HomeTech.fm - Episode 364 - Two Hubs, One Show

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

This week on HomeTech: Picking up the pieces and news stories for the past two weeks post-CEDIA, big moves in business, Sonos ups pricing on just about everything, “Input 0” coming from both Comcast and Amazon, and TWO NEW HUBS! All this and, of course, a pic of the week!

All right, all right. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. The Home Tech Podcast for Sleepy Friday here of September 17th. It's been two weeks, I guess, and I've forgotten how to do a podcast at this point. It's amazing how quickly your skills degrade into not being able to do things. But, man, like two weeks ago, back on the second, we did, we came up with a black wire and did this massive five and a half hour long CD special. So if you, if you do want to go check out kind of like the two week backlog of show, go check that out. It was an entire conversation from beginning all the way to the end.

And really good stuff in there. There was there was a couple of, you know, there's a guitar giveaway kind of in the middle. There was talk about programming and driver development towards the end. Of course, the beginning, we talked a lot about the show, CDA show, and what was going on there. And there were people who were in Indianapolis who were able to join us and, you know, kind of share their feelings on what was going on there. So really, really a great time. There was probably 20 or 30 people that were able to kind of pop in and pop out, maybe a little bit more for a while. I think there was over 100 in attendance at certain points in time. But it was a good, good talk.

And it's over on our YouTube channel. So if you're going to watch the playback of it, I need to go in and add the chapter titles to it cause it's a little kind of difficult to kind of go to the point in time that you want to with the YouTube interface and the way it is. Um, so I, I, I had started writing on all the chapters and then realized I wanted to cut some like of the intro kind of down because there was, you know, a lot of people were kind of filing in and joining YouTube was running and I don't know, it just didn't seem like it was the best time to start things up. So anyway, uh, all that is to say, go check it out. Home tech that off him. Uh, you can, there's a link there to our YouTube channel. Uh, you can go over and check out, uh, that entire talk. Um, this week we had a pretty cool home tech talk. I kind of

opened it up for an, uh, a watch party for the Apple, Apple event, where we all got to look at the new phones that we're all going to want and envy and new cameras and all this really cool stuff that Apple's doing. Really didn't expect anything to come up with home automation or anything like that. And of course, nothing came up with home automation. It was all about iPhones and iPads and the watch

and just kind of like Apple gearing up for, you know, December sales and going into the holidays with having products on the shelf for people to buy. I think that was their core focus and everything else. And that discussion was, you know, pushed off on the side. It was a very tight show and entertaining at points to watch. A lot of cool things they're doing with cameras these days. And the new phones look great. I really, really like what they've done. I was really impressed to see the camera technology of the current iPhone 12 Pros

get moved almost like just copied and pasted down to the normal iPhone cameras. Actually, the iPhone 12 Pro Max camera got copied and pasted down into the new iPhone 13s, which is like their base model phones. And that camera is excellent. So it's really cool to see that happen. I like taking photography and whatnot with my, uh, with my iPhone all the time. So it, it, it, I I'm going ahead and getting the pro and just kind of like going straight across in the models. I'm, I'm interested to see if the display is kind of enough to keep me there, but I've been really

thinking about getting the mini. I kind of going back and forth on it. So, uh, I, I, I have, uh, have held one in my hand and I really liked the size of it. Uh, and, and I have held one in my hand, and I really like the size of it. And I have had phones that size in the past and really enjoyed using them. And every time I pick it up, pick one of those ones up, I'm like, oh, I really like the size and form factor. Why can't everything be that size? But I don't know. We have these big phones now, and that's what we'll use. With that all said, let's go ahead and,

uh, Oh, one more thing on the homeset talks, uh, we're going to be trying to spin those up next week. So I've got to, uh, got to change the time on it though. And that's why I really haven't been pushing them too much. The three o'clock time is not a good time for me anymore. Uh, there's a couple of things changed on my end, so I need to find a new time to do that. And I'll probably just reach out through the patron thing and, uh, ask everyone in there to kind of like vote and let me know what a good time would be, uh, to kind of get together and chat, really want to pick those back up and, and pick back up where we left off. Uh, but three o'clock seemed to be a pretty good time. Cause we could pick up the guys in the UK who

were just kind of ending their night and kind of like we're able to chat with them. And then we were able to pick up a couple of guys here in the States towards the end of their days. And clearly wasn't all that great for people out West who are kind of probably eating lunch or something about that time, but I'm hoping to find a good time that works for everybody and we'll see what we can do with that moving forward. But what do you say uh let's go ahead and jump into some home tech headlines all right got a couple of follow-up things with with cdia uh man uh just more and more information keeps flowing out of that and uh it looks like from from from what everybody was was saying there's about 1400 people that actually attended the show. I'm still not really sure if that includes the people who were manning the booths and who were just there as part of the show.

