HomeTech.fm - Episode 357 - Smart Home Hoops

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

This week on HomeTech: End of an era at Crestron, watching movies from home looks promising, and is the smart home worth it? All of this and a little bit more on this week's podcast.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, July 16th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week, got a couple of home tech headlines to dive into. Got a little discussion topic that has kind of come up I want to chat about. And yeah, yeah. Oh, I got to mention at the top of the show to check out our Home Tech Talks. I am seriously behind on getting those uploaded, but I have started the process, which involved, thanks to Greg, who is waving high over here in the,

in the chat. I'm just going to add you in real quick. Hey, there we go. Uh, thanks to Greg. Uh, he's been, uh, instrumental in, in me being delayed. I'm going to blame it all on you, Greg, not my procrastination. Uh, but I had to edit a couple of things. And when you have to edit something in video, uh, it just takes a lot longer. That's why I don't edit this podcast for video on YouTube, other than maybe like chopping off that long intro I used to have. So yeah, yeah, that's what's taking me so long, other than, you know, just not having the time to get to it. So I should have those up.

I've got like four of them done, I think. I've got to get in and edit some other things. So there's a couple of things here and there. Not much, but I just, you know, while I'm cleaning them up, I'm going to get them cleaned up and then get them posted. So last week we had a really good conversation on how to fail, which was kind of a broad topic that, you know, how to fail in front of a customer,

how to fail with a smart home product, how to use the wrong product, that kind of thing. So, um, thought that was a fun, fun conversation to have. And I was glad to sit down with everybody and just chat a little bit about that. Uh, tomorrow we've got printer troubleshooting with James. He's going to be covering, uh, steps one through 12. And, uh, that's a pretty good inside joke. If you're there in the hub with us every day, you'll find out that, you know, sometimes printer troubleshooting is a thing. It's a thing that we all have to deal with. So with that, why don't we jump into some Hub & Tech headlines? So big news after more than 30 years with Crestron, including the last eight

as president and CEO, Randy Klein will be retiring this year. Dan Feldstein, current chairman and COO, and the son of Crestron founder George Feldstein, will assume president and CEO position. Randy Klein shared, quote, later this fall, I will be retiring from this wonderful company that has been my home and second family for more than 30 years. As president and CEO, I make a lot of decisions every day. This is one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made. The timing is right. Crestron is in a better place than it ever has been. We emerged from the last 16 months stronger than ever, more united and more resolved to take on future and all opportunity that it holds.

So really good. Really. Why not? Why not? If it's time to retire, this probably felt like the right thing to do. This is a this is a I mean, Randy is a staple in the industry. He's been been around for so long, especially in the Crestron world. It's hard to imagine Crestron without him. But we've got Dan here, who, again, is the son of George,

the founder. And he's been in Crestron for 25 years. And he has the background in computer engineering. He spent the first decade at Crestron in in R and D and, and designing a number of technologies that Crestron still uses today. So I think there'll be an excellent hands in the future. I don't, I don't think we have anything to worry about since, since then he's been working alongside Klein and former CTO, Fred Bargetzi. So big names in the industry it's end of an era. And I got to say, things are looking up for Crestron, especially in residential, which is primarily what I'm involved in. There's not a day that goes by right now that I'm not hearing something good about Crestron Home or

getting a request to develop drivers for it from a manufacturer. So it will be interesting to see where Mr. Feldstein takes us. So I thought this was interesting. Disney and Marvel superhero adventure Black Widow captured a

massive $80 million in its first weekend, crushing a benchmark for the biggest box office debut since the pandemic.

The film starring Scarlett Johansson is the first from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to open simultaneously in movie theaters and on Disney Plus, where subscribers can rent Black Widow for an extra $30. It's not really, I mean, it's, yeah, whatever, rent. Disney reported that Black Widow generated more than $60 million from streaming on the Disney Plus platform, marking a rare occasion in which the studio disclosed

the profits made from streaming. Disney began rolling out selected movies under the Premiere Access banner as a concession while moviegoing was impaired during the pandemic. The studio didn't share view at ship data for the previous released, Cruella and Raya and the Last Dragon, which also premiered both in theaters and on Disney Plus

for that rental fee. Right. But it's unclear if Disney will continue to report on digital rental data for upcoming films or if the studio is just selectively picking out information that looks really good. And gosh, $60 million looks amazing. Absolutely amazing. I've got to say that's the end of an era type number, right? I think we're going to see a swift departure from studios worrying too much about what theaters think and putting their properties that they're making both on their streaming services that they own and in theaters. So tough times ahead for theaters for sure if they're not getting like exclusive access to movies, especially through Disney and Marvel branding. I mean, that's wild. But to have more than half of the opening box office come from basically people watching in their home on their own TVs is pretty stark. I mean, that's, that's, that's the kind of numbers

