HomeTech.fm - Episode 356 - HomeTech One

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

This week on HomeTech: SnapAV is now Snap One plus a new S1 filing reveals the company plans a paid version of OVRC, the Onkyo deal is done, ADT sues Vivint, and are counterfeit products next in our future? All of this and a little bit more on this week's podcast.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, July 9th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson, and welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week, we've got a couple of home tech headlines to go over. Missed a week. I had everything written up for last week, ready to go, and just plain ran out of time. It's been one of those months, you know? And then, of course, over the weekend, we had a nice little hurricane blow through here.

It actually didn't come very, very close to here, but it was close enough where we got enough wind and rain last night. But, yeah, everything's all right. There's no damage anywhere that I could see. I saw a couple of like really old fences knocked over and that kind of thing, but nothing major. So yeah, it looks like we're all good here. I hope everybody up north and the northern part of the state of Florida who did get a direct hit are doing better. But just want to remind everybody about the home tech talks we have going on now.

We had a really good one last week. Didn't have the show, but had a home tech talk. It was all about Canada day. No, no, it was actually, it's actually a really good, uh, good talk. It was just, uh, four of us sitting around talking shop, which I really enjoy those types of conversations. Cause you can kind of get into deep dive and go into like really deep dive into topics that people are finding at the front of their conversation, at the front of mind, at the

front of their conversation. So go ahead and check that out. Hopefully I will have these uploaded. I know I'm behind on uploading these over to the Patreon page, but I will try and get those up shortly. Tomorrow we're going to have a Home Tech Talk. The topic is how to fail. So this is on Thursday. If you are a member, you can go check out how to do that over at hometech.fm support. It'll bring you over to the Patreon page, and that's where they're all posted. And I usually put the link in the hub as well to join us when we have those conversations. So keep an eye out for that. But what do we say we jump into some Home Tech Headlines?

All right, end of an era here. We have Vox International. And we talked about this before. But Vox International Corporation and Sharp Corporation have begun the process of acquiring assets from the Onkyo Home Entertainment Corporation. The acquisition will provide Vox, V-O-X-X, I guess, its wholly owned subsidiary, Premium Audio Company, and Sharp with the ownership of the brands, intellectual property, engineering, and manufacturing rights of the Onkyo and Integra brands. Like I said, we talked about this potential acquisition a couple months back, and it seemed at the time that it was a done deal, at least something that both companies and their shareholders kind of wanted to have happen.

So it looks like it did. Along with the deal, Vox announced that it also completed new licensing agreements for Pioneer and Pioneer Elite brands for all markets except China. And Vox said they paid $30.8 million for Onkyo, and that the company would become part of the subsidiary, NoNo's premium audio company. Still not sure what they do to plan to revive struggling Onkyo brand. It's only made money in one out of the past five years.

Last year alone, it lost over $90 million. It can't be very easy to be in the receiver game these days. This is what I think of when I've got the, uh, the, the tape deck posted here, because that's kind of what I think of when I think of Onkyo. Tybent's pointing it out. Uh, yeah, it's, it's what I think of when I think of Onkyo because they were like one of the first companies, um, that had, had like tape, tape decks and that kind of thing. So, um, especially a dual cassette deck that, that had, had like tape, tape decks and that kind of thing. So, um, especially a dual cassette deck that, that was, uh, something that was kind of unique to the Ankyo brand. So, um, yeah, I, I went with the tape deck, but I think of Ankyos, I think of Ankyos, I think of receivers and that

kind of thing. And, uh, it can't be, can't be easy to get those these days. Uh, I know that it's very tough to find any kind of amplifier or anything like that in the marketplace right now. So, yeah, it will be interesting to see what they do with this already struggling company in really tough times here. Well, kind of our next big story. Leading up to the big IPO, SnapAV is unveiled. Its new company name and logo. SnapOne. Okay. According to CEO John Heyman, the name SnapAV no longer fully represents who we are or our aspirations for the future.

