HomeTech.fm - Episode 361 - Empty in Indy

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

This week on HomeTech: Major vendors start to cancel on CEDIA, Wyze is at it again, new TCL TV pricing, and is T-Mobile testing fiber? All of this and a fun pick of the week on this week's podcast.

All right, here we go. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 13th. Friday the 13th. Oh, yeah. Explains why I'm recording so late. But from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. And welcome to Home Tech Podcast. A podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. I got a number of home tech headlines I didn't think I was going to have this week, but I guess I'm not recording the show on Wednesday. I'm waiting until almost Friday.

Heck, it's like 9 o'clock on Thursday right now. Greg's here. Greg's here. Welcome to the show, Greg. I'm going to bring you in. There you go. Welcome. Thanks.

Thanks for swinging by. But yeah, it's been a busy week. Very busy week. But I needed to get something out tonight. There's been a lot of news actually this week and kind of picking up some pieces and missed stories from the last couple of weeks. But yeah, clearly going to happen. Looks like Greg's in here too. Two Gregs. I've got Greg S and Greg R. Thanks for swinging by. But hey, I do want to mention our Home Tech Talks this week. We had a pretty good discussion actually today since today is Thursday,

but last week was a design review part two. This week was the SEO generated title was the death of custom. I don't know if that didn't really gather too many more people, but we had a fun conversation about a lot of interesting ideas kind of floating around about what custom AV and custom install is. And is it going away? And the consensus seemed to be that no, it's not. It's not going anywhere. But we had a pretty good discussion. There was also a pretty good discussion in the hub too. So if you are a member of the Home Tech Podcast, you should have access

to definitely the back catalog or the back catalog of at least the conversation that we had there in the hub. I still have not. these last couple of weeks have been insane and it all kind of revolves around work and work and more work, but I have not, still have not been able to get some of those things put up. So I'm hoping to do that. Some of the older home tech talks,

hoping to get those put up as soon as I can. A number of them already edited and I just need to post them up. So hopefully you guys will start seeing those soon. Sorry that it just has not happened, but I am committed to getting them up. I download them every week, and Zoom yells at me every single time we record

that I'm over my balance in recording because these things are about an hour long. And for some reason, it records it in like 4K, even though everybody's camera is like potato vision 320 on the Zoom recording. So it's all gotta be resized and worked around and all that good stuff. I don't know why Zoom does that,

but I guess it's just to give me a headache. And yeah, there you go. But with that all said, what do you say? We jump in to some Home Tech Headlines. Well, what a week in Home Tech Headlines it was. Earlier this week, Savant Systems announced that it decided to pull out of the Cedia Expo, scheduled for the beginning of September in Indianapolis, due to concerns surrounding health and safety. As the COVID Delta variant continues to fuel a new wave of infections

around our country, many potential attendees are likely to make the same calculation. Savant had a pretty large booth. I think it's about 4,200 square foot booth. It's one of the largest ones at the show. And they also announced that all their training would be taking place, not at the expo, but virtually. So they've kind of pulled all their employees out of that. As I was writing this up today, a similar story dropped from SnapOne, which is also SnapAV, massive company, and Control4. I think they probably had the biggest booth or the biggest pair of booths. Usually they have two, one for control four and one for snap av um they are now pulling out of the show and will not be um attending the show the expo this year um cd expo did kind of like in between all this cd expo did uh release a statement saying that they were expecting around 10 000 people to show up at the show with only 6,000 current registrations.

So that's far fewer than the 20,000, 25,000 that we've seen attend in the past. And as far as those Delta variant concerns, CDS said they will not be requiring masks for attendees at the show at this time. But if anything changes in the future, they'll update all that on their website. And I've heard more, you know, since all this, you know, the control for Snap One, I guess, thing and and Savan. I've heard rumors of more companies that are talking about making a decision in the next couple of days. So kind of an end of an era, I guess, for these shows. It's we've definitely talked about this in the past that i think that these big shows they're

they're great to go to um but i think it's they've seen their their time and um one of the things i think kind of going back to bob madonna and what he said uh in in his letter to dealers he said we look forward to meeting you assuming safer conditions early next year as Zavant prepares smaller targeted events for 2022 in Q1. So I'll be interested to see how that plays out and how other manufacturers react to that as well. We've seen Crestron do that in the past with great success and by all accounts from dealers that I talked to, it's like, it was great to have these little local shows or regional shows that you could go to and get tons of great hands-on time. I think we're going to see a lot of companies start to do that here in the future because going to these shows while they're fun, they do cost a lot of money. Um, not only for,

if you're a dealer or an attendee, but it costs millions of dollars in some of the cases of these larger companies. So making the calculated move not to attend saves you tons of money that you can put into other marketing efforts. And clearly, Zavant sees that effort as smaller events, smaller targeted events. I thought that was an interesting idea.