that if you own a movie theater, you don't want to hear. Um, I, you know, it's probably, probably not a lot. It's probably not very much more to say about it. Like if you either love going to the movie theaters or you don't, I personally, I love going to the movie theaters. I love packing up the family, grabbing some popcorn in there. And we haven't really been able to do that, especially over the last year. So, um, you know, but I do, I do like this option if I don't want to go to a movie and and see, um, see, see a movie at a theater. I do like this option of, you know,

being able to watch from home. It doesn't quite give me the same experience. And, you know, it's also a lot more expensive. Like the movies we have in here in town for $30, I pretty much can buy two tickets, maybe three, and possibly some popcorn and maybe a Coke, probably not both, but at least it gets me into a movie theater. And, you know, for $30, that's, that's, it's quite a bit. It's a, it's a big reach from a studio's perspective. That's a huge margin that they're going to be making off that $30 rather than just a piece of what the ticket sales would be. So yeah, I've got to say this is, this is probably going to be the way the wind starts to blow, uh, for a lot of movies, especially these blockbuster type movies where in the past, I think studios were hesitant on separating them, divorcing themselves from

movie theaters. Uh, I think here in the, uh, in the future, we're going to see these go out side by side, and the market's going to determine where people want to watch movies. So it'll be interesting. It'll be interesting. So got a quick discussion topic here. I'm going to switch back out of this. There was an article over at C-Pro by Jason Knott that caught my attention. And it was he was complaining about a Gizmodo take on smart home industry and the title of it's pretty incendiary. It says the smart home isn't worth it. I'm not willing to jump through all the hoops needed to make my home barely smarter. And it's by Andrew Lizwinski. Lizwinski, I guess.

I don't know. This is not to show for names of people clearly. But he wrote he wrote actually a pretty good article. And Jason kind of put a counterpoint to that. Jason not over at C Pro kind of put a pretty good counterpoint to that. And, you know, kind of said, if you had all these frustrations, why didn't you just hire a pro? You know, like, you know, basically what happened here is he was living in an apartment and had two or three homes that he had to automate. Everything was working well. Everything worked exactly the way he did when he moved into an actual home. The stuff that worked in the apartment didn't exactly work in the home.

And it was just a bit overwhelming trying to figure out what to do in every room in the house rather than the two that he had to manage before. You can see where all this is going. He basically just threw his hands up and walked away. Let me quote from the article here. Sorry. A smart home that responds to your every command and automates mundane tasks is a tantalizing dream, but the reality is that given the current limitations of fixed technology, competing standards, and devices that quickly become obsolete, trying to make that dream a reality today just isn't worth all the effort. Um, so, uh, Jason not actually pointed out the, uh, the, the car analogy where, uh, you know, you say you're pretty good at changing that, uh, changing the oil and what your 1985 Datsun or whatever, but now you bought the BMW and you

can't, you're frustrated and can't figure out what the oil filter is. Yeah. It's, it's take it to a pro, you know, take, take it to someone who knows what they're doing to work on the fancier car that you got. And the same thing can be applied to a home, owning a home, you know, versus owning an apartment or renting and that kind of thing. But aside from that, I don't, I really didn't get the impression that hiring a professional was on the radar of, um, Andrew over there at Gizmodo. And he was basically trying to take the products that were the wrong products that were working before they were the wrong products. Let's just say that like they worked well in an apartment, they were designed for his apartment products that were the wrong products that were working before. They were the wrong products. Let's just say that. Like they worked well in an apartment. They were designed for his apartment.

And without knowing that he designed it for his apartment, that's exactly what he did. He designed all of this stuff to live in his, he kind of went over all the stuff that he was doing with vacuums and lights and turning on lights when he arrived. All of that worked well in a two bedroom or two room apartment didn't work well in a four bedroom house with living room, dining room and all that good stuff. So he, he, it's, it's, it's one of those things where you have to have the right products. Um, and it, this kind of goes into a second point about, um, products becoming obsolete. I think these products became obsolete not because of technology reasons. Like it sounded like he had Philips Hue, which are still widely used.

I don't think there's any real issue with those. But these became obsolete because they were moved out of where they were designed for. And it's kind of been one of those things, like I said, I've been complaining about for years, that these products are designed for those two bedroom apartments. We don't really have very much in the consumer space that's designed for an entire house. There's a couple exceptions out there. You have Lutron Caseta would be a really good example of a product that has roots in the pro side and gives DIY access to a product that is better designed to fit into a larger house or even a larger apartment or condo, that kind of thing, than its counterpart like Philips Hue.