And it says we kept the name Snap because of the ongoing mission to make our partners, which is what they call integrators and their dealers, lives easier. Let's see. Snap one, it's going to be really hard to change saying Snap AV. But Snap one builds upon its legacy and reinforces our aspiration to be the integrator's most valued and most trusted partner. Let's see. Among the, all right, I'm having troubles with my notes tonight. It says among the, uh, those aspirations included opening even more pro store locations, uh, snap

one. Oh man, this is really weird. Currently has 27 branches, but plans to add at least 15 more over the next 12 months. It's kind of a, kind of a big deal there. Now, I had this from last week, but we knew this was coming. We knew this rebrand was coming. When Control 4 and Snappy V merged together, what was that, two years ago now? It's hard to keep up. It was announced that the new brand name would be announced as well. So we kind of knew that this was coming, and here it is.

We all had our bets placed on, what, Snap 4? I think there's been kind of a couple of jokes placed around that. Or what would the new name be? Well, it's Snap 1. And this is kind of like a holding company that is going to hold Wirepath, which actually is the company that owns Control 4, Binary, all the subsidiaries underneath that. So it's interesting how they're going to set this up. I know all this because we have the S1 that dropped today, and I don't have any real news reporting on it. So I made it a go, being a programmer, I'm fully qualified to read S1s and, uh, kind of dive through them and see if I can figure out what, what's in them. Uh, let's see. There's

some numbers I thought that were pretty, pretty interesting and kind of go ahead and pull some of these out. 16,000 dealers domestically. Uh, so just in the U S alone, 16,000 dealers, um, they plan to use their end to end andend and one-stop shop experience to embed themselves further with those dealers. And they want to increase. So on average, dealers spend about $40,000 per year with Snappy V. They want to extend that to $240,000 per year. So it's going to be quite a big leap. They know they're saturated, it seems.

But they want to get even more of the dealer's, their customer's wallet, I think is what they, wallet share or something like that's what they called it. It's kind of interesting that they know that they're going to do that. Another big thing I kind of read into this, Oversea has 345,000 active installs, so quite large for a free platform. But SnapAVs or SnapOne in this case is looking to leverage that and bring it into a subscription model. So paid oversee is coming for sure. That's been announced today. So keep an eye out for that. I'm yeah, I'm not too big of a fan of the oversee platform. I don't think it does much. Now, if you just need to reboot equipment that doesn't work very well, it does that fairly well. You need to get in and do some remote access and that kind of stuff. It does that as well. But if you look at platforms like

Domont and that kind of thing, it's just head and tails. It's just missing a bunch of features. And those features would eventually cost SnapAV a lot of money or SnapOne. So I'm thinking what they're going to do is bring in like a Domots competitor, right? And kind of put that on top. And the dealers who have already embedded their operations with Oversea and haven't, you know, changed over to Domots or haven't been with Domots or sat over there, they'll have the option within the SnapOne ecosystem, still having a hard time, to upgrade their systems and bring them into that more premium account. So it will be interesting to see how and what they do with that. But it definitely indicated in this S1 that a subscription model is coming. It was very clear on that.

There's no, I thought those were interesting, no indication of a DIY, like direct-to-consumer facing present at all. This was kind of like some of the worries that when this S1, or when the public company thing was announced, that SnapAV would be bringing in more like consumer facing portals, I guess, like e-commerce stores that were set up directly for Arachnus or, you know, some of their in-house brands like Binary or the mounts and that kind of thing. No indication at all. They are. And in fact, there is the do it for me is written all over this S1. D-I-F-M is literally in just about every paragraph.

And they use that as kind of like to explain to the investors who will be invested in this company, the people who are interested in this product line. We've talked about do it for me plenty of times before, but who are not exactly like going to do it themselves. So there is no indication in this at all that they would be doing anything whatsoever other than selling directly to integrators and having integrators resell the product to consumers. So I thought that was interesting to pull that out of there. A couple of other interesting numbers that we get to see as part of this are a couple of acquisition numbers. So big number here.

They paid $40 million roughly for access networks. That's quite a bit. And I saw that they paid, I think it's HCA, they paid $1.3 million for that one for distributors. So kind of interesting to see those two numbers set side by side. I wouldn't have thought Access Networks was $40 million, but I guess it is. There you go. Here is an even bigger number that I think kind of explains why they need to do this public offering. They have a $671 million liability in loans that needs to be repaid. They plan on using the portion of the filing proceeds to repay that loan. And Hellman and Friedman will still own a controlling stake in the company.