So we'll have to see what that looks like in moving into 2022 and forward. And I just want to take a second and say, please go get a vaccine. Just I'm so over all this dumb stuff. I'm so over not attending shows, not to seeing friends. Just please, if you can, go get a vaccine. The goal here is to stay out of the hospital. That's everybody's goal. Stay out of the hospital. Stop clogging it up. Let people who have heart attacks, who have car accidents, go to the hospital. Right now, they're having a hard time finding beds for those people, and they shouldn't because so many people haven't gotten their vaccine. So please, if you haven't had the chance to get the vaccine, just go get it. It's easy. I had it done. I had a shot in my arm. I felt sleepy the next day. No side effects except

immense relief because I didn't have to deal with this stupid thing anymore. And that's it. It's over. You're done. Walk away. Have a great day. So stay at the hospital, get a shot, and maybe we can all see each other again sometime in 2022. Love for that to happen. I'm so over this. Moving on to more fun things. Let's do this. I got to push the button here. Wyze. Wyze launched a new low-cost security camera. Hey, who would have guessed? But this time it's got a light, a light strapped on top of it, it looks like. The new $50 Wyze Spotlight Cam released this week on the Wyze website isn't really even a new camera. It's the same V3 camera that kind of released earlier this year,

costs around $35. But it's missing a few options, like for correcting colors and brightness and all that kind of thing. But it includes a light, a 70 whole lumen light. If you look at this thing, the light is absurdly small. I mean, the camera is small too, but the light is kind of like just laughably small. But it's got 70 lumens. It kind of pales in comparison to what you would think is a normal, like the ring floodlight that has, uh, 1800 lumens and, um, the smaller ring spotlight cam, that one has 300 lumens. So 70 is nowhere near those. I don't know what this would be used for. Um, it's gotta be wired up for power has 130 degree field of view, 10 AB resolution, IP 65 water rating, weather rating,

um, kind of means it can, uh, can be good for like, you can get it a little bit of wet. You can get a little wet and you can get it, um, you know, dust around it and that kind of thing. So it's got good outdoor rating essentially to it. Um, pre-order is going on now for $50. I don't know. This is kind of a, a goofy product. Uh, I, I just, I just don't, don't see what, um, I just don't see what the appeal is here or what the use case is. I guess if you had maybe, uh, I, I have to go back to like Dave's ads and, and Jason, uh, going after the mice and, and, and, Dave Zatz and Jason going after the mice and Dave Zatz going after the chipmunks in his yard. And he puts the Wyze cameras or the Arlo cams outside and catches them that way.

But I don't know. I don't really know what the appeal of this is. So if anybody has any ideas, let me know. I just don't get it. I really don't. I'd rather just maybe spend the $35 on the camera. And then also, hey, I missed this, but Wyze actually introduced some low cost lights, believe it or not. Like they have some smart bulbs that they've released earlier this month. The average cost of those was about $12 a bulb. So

I mean, you can get an 800 lumen bulb in your 35 camera and put them together and yeah there you go and when you just turn the light on when something's moving around i guess i i don't know i don't know but uh they they have a 800 to 800 lumen tunable white uh or a 15 for the rgb version color versions basically um i say average on those prices because it's like 50 for the RGB version, color versions, basically. Um, I say average on those prices because it's like $50 for the four pack of the tunable whites and $25 for the, you can buy these in, you know, all sorts of packs of one, five, um, that kind of thing. So there's multiple ways of buying them. And you can, of course the packs bring down the prices. Uh, they all work with Alexa, Google, if this, then that, that, that, that, that, and more. So kind of runs directly on the wifi, no hub needed. Um, I also

noticed they were taking pre-orders on some tape lighting, some RGB tape lighting that they call light strip pro on their website. It runs about $30 for 16 feet and $45 for, um, I'm checking a picture of this one, $45 for, uh, 30 feet. So 32 feet, I guess. Uh, it's not a bad deal there. I don't think, um, it looks like you can control it all the ways that I talked about before with the other lights. Um, and these are neat because they're, they're using RGB pixels technology. So like, uh, each individual pixel or each individual RGB lamp is assignable in the color. So you can like segment off the color the way you want it to be. Um, Jimmy's is bringing up, uh, an interesting spotlight's a bad name. It's bright enough. Let me bring you into the show here, Jimmy. Thanks. Thanks for commenting. Spotlight's

a bad name. It's just bright enough to provide enough light for their starlight sensor, which is quite good. Um, so yeah, the starlight sensor, I want to say I've seen those in like similar type technology in other cameras. I think it's one of those like Sony products or something that you can get when you're OEM cameras and OEMing the little piece inside. And that brings out some like fake color type thing out of the dark, I guess. So what, I guess what they're trying to do with that light, just give it a little bit more color and a little more light. So the starlight sensor picks up color and that makes sense. But yeah, 70 lumens isn't, isn't that much.