So I don't know. He goes on to talk about the competition in this article. And I really think, I'm not really sure what his point was there. He's kind of saying that everything's kind of revolving around these three camps, three or four camps, you know, Apple, Google, Amazon. uh, he's hoping that this, this new standard matter is going to come out and solve all the problems. I gotta say, I I've, I've been hearing people bang on that drum, uh, for the past, I don't know, a few months now matter is just Zigbee folks. It's not anything impressive. Zigbee has its own problems, which you will find out when you buy new, these new matter products, they're, they're going to work in a different way. Um, what matter is going to do for us is it moves all these problematic problems off of wifi

and onto a different network that's actually designed for internet of things type gadgets, right? Um, the reason these Pico controllers from Lutron work so well, I'm looking for the one on my desk, is because they don't operate on Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is not designed for what we're using it for today, especially in the smart home. And I can tell you by my own experience and being frustrated with Wemo devices and heck Ecobee over there, you know, just connecting from HomeKit from time to time. I haven't had a single problem since I upgraded my Wi-Fi network to a way too expensive system. And it was provided by work and all, but I don't expect everyone to go out there and have, I don't know, six or $7,000 in Wi-Fi access points and network switches.

It's just not practical. We should have this stuff working on a consumer-grade network. We should have all this stuff working on what you're provided by from maybe your ISP or your cable provider or something like that. Everything should be built for the lowest common denominator, and you shouldn't have to have enterprise-grade Wi-Fi to make a Wemo switch work. It just doesn't make sense. And I think that's what this article was getting to. Um, and I, and all the hoops that have to be jumped through to make a smart connected home actually work.

Not that you're actually interested in hiring anybody or, or, or, but you really want to get this done. It's just, there's, there's a lot of like headwind already just stacked up because of the technology. Um, matter, matter is going to get us a little bit further down that road. That's all it's going to do. It's going to, it's going to give you the ability to use a different network. That's not wifi anymore. It's not going to give you the ability to take a device and connect it to Apple and connect it at the same time to Amazon. That's not going to work. That's not how Zigbee works. Zigbee is a secure network layer.

It's going to connect to Apple, and that's how you're going to use that device. Now, what it does give you the ability to do is to break that connection from Apple and switch it over to using Amazon if you get tired of using HomeKit. But it's not going to give you like this ubiquitous view of the home. That's nothing's working that way. Nothing was ever designed that way. You have one hub in the house and that's what things are going to talk to. And these big companies that are really interested in having you in their silo, um, and their walled garden, I guess, uh, that's, that's what we're, that's what you're going to see from now on so I don't know if the competition thing is going to go away there's a number of other products out there

even in the DIY space like Home Assistant and all that good stuff that really are doing a great job of bringing all these things together and I have no doubt that there will be some way that Matter devices are going to be supported through something like home assistant in the future. So I don't know this, this article kind of goes all around just asking basically, is the smart home worth it? He's concluding that it isn't. And I don't know. It depends on your level of, uh, your, your level of, of how much headwinds that you want to run into, right?

I have cars that I have to work on. I do not like working on cars. Every bone in my body hates working on cars. But I know how to do it. And that almost sticks me in a position sometimes where I just kind of have to grin and bear it. Like, Oh, I'm going to have to change that, uh, that clutch cylinder. You know, like I know where it is. I know how to find it. I know how to fix it, but I don't ever want to. And that's where hiring your pro may come in handy for some people. I actually just dropped my car off at the shop because I

don't want to take apart the dash to replace some little broken, you know, trim piece. Is it going to cost me money? Yeah. But do I have time to do it at my house? No, it's going to sit there and be broken for years if we just don't take it down there to get it done. So six one way, half dozen the other. If if if you hire a professional or try and do something yourself. But at the same time, all the hoops are still necessary to jump through. And I think that's what this article is. If I, if I distill this article down to everything, all those hoops of, of, of planning out a home technology package, getting it into your house and working properly, working exactly the way you want. I still think those hoops are there. No matter which direction you go,

if you go DIY, you may have a little more work, may have a little more elbow grease to put into it, but you still have those hoops to jump through. If you hire somebody, they're going to have a little work of setting the thing up. But there's, like I've said, there's no way that an integrator coming into your house is going to be able to do those lifestyle programming changes. We're starting, we interviewed a couple of weeks back with Oro and they're trying to do some things where those lifestyle programming things are taken off your plate as a homeowner and put kind of into like AI or smarts and that kind of thing. I hope that we see more devices trying to take that on in the future. Apple is trying to do

something like that or had tried to do something like that. A couple of releases back where they suggested some automation routines or just gave you some, a couple of templates to follow. Not the best experience, I still don't think. But, you know, I'm hoping in the future we start to see some of these devices that are calling themselves smart actually be smart. And I've got to fall on the side of the Gizmodo article a little bit more than the CE Pro article on this one. It's all the hoops. They're all still there. They're all still painful.