They can basically override the board, do anything they want, because they're going to own more than 50% of the company. And if you had your bets placed on S&P 4 for the IPO, for the NASDAQ symbol, it's not. I've got it here right here on the screen. It's S-N-P-O. So Snappo, Snappo, that's the NASDAQ ticker. That's what you'll be seeing on the big CNBC screens, I guess, when this goes public. And they have their fun in the sun there. SNPO for Snap One. Cool.

A lot of interesting things we found out there. We're going to have to see how this kind of all goes down. I have a feeling they're going to, I don't know, they're probably going to raise a lot of money for this. None, the stock price or dates and none of that's announced. This is basically the S1 that gets filed, gets filed with the SEC to say, hey, we're going public and we are, here's all our information, kind of gets out in front of investors. And the investor class gets to go in and buy stuff up early and basically set whatever the public stocks are going to be. And then, yeah, we all get a shot of purchasing Snap One stocks later on. So ever development story, probably a month or two before I guess that finally wraps up. But yeah, it should be interesting to see what happens with the company moving forward.

Josh AI has expanded its voice control platform through a new integration with Crestron. According to CEPro, a close engineering relationship between the companies allowed Josh AI to be given exclusive development access to help expand audio and video distribution capabilities to Crestron Home systems. Crestron Home clients are now able to enjoy intuitive control of their AV content using natural voice commands, all without requiring a professional installer to pre-program scenes or quick actions. So sounds pretty cool. Sounds like the out- the box, Josh AI experience that we're, we're kind of all used to seeing with control. And I know with the control for integration, it works exactly the way you basically come into the house, you plug it in, it discovers what's on the control for system. It discovers what's on the Lutron system, sucks all that project data

into the, uh, into, into the controller and into the Josh AI controller, so to speak, and goes from there. There's nothing you have to do. So it looks like it's good to see that the same approach can be used with Crestron Home. I don't like the words exclusive development access. I don't know who thinks that's a good idea. It's never a good idea when a company has exclusive development access. In most cases, that means an outside of the standard like API, something is being used, something that both companies have to work to maintain and make sure that it doesn't break across updates. But I'm not really worried about that with Josh AI or Crestron Home in particular.

These guys are really good stewards for this kind of integration. And I'm glad to see overall, I'm glad to see that they're able to put all this stuff together and work together to bring this integration over to Crestron Home. So it will be cool stuff.

We'll have to see how that goes in the future. All right. So moving on here. More lawsuits. I'm just going to use my little home tech sign thing for every one of these ADT lawsuits. ADT is now going after Vivint and claiming that the smart home company competitor has, quote, introduced and promoted a series of products willfully infringing upon several of ADT's patents. These patents cover ADT's investments and innovations in smart home integration, data collection, and control panel functions and interfaces, among other capabilities and features. So basically everything. According to the complaint, Vivint products, including the

Vivint home security system, Sky Control Panel, and Vivint Smart Hub violate U.S. patents that belong to ADT. Vivint believes the claims asserted are completely without merit and that a complaint is a reactionary countersuit to a patent infringement complaint Vivint had previously filed on February 25th against ADT in the U.S. District Court of Utah. Vivint complaint asserts that ADT infringed on six Vivint patents. So what does all this mean? This all means lawyers are being lawyers. I don't think anything's going to ever come of this.

It sounds like to me that these are like two big companies basically fighting out with their IP. I think what's going to happen is that neither company is going to prevail, but there'll be some kind of like backroom mediated agreement or settlement. And the lawsuits will kind of all be dropped and that'll go away. But it's interesting that Vivint filed the suit against ADT and then ADT's reaction is like, well, we got patents too. We'll just throw them at Vivint. So we'll see what happens. The thing is, is like when you bring these things to court, what could happen is you could lose and then you lose all your IP that you're holding there as a valid patent and you're unable to defend it. So I don't think either company's interested in that. And now that there's like,

this is basically a countersuit, kind of a defensive measure that ADT has done. I think we'll probably see this settled, swept under the rug and nobody will pay attention to that anymore. It's probably my favorite graphic I've ever done. If you're not watching the show live, you don't know, but starting in 2022, universalies will be available on Peacock first instead of HBO. That means that the next Jurassic World and the new Halloween movie will make their TV debut on the streaming service, also owned by its parent company, Comcast. So on big happy family. According to Variety and the Wall Street Journal, Universal's films will appear exclusively on Peacock for streaming within four months after their theatrical release, as well as within the final four months of an 18-month window. Okay, so we've got four months at the beginning, four months at the end of 18 months.

