well, like restreaming the live streaming, the actual concert concerts with all the technology we have and everything that we have now. I think it'd be really cool to see some live stream concerts for the people who don't feel comfortable going out to concerts when they start picking back up, but also like adding in the element of the audience, not only for the recording, but for the band themselves. I've seen a number of these concerts done and they're just not all that compelling

without having that feedback from the audience. So I don't know. I'm a bit, I do like live concerts. And I think there's some technology with the technology we can do a lot better than, than this. $15 isn't so bad though. Or HBO max news. HBO max will launch an ad supported tier in June for just $10 a month. It's offering a cheaper option and a full $15 per month ad-free subscription. News was announced this week or last week, I'm not sure,

during a WarnerMedia presentation for advertisers and the price launch date were rumored last month. The streaming service, which has 64 million subscribers, has been planning an ad-supported tier as a way to reach a wider audience. And the price makes it cheaper than the standard Netflix plan, but still costs more than Disney Plus. Hard to beat those guys. And HBO promises the lightest ad load in the industry, but it'll include a new ad format, so it's pause ads. So this is interesting. When you press pause and get up and get a drink or whatever, you'll see an ad on the screen for something not necessarily. Maybe it's moving.

I don't know. Maybe it's just a picture or something. It'd be interesting to see what that looks like. Ad supported subscribers will get access to the full HBO Max content. But with one big exception, they won't be able to access the Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers movies that will be premiering on the same date as they're streaming in theaters. And we've talked about those deals in the past. So a couple of carved out exceptions here again, only to confuse customers and make them scratch their heads. Can't be easy.

But $10 for the HBO Max, access to HBO Max, not so bad. The ad-free ad support service will launch first week of June in the U S followed by 39 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean by the end of the month. And then Europe will take the longest reach hopefully by the end of 2021. So we'll have to see how that goes. We were just talking today about grab, grabbing HBO Max back and paying for a subscription for a couple of shows that'll be coming out on it. So, uh, we canceled that one a while back and, uh, it's kind of been on the back burner, but maybe time to get back in. I'd probably pay five extra dollars for no ads though. All right. Um, big news from Apple this

week. Apple's getting to Apple music is getting two big updates next month, support for high-quality lossless audio and for spatial audio through Dolby Atmos. All these features are going to be free to all subscribers, including those on family and student plans, because the company says it'll have 75 million lossless audio songs in its catalog by the end of the year, 20 million to start. I saw a lot of press on this over the last couple of days and the

rollouts just seems kind of awkward because you really can't use the lossless audio if you're using, well, really any Apple product. I guess you could stream it out. You'd have to hook some kind of like USB device up that had the better DACs in it, but you won't be able to use the headphones. Headphones don't support it. And since we don't have a headphone jack out, there's really no way you can get the audio out of the, I don't know, it's just kind of awkward on how they released Lossless.

In reality, Lossless is just a checkbox. They're just playing catch up with companies like Tidal. I think Spotify was even offering something better. It's just a checkbox. They're just playing catch up with companies like Tidal. I think Spotify was even offering something better. It's just a checkbox on the feature list. So that's not what I'm excited about. I'm actually excited about the spatial audio stuff. And we're going to be talking about it a little bit on our Home Tech Talks this week. So if you're a supporter of the show, you have access to those. You can go to the Patreon page, hometech.fm slash support, get you a link over there, log into that,

and you can get the link to join our home tech talks where we're going to talk about spatial audio and what that can mean for industry and how we're going to pull this off. Back to Apple, the spatial audio stuff is amazing. The idea behind spatial audio, we've talked about Dolby Atmos.

Every now and then we've talked about Dolby Atmos, just kind of brought it up. It's kind of like the new big thing, right? But spatial audio is a big part of what you can do with stuff like Dolby Atmos. And what it gives you as a, if I was mixing the music, it gives you beds that you can mix into. So you get a 5.1 bed, a 7.1 bed, whatever. And you can take the audio, say the guitar sound, and treat that as an object. And you place that object in a virtual room. And then it's up to the receiver, or in this case, the Apple headphones that Apple would be streaming the sounds to, to decode those sounds and build them up within a soundstage,

a virtual soundstage. It gives you much more immersion than stereo. So think of stereo as like when you have stereo audio, you can hear hard pan, hard left and right, but the audio still feels like it's in your head. Like you still kind of feel that way when you listen to stereo audio. Atmos and spatial audio is going to be outside of your head. It's going to feel like you're in a room listening to this music. And a couple of providers were already doing, I think title was already doing this and, and had some really positive reviews on it.

I think this is going to be big. And I think it's, it's, it, this type of listening is going to be interesting moving into the future. Cause I think this is really, it's going to separate a lot of like a lot of things. Music wise, it's going to separate a lot of things for consumers who are actually able to utilize and use this stuff. And they're going to expect that they're, you know,

one hundred and twenty nine dollar or two hundred two hundred dollar, two hundred fifty dollar headphones that they pick up. You know, they're going to expect that they're, you know, ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollar systems in their house sound the same thing, same way, and can have match the same feature. So it will be interesting to see how our industry prepares for that and gets into it with everything being done this way. Immersive mixes will be available on AirPods, Beats headphones that use the H1 or W1 chip. And the spatial audio will also play through built-in speakers on, I mean, who cares? It's just the dumb way of doing it, but whatever.