And after five years of recording, five, six years of recording this show, everything is still every headwind that you have still exists. And I think we're going to get to a point here shortly that we have a standard that at least three big companies are excited about, but I don't think that's going to get us all the way there. We still have a ways to go, both DIY and on the pro side. So I'm looking forward to it.

Hopefully we'll start seeing these manufacturers step up and going to the next level with their products, not just introducing little devices that can hook up to a network. Yay, I think that's old hat now, right? Like now we're looking for reliability. Now we're looking for something that goes in and disappears. It's seamless

integration that I don't ever have to worry about once I set it and I forget it. And I think that's, that's the next goal. That should be the next step in the evolution of the smart home. So with that, all the links and topics discussed tonight can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash three five seven. Again, that link is hometech.fm slash three five seven. Again, that link is home tech.fm slash three five seven. And don't forget that you can join us live in the chat room Wednesday, starting sometime between seven and seven 30 PM, seven 30 PM Eastern. Find out more about how to do that at home tech.fm slash live. And I got a pick of the week here. This is a fun one. I like set design. I like movies. I like TV shows and nothing brings you into the movie, uh, more acting a little bit, I guess, but like the set design,

the sound, how the movie looks and feels and all the little small details that you may notice. Um, that that's, that's really, I really like geeking out on that. It sets the tone of the movie more than anything. And all the work that can go into building out a set on a movie is just amazing to me. What prop masters do to develop something that may just be a little piece of plastic, you know, that the actor has to hold in their hands. And then like we see it and there's all these digital effects and everything on it. Um, I think all that's really cool. Uh, but all the practical effects and things that don't have special effects really around them. I think you really notice those. Um, one, one of, uh, it's a lot of extra work, uh, to, to do. And you start, you know, you really do notice

that in, uh, in some films. So, um, like say like Harry Potter, uh, has all of those like, uh, artwork and posters and newspapers and all that was done from a shop called Mina Lima, uh, over there in the UK. Uh, and if you actually visit the, the, the studio there in the UK, uh, they have this huge wall of all, like all the props and everything that came from these guys. And it's just incredible to sit there and look at it. It's like, Oh yeah, I saw that in the movie. I did. You saw in the background somewhere like that's, that's crazy. Um, so my pick of the week this week is actually, uh, a different franchise altogether. Uh, Loki over there with the Marvel universe, um, has a really incredible, uh, set on their show. And it's, uh, there's a good interview over at the verge with, uh, Casa Farhanani, Far, Far,

see Farhani. There we go. Uh, who did all the work on Loki. I'm sure he had a team as well. And, uh, here's a couple of quotes that they had, they had a. They had this area. I don't want to give too much away about this show if you haven't seen it, but they have like this bureaucratic organization that exists. And from its quote here, in our fiction, the TVA is a bureaucratic organization that's probably super well-funded or incepted or had been renovated in the post-war era. Imagine a bureaucracy or an organization that gets a massive infusion of resources at a certain point and then doesn't again for decades.

And then they're just using that same technology and it's slowly degrading. So CRT TVs are everywhere in this thing. 8-bit video graphics, just like old looking computers. Some of them may actually be computers from like the fifties, sixties and seventies. Uh, there's a, there's a lot going on in this show. So yeah, if you haven't seen it, highly recommended. If you're not into the Marvel stuff, I, I think this is one of those shows that kind of stands on its own.

It's worth checking out. Um, because it out because it's not a very long show. Like there's only 10 episodes or so. I think actually I think tonight is the series finale. So it's kind of like a story kind of off on the side of what would happen in something like Iron Man or Avengers or that kind of thing. So, you know, if that's not your thing, check it out just for the set design alone. They've got some really cool mid-century modern designs, computers and tables and technology.

And it just actually looks really cool. And I like that kind of stuff. So especially when it hits technology and you can see them kind of imagining how technology would be if analog technology just got better and more sophisticated and digital technology just never existed. It's kind of an interesting idea. So check that out. It's over on Disney Plus, I think is where all the Marvel stuff is these days. And yeah, check that out. If you have any feedback, questions, comments,

picks of the week, or great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. And want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to

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So check that out. If you're want to help out the show, but you're unable to financially support, totally get it. Uh, just appreciate a five-star review in iTunes or positive rating in the iPod, uh, in the podcast app of your choice. Um, that's looking at, Hey, Hey, Eddie, thanks for, for dropping in. I appreciate it. I've seen a couple of comments flying by here and, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's good to see everybody kind of joining in uh on the show here uh live uh it looks like gavin was in there i didn't see greg today maybe

oh yeah great right at the beginning right at the beginning that's right uh anyway that's that pretty much wraps up this week in home technology news i will talk to you guys next week