Those LED tape lights, those are supposedly shipping in October. So if you want to get them, head on over to Wyze's website and you can pre-order them now. I thought it was pretty cool. Also want to mention that Wyze just closed another $110 million of fundings at the end of July. So they're going to be launching, they're going to be, this is always the key here, right? They're going to be launching AI into their camera products. Okay. Like that's everybody says that, right? Uh, Oh, I'm gonna be putting AI into something. So give me more money. And, uh, they were, they raised $110 million. It's not bad. Uh, they brought their, they brought in $146 million in funding and has about, about 30 products and around 300 employees right now. Uh think it's such a weird company. They've

got, but they've got everything covered. Now they've got like vacuums. They've got these lights, they've got nightlights that actually look pretty good. And they, they also have everything covered, including your feet. They have socks now. So I found some wise socks on their website, which I thought were pretty good. And they're, they're wacky. They're wacky socks. I love wacky socks. So I bought some they're they're $12. So half the cost of one of the cameras, but I get two socks. So I guess $6 each. That's a, that's a pretty good deal. Uh, I'll put a link to those in, in the show notes. If anybody else is interested in getting some wise socks. So, all right, moving on, moving on. TCL announced pricing and availability

for the 8K Roku TVs. 8K, yes, all of those 8Ks can be purchased for $2,100 for a 65-inch model and $3,000 for a 75-inch model. And those are expected to hit the stores next month. The two models are being pitched as an extended offering of the 6 Series TCL, which we've definitely talked about in the past.

It also comes with THX certified game mode, variable refresh rate and auto load latency features. All of those things mean to me that this is geared right towards gamers because there's really no content out there right now for anybody else to watch on their TVs right towards gamers because there's really no content out there right now for, uh, anybody else to watch on their TVs other than, you know, these gamers who are going to have consoles like PS five or the Xbox series X that should be able to push that many pixels around. Um, anything else

we're going to be waiting a long time before we see 8k content hit TVs in mass. We're just now after all these years getting to the point where we're getting 4K content hit and still not, you know, like 4K HD, you know, 4K 60, 444. We're not seeing any of that. Like that we're not hitting the extreme edges of the TVs and what they can really do. Very far, few and far between. Most of the times we're doing just,K30, 4K424, I guess, 422.

Not the full spec. So it's good enough. It seems to be good enough. People seem to be passing that off. So yeah, again, no content on these. But these clearly are game with those other features on there. THX gaming mode, the low latency features, clearly aimed at gamers. And that's who I suspect will be purchasing these to use in their video games, get those fast refresh rates and shoot

them up faster, I guess. I don't them up faster, I guess. I don't know. Fortnite, I guess. I don't know what the kids are playing these days. I, uh, I'm not a gamer. I do not, do not do play many games. Um, it doesn't work with my brain very well. And I, I just kind of like, don't like it. It hypes me up. I can't sleep all night. Decided not to play them. I'd rather sleep. So there you go. There you go. And lastly, thought this was kind of neat. T-Mobile has launched a pilot program and is offering fiber optic home internet services in a very small portion of New York City.

The company's testing the service in select Manhattan residential buildings, offering 940 megabits upload and download speeds, along with a Wi-Fi 6 router. Seems to be a small test run. T-Mobile is using like third-party providers, Fiverr, and not even running their own lines for this stuff. The company told The Verge that more information will be available when and if the program rolls out more widely. So it seems to be just an experiment to see if this is something that people would want. I'm not even sure what the pricing is, but if you do live in Manhattan and you want to check to see if you can get it in your building, the pricing, there's a dedicated website.

You can go and I'll leave that in the show notes. You can go in and check that out. It's always good to see more competition in broadband here in the States. We don't have much. I only have one offering that I can get. And luckily they have to remain competitive because everybody else like around us has two options and they can flip back and forth. But my my single street out of my entire neighborhood, my single street, I can't get fiber to the house. I have to go with cable. But so far they've they've managed to keep the rates low and keep increasing the speed, but I'd, I'd much rather have fiber where it can get matching upload and download speeds for things like tonight when I'm streaming and I get a notification that, um, for some reason

the bandwidth had to be knocked down or the quality had to get knocked down, uh, for, for the stream going out because of whatever, who knows. Uh, but yeah, I would love to have better internet service sometimes than Comcast. So there we go. Uh, but yeah, I would love to have better internet service sometimes than Comcast. So there we go. Uh, all the links and topics discussed tonight can be found at show notes at home tech.fm slash three 60. Again, that link is home tech.fm slash three 60. Uh, let's see. Did you do, don't forget you can join us live. Whoops. Went a little bit too far there. Don't forget. You can join us live, uh, Starting sometime between 7, 7.30 p.m. Eastern Wednesdays, usually, not quite tonight.