You can turn it on on your headphones. I think you have to go to the music app and settings. You go to settings, music, audio, and set Dolby Atmos to always on. And the spatial audio will be compatible with most Apple devices made in the last few years, including the Apple TV 4K connected to a compatible TV or receiver. So that's always the fun part, finding a receiver or a TV that can do Atmos. These days it's kind of tough because

there's no inventory. We just, we don't have them. So, oh boy. Let's see. I think that's the last one. So all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found in the show notes at over at hometech.fm slash 351. And don't forget, you can join us live in the chat room starting sometime between 7 and 7.30 PM Eastern. You can find out how to do that at hometech.fm slash live or following us on Twitter. I usually tweet out, hey, we're going live and give you kind of the same link there too. Pick of the week. Got a great pick of the week.

I need to bring this back up. Let's see, pick of the week. Cable is here. This is really cool, guys. I'm really impressed with this. Tell me what you think. I'm gonna go ahead and read it. I'm just gonna read this

because it's a great press release from this company here. And the company is called Kable. It's K-A-Y-B-L. And this is a new service that bundles your favorite content for one flat monthly fee. All that garbage we talked about earlier about HBO, it doesn't matter. Here's what they say in their press release here. Let's's face it streaming is broken content constantly disappears from your favorite platforms new services pop up every day and each streamer comes in with confusing variety of pricing options and we just reviewed that so that's why we've created a brand new service that bundles all your favorite content into one flat

monthly fee called here we go cable Our service is different from those old school digital content providers. Thanks to our patented browsing channel, uh, uh, browsing system called channels. That's with a Z it's trademarked. Pretty cool. Our content is constantly looping on thousands of numbered streams that operate 24 seven. That's right. No more having to type out all the letters and the marvelous Miss Maisel one by one. No, you don't have to do that. Or use a voice recognition remote that misinterprets WandaVision as WandaVision. With cable, searching for shows is simple thanks to their... Now, this is cool.

They have this new feature called GYD, and I think it's pronounced guide. It's a state-of-the-art search engine that displays all of the content on cable on a single grid organized by channel number and time of day. This is amazing. This is amazing. So, uh, it says, say goodbye to, uh, to trying to remember which streaming service offers little fires everywhere. Uh, say goodbye to that, getting that op, that trial of Apple TV, just a wide Ted lasso andso. And say goodbye to forgetting the family Netflix password and having to call your dad and figure out what it is. Your dad doesn't text back right away, so you call him. But now he wants to catch up.

It's been a while since you last talked. And then you finally get around to asking him for the password. He nags you about the fact that you're still in the family phone plan even though you're 30 and married. So now you're going to have to spend the rest of the night looking on how to switch to T-Mobile. Instead, you can join the millions of cord adders. That's pretty cool.

They have a whole thing about this. Who are ditching streaming for the service where everything is included at one flat rate. There you go. This is brilliant. I will link to this. They go on and on in this story here and have so many more great jokes

about cable. But it's so well written. I just had to put it in for the pick of the week this week. It is just too good. So if you have any feedback, comments, picks of the week or great ideas for the show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. I do want to thank everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about our patron 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, the hub and where you can get news before it happens. Because I can tell you the SnapAV stuff, that news broke a little bit earlier in the hub than it did anywhere else. And yeah, yeah, the hub, that's where, that's where you got to go. And it also gets you access to the home tech docs, both the recorded versions, and you can join us live when we have those typically on Thursdays around 3 PM Eastern, maybe three 30. I'm not sure, but if you join, you go into the, the, the final link to join those and you, you'll have access to them. You can, it's just basically a zoom webinar and it'll remind you just like it

reminds me when it's supposed to be. So if you want to help out, but can't support the show financially, totally understand, just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. And with that wraps up another week of two weeks of home technology news. I am exhausted now. I'm going to have to take another vacation, but that was a lot to cover in the last two weeks. Crazy news. Well, I'm sure there's going to be more on SnapEV and then what they're doing to go public. It's not a,

it's not a, like, they've got to basically show their books to everybody. And I think that'll be interesting for the industry to see how, I would say, one of the largest, or if not the largest provider of equipment and services maybe, into the industry is doing financially and what they see, uh, as, uh, you know, in there, you have to put risks, uh, into the industry. You know, one of them, I remember control four had in there is like a risk. Here's a risk as an example, housing is kind of a fickle thing. And if housing, if the housing market goes down, then a lot of the profit from control four would go down. So I imagine we'll see something like that written in, but I'm very curious to see what SnapAV considers risks to investing in their company

because they're going to have to put that before they go public. So anyway, that wraps up this week. And thanks everybody. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, Eddie, for joining in the chat over there. We appreciate you guys adding to the show. And yeah, thanks for listening and we'll talk

to you next week