But it really looks like it was just a really rough show this year, as we all kind of expected. I did hear back from some manufacturers who said that they were having conversations with people on site and they were really enjoying those conversations because they could just have full and complete conversations about anything and everything that potential client or dealer or whoever wanted to talk about. So it was really good having some really good extensive one-on-one time. And I know that probably some dealers appreciate that as well. That said, go check out our Home Tech Talk over there at HomeTech.fm. You can jump into that. Actually, it's HomeTech.fm slash talk. It'll bring you right to the YouTube video so you can watch it there. And it was a lot of good. We had

a bunch of manufacturers pop in throughout that period of time. And Josh AI's Alex Caposalandro was able to join us and he just kind of like popped in from like the beach or something. It was great. So something to check out. Speaking of shows, NAB canceled. And I'm waiting. I don't know what's going to happen with Infocom. Like NAB is huge.

Sony had indicated they were going to be pulling out of NAB, I think. And so I just don't know how this is going to go. I thought it was kind of strange that the Sony booth, you know, the virtual booth, that we kind of like had a little watch party for that. They spent a significant amount of their time talking about their commercial products. It was kind of like a joint, it felt like an Infocom presentation

where you would maybe talk a little bit about the home audio video type stuff, but didn't bump it right up into the professional stuff. I thought that was kind of strange and not going to make sense. They're going to probably do the same show for Infocom when that comes around. But after Cydia, SnapAV, or SnapOne, and Control4 announcement came out. It was kind of like one of the prerecorded videos. I think it was John Heyman, the CEO over there.

He kind of like introduced a number of the new initiatives and talked about their experience and why they pulled out of Cedia. If you're a Control4 dealer, you had access to that, but there was a bunch of new stuff that they, well, new and old stuff that they talked about. There's a new single-gang amplifier thing that kind of fits in a wall plate that has Alexa built in.

They said it's coming soon on that. I think they've announced this before, but I thought it was a neat product, and I think it deserves a little bit of mention here. It's a mini 5.1 receiver. I think it's been out for a couple of months, but it looks pretty cool. And it's like small. I always like small equipment that works. Stick that into like a small cabinet. You got a full 5.1 system. I might even be able to fit it behind a TV in one of their wall boxes or something. It's tiny looking, but looks like a really neat product.

They've got a bunch of IP controlled amplifiers on the way. More subwoofers and speakers. Pulse 8 matrix switches are being brought in for 4K 60 switching. I guess it's HDBaseT. And then Control 4 was showing off their new keypad designs, which are just keycaps. I don't know. They look kind of nice. They're like more of a flat look than the rounded button look and kind of a more modern look to them.

And they've got another key covers that go with them as well. So really classes up the line. And I think from what I was told and what I was reading, it looks like it's just a one-to-one swap on the keypads themselves, uh, with, with the existing keypad. So you just pull off the buttons, put the new buttons on, you got a whole new fresh look and everything, uh, for the control force system. So it's really not a bad idea. Um, uh, they announced a bunch of other stuff that they had announced before, like oversee being built into all into all the controllers. One thing that the new Control4 OS will have that it's finally like being brought back to like 2006 here is a multi-room display for like video, multi-room, multi, basically video wall control is being brought

back into Control4. This was in there years ago. It was in there when I started working with Control 4 back in the 1.3 days. Maybe it was in 1.2.5. I'm not too sure, but I know one of my very first Control 4 systems had a video wall in it. A video wall is a sports bar type system that you'd have at a big house or something. You'd have one TV in the middle, two TVs on the side. And they had a

control interface on their touchscreen. So you'd be able to swap back and forth easily, swap back and forth between the TVs, both the audio and the video. If something was happening on the left TV, you'd hit a button, swap, it would swap that for the center TV, and you'd have the audio video coming out. It's a really cool setup, but they took it away and never really replaced it with anything. It's been years and years and years that I know people have had some really strange and odd workarounds that they've had to do over time. So I'm glad to see that finally coming back, and I'm really kind of curious to play with it