That leaves us with 10 months in the middle. So the move is being made to allow the films to be licensed to two or three additional partners for the remaining 10 months, with the idea being that no one will have exclusive rights to the films over that period, and Universal can kind of avoid having like an oversaturated marketplace for the movies. And kind of when you see a movie like everywhere,

nobody likes that, but it's kind of nice to see a movie like everywhere, nobody likes that. But it's kind of nice to get like new things to come like pop up on Netflix every now and then. It's nice to see that. But when you see like the same five movies like trending now on Netflix all the time, kind of gets boring and stale. So they're hoping to avoid that. Article notes that streaming platforms are willing to pay top dollar for popular movies in an effort to stand out from their increasing number of competitors. So kind of neat that we're going to see some of these. This is not an exclusive deal. I guess it is for Peacock for like four months, but it's kind of interesting to see how this is going to work. Like this could be kind of a model that other studios could follow,

like give their parent company, you know, access four months before, four months after, and then, you know, turn it over for 10 months to other companies to license and stream to. So all a new industry, kind of have to keep an eye on it and see what's going on there. But all right, so moving on, kind of a discussion topic

that I wanted to bring up. There was a really cool article over in CEPro that kind of got me thinking about something I haven't thought about before. And we've all been warned and we've on the show here have definitely been warning of this global electronic shortage uh at least since the beginning of this year maybe to the end of last

year i'm not sure at this point and uh dealers now are beginning to see what that all looks like no sonos tv's out of stock can't find avrs you know onkyo av. They just don't exist in 2021. So that's step one of this, right? So eventually these companies are going to get products and they're going to come back. But the question now is, what about the components that are being put inside of them? Are they really what they claim to be? And so this article over at CE Pro really got me thinking about the quality of products that are being produced and manufactured in 2021. And now that experts are saying like this shortage that we're seeing could also lead to counterfeit components, not even the products that exist, like the components inside of them, the IC chips, those could be fake underperforming, not, not fake, but like maybe like an underperforming version of the chip that say, you know, I'm not going to say Sonos orders

some specialized electronic piece for a tiny little part inside of one of their players. Well, it gets shipped in and it's labeled exactly what it should be. And Sonos hooks it up and puts it all together and ships it out, and it's not the right part. It comes against some edge case in some piece of software that they're writing two, three months, two years down the road, who knows? And it hits the edges of what that chip can actually do? You're going to have a problem. It's kind of weird, huh? So a couple quotes here I pulled out of this article. Dignata Das, he's a researcher in counterfeit electronics at the Center for Advanced Lifecycle Engineering, said, If next week you need to get 5,000 parts or your line will shut down, you will be in a situation of distressed purchase and you will put your guard down.

You won't keep your rules for verifying the vendor or going through test processes. This is likely to become a big problem. So we're already seeing that now. We know that vendors and manufacturers are having a tough time even finding like resistors. I think Greg actually posted not too long ago, maybe last month or the month before, a spreadsheet that had resistors at 52 weeks out. Like resistors, these are the tiny little parts and pieces. This is like the most basic component that's in every single electronic device multiple times. Like it's

not like you just have one resistor in your, you know, iPhone or Apple watch or control for a control for device or receiver or anything like there's, there's hundreds of them and every electronic device and they have a 52 week lead time. So the order you put in today, you won't see those parts for another year. Crazy. Steve Calabria, I guess, a member of the Independent Distributors of Electronics Association, believes that it's only the start

of a wave of counterfeit semiconductors making their way into the market. He says, quote, I think we're on the cusp of a major problem here. The worldwide shortages have opened up the door for criminals to exploit the electronic component marketplace. And I'm seeing early signs of this already. He goes on to say, we're seeing companies that have never been rated by any other company in the industry showing significant quantities of parts that are in shortage. So what it sounds, he says, it goes on to say,