Tonight was a little bit late, and whatever the show is tonight is going out live on the feed. I really don't even have time to edit things down. I've got a bunch of work I gotta get off my desk. As you can tell, Cedia is still a timeframe people try and finish products in, so gotta get back to work.

Anyway, uh, you can find out more on how to do that at home tech.fm slash live. And I got a cool pick the week. I ran across this Twitter thread, but an old product that I had never heard of before. And I've heard a lot of them like, you know, technology from the 1970s. But this one's actually pretty wild. And it was all referencing a listing for one of these massive TV, like an eBay listing for one of these massive TV consoles. I've got a picture one here on the show, but you've seen these. And if you aren't old enough to have had one in your house or have actually owned one, um, you have seen these sitting out on the, uh, on the street corner for a trash pickup, especially in the last 10 years when people have been switching away from these

older console TVs with CRT, CRT tuners in them over to something else. Um, but these things are absolutely massive. Uh, they had, you know, sometimes they had record players into them, absolutely massive. Uh, they had, you know, sometimes they had record players into them, built into them. Sometimes they had, you know, full AV systems and stereos built into them. Um, people, I mean, they love them. They, people, people had, these were very, very popular, but in the 1970s, you can get one of these built in with a thing called card, card division and cart revision. Sorry. And,. And if you haven't heard of Cartovision, you aren't alone. So about the same time the VCR tape was being introduced, there were another few other companies.

So that's back like in the 1970s. And AFCO introduced one of these, it's called Cartovision back in the 1970s. First model of the TVs came equipped with Cartrovision. You could not buy a Cartrovision player by itself. You could only buy it built into one of these massive TV things. So it sold in, I think, 1972, I believe, for $1,350. And that's equivalent to about $8,000 today. And it was the first video cassette recorder to have pre-recorded tapes of popular movies available for rent. So that was kind of unique. And I think one of the wacky things that they did was kind of

this DRM thing that we would call today. It was more like analog rights management. Basically, if you got one of these cartridges, it was red, and you rented it, and the red cartridges, you could only watch once. You couldn't rewind. There was no being kind with these things. You would watch it once, and the movie would be over, and you would take it back and return it to the retailer and, I guess, rent another movie. They had a catalog of about 200 movies out at the time. These things were super rare. They were only on the market for probably a year. It looks like they stopped selling them in 1973 after about 12, 13 months of poor sales.

I'll link in the show notes this informative Twitter thread that I ran across. Also a link to the Wikipedia page on this CartraVision stuff. It's really cool. I like seeing this old technology and seeing how people used it in the past. But if you're interested in more, check those out in the show notes.

And that eBay listing actually went for that rare cart. It was like an entire TV with a CartraVision set player inside. It went for like $1,500. So not a bad deal for a collector or somebody that was interested in that kind of thing. Let's see, moving on here. If you have any feedback, comments, picks of the week, show ideas, anything, give us a shout. The email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form there. I do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through the Patreon page. If you don't know about the 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 the private Slack chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day to discuss the demise of the custom install industry. Cause that's, that seems to be what we're all about over there. Uh, I don't know. Uh, we were talking about a mask wearing today. That's always a hot topic, right? These days, how, how, I, there were, there was someone in, in, in, in the Slack channel today that was, that was just making polarizing comments, um, to, to get people, uh, riled up. And it was quite funny. It was actually quite funny. So, and I, Gavin, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. It was, uh, it was definitely fun, uh, there in the, in, in the hub today.

Um, every, everybody, you also get invited, uh, to our, uh, weekly chats that we've been having the home tech talks. Uh, there's been a lot of fun kind of extend the conversation, put some face-to-face time, uh, together with other members of, of the, the, the supporters of the show and, uh, just get to talk about some really advanced things and learn things. We have these discussions. We talk about, sometimes if you're an integrator, we talk about jobs that we currently have.

We may show off some plans, some ideas and that kind of thing. And if you're in the DIY space, I've had a bunch of good ideas come from people in the DIY space who have contributed back into those, in those conversations. So it's, it's, it's a great conversation, I think, for the industry to have, and hopefully we can make it bigger and, and, and get more people involved with it. So to do that, of course, you have to become a patron over at hometech.fm slash support. And if you want to help out with the show, but can't help financially totally

understand, just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. And I cannot keep up with the chat for the second week in a row. There's probably like five or six people in here flying by with things, uh, talking about, I think you guys are talking about Google beta now and all what is Alta Vista. Oh man, I'm in trouble. I'm in trouble. I have to go back and read this chat. Uh, anyway, thanks guys for hanging out in the show tonight and contributing. Uh, those who commented on some of the stories earlier, I really do appreciate, um, you, you giving shout outs here on the show. It's,

it really does help move things along as best I can read them and, and keep moving the show the's I can do anyway. Thanks very much guys. Uh, have a great weekend, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week.