but what sounds too good to be true is too good to be true. So what can we do, right? What can integrators and consumers do? I don't think there's much. We're all scrambling right now just to get the completed products, right? And we're not really concerned about like a tiny little IC chip inside that may be counterfeit or under like spec'd under what it should be. So there's some of these things, some of these things will get caught by manufacturers before they put them into the products or as they're testing the products on the way out the door, they may see those in the assembly line, but surely some of them are going to get out and end up in our hands. And this means that products are going to underperform. Maybe they'll fail faster because they're running

outside of the tolerances. Um, I don't know how this is all going to be solved. I guess we're just, we're just going to kind of work our way through this mess. Right. Uh, so it's, it's, I don't even know, like what happens down the road. Is there insurance for this? I'm sure a recall would maybe an order, you know, if, if some speaker manufacturer ships out a smart speaker that underperforms and fails in two years, are they going to recall it? Or are they just going to say, well, tough luck? Who knows? No, I'm not sure how this is going to go, but it will be interesting to see how this does play out and we'll have to keep monitoring it. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on the show notes at hometech.fm slash 356. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for a weekly newsletter.

Actually, don't do that weekly newsletter very much anymore. But while you're there, don't forget to check out a patron page over at hometech.fm slash support, and you can sign up for the Hometech Talks and come join us there for some cool conversations that we're having. Again, the link is for the show notes is hometech.fm slash 356. And don't forget, you can join us live in the chat room, like it looks like Ty and Greg have done tonight. Usually on Wednesdays starting 7 to 7.30 p.m. I'm a little bit early tonight.

It's about 5.45 p.m. But I typically blast that out in the hub and on Twitter. So you can find out more about how that happens over at hometech.fm slash live. All right, let's get over to the pick of the week. Oh, man. So what happens when you really need internet on the road, but you don't believe in 5G or LTE hotspots? Well, why not mount one of these new fancy satellite dishes

that gets internet from the heavens on the hood of your car? And that's exactly what a man in California did. And not only did he get high-speed internet, he also got a ticket for the visual obstruction. This is the craziest thing I've ever seen. They said a transcript of the CHP Antelope Valley's Facebook page said, Sir, I stopped you for the visual obstruction on your hood. Does it not block your view while driving? The driver replied, only when I make right turns.

That's a ticket. The driver told CHP officer that they were using the hood mounted dish to have Wi-Fi for business. They run out of their car. OK, this is this, this is illegal. You can't do this. And they don't have, SpaceX doesn't have the regulatory clearance to even mount these on cars yet.

In fact, I don't think they were even claiming that they would be doing that in the future because the dishes are so large. They're hoping that they can use this technology on uh, like yachts and that kind of thing, uh, to get high speed internet into those areas. But man, uh, this, this doesn't seem smart and at least mount it maybe on your trunk of your car rather than on the hood. I don't know. There's probably, there's probably some other places that you could, you could mount this particular satellite dish and not have any problems seeing out your windows.

So there you go. There you go. 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 hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. I do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, and especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page.

If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm to learn how you can support Home Tech 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 you go over, get you over to the home tech talks where you can rewatch those, or, um, you can join us every week. Um, let's see if, uh, if you want to help out the show, but can't support financially, totally understand, just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. And with that, we wrap up another week of Home Tech News. Actually, two weeks of Home Tech News now, as I'm a little bit behind. Hopefully, going to get back in the saddle. I'm trying to get some interviews lined up. I also have

some kit that Lutron sent me that I think I'm going to actually get some more of it to try and put something together. I'm not too sure. They sent me a, um, one of the wireless outdoor, um, what's it called? Wireless outdoor switch things. And, uh, I've got to find something to do with that mostly because I don't have any, any outlets outside that I can think of that I could plug it into. So I've got to figure out something. I would normally use it for like Christmas lights, but it's not the kind of year that not that time of year. Um, so yeah, anyway, we'll be, if you've got any ideas, send them over to me. I'd love to, uh, love to try things out. Um, but I've got, I've got a bunch of stuff, uh, to kind of test and play around with, including some of their Pico controllers go right here. Um, So I know this good product, I've used it in the past, but I'm going to try and put something fun together. So I'm going to be thinking about that

and see what I can do with it here in the near future. And with that, like I said, another two weeks of Home Tech News. Hopefully I'll see you back next week. Have a great weekend.