and see what they've done with it. They also added a bunch of language support and general interface improvements in Control 4. So like I said, I'm really curious and looking forward to playing with that kind of stuff. As for news over the last couple of weeks, I'm having to divide this up. So I'm going to start with kind of the boring stuff, the business news, so to speak. Kind of things that are related around mergers and business in general. First, we've got to talk about is Sonos announced and began raising the prices on a majority of

their products as we all kind of head towards the end of the year when those are typically one of the more promising things that you would get, right? Kind of during their previous earning calls, they indicated that both supply and demand would factor into decision to raise prices and kind of thought that was interesting. Well, they did it. Uh, some of the big movers where the arc is going up $100 to $899, the sub amp and Sonos five, all going up $50 to seven 49, seven, uh, six 99 and $549 respectively. The Sonos 1 and 1SL will bump $20 to $219 and $199. And the Rome, the new one, will jump $10 going up from $169 to $179. Ouch.

Only the port and the move are not going to see a price increase, which is interesting. I wonder if these are like they're really hot selling products that we kind of went through here and they're just kind of like going to raise the price. Obviously, demand is a problem right now or supply is a problem with the chip things. And in fact, no one really knows what the problem here is. The Verge did manage the prior response out of Sonos, and they said, Sonos is always assessing market dynamics, including demand, supply chain, component costs, and the competitive landscape. And it led the Verge to believe and speculate that the current chip shortage

might have something to do with the price increase. But there's been no real official reason for them doing this price increase right now that they haven't really come out and said why they did it. So there you go. Another chip shortage, maybe. I don't know. I'm wondering if they aren't. I mean, skeptically, I wonder if they aren't like sandbagging sales for Q4. I'm sure they have plenty of sales built in towards the end of the holiday season that they can estimate and schedule out for both retail and custom AV. So a lot of people purchase and put in Sonos towards the end of the year here. And they've got a lot of proof to investors after that real successful launch of the Roam earlier this year and then showing really good profit margins after they let everyone go that worked at the company.

So, yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting move. We'll have to see how that one plays out. This one, here's a little story that kind of went under the radar this last couple of weeks. Assa Aboy is set to acquire Spectrum Hardware and Home Improvement Division for $4.3 billion. And if you don't know about Spectrum HAI, you probably know a few other brands that are under that division. Mainly, we're going to talk about Kwikset and Baldwin here. Uh, so if you think about Assa Abloy, that's Yale, August, Kwikset, Baldwin, that's everybody. That's, that's every single residential lock company.

I think, I think the only one I can think of a Slade, which is owned by Allegiant, I believe. So, I mean, I just, I'm blown away by this. This is wild. This is, we're almost about to, we're going to run into another, what do we have, my queue situation here. Where we have all of these brands kind of under one division. And they'll be able to do what they want and nobody's going to have to be able to do anything about it. Luckily, Slage is pretty big and pretty popular, especially among like production builders and that kind of thing. So I see Slage locks out there quite a bit, but wow, Yale, August, Kwikset, Baldwin, all under one company now. That is, that's wild.

Another one, another big news, I guess, kind of in the industry is Melrose has sold off Nortec Control for $285 million. If you're not familiar with Nortec Controls, you might have heard a few of their brands, 2GIG, Elan, SpeakerCraft, Linear, Panamax, Furman, and Proficient Audio. It's all pretty interesting news right now because we don't know who the owner of Nortec Controls is. The deal has evidently been done, signed on the dotted line. But what we do know is that the deal actually requires federal approval, which leads everyone to believe that it's a public company that's making the purchase.

And the feds are actually looking to see if there's any regulations that are going to be violated or this is going to create some kind of monopoly or something around this. All kind of big business stuff here. This is a lot of brands kind of being pushed together and just really curious who the new buyer is. Who do you think it is? Let me know. Feedback at HomeTech.fm or just, you know, tweet us at HomeTech Podcast.

Let me know. I'm really curious as to what the speculation is these days. We can't make heads or tails out of it. No, it can't be Snap AV. It wouldn't make any sense. They have control four and literally an answer to every single one of the brands there. So I don't know. It's interesting because whoever did purchase all of these brands now could stand them up to kind of like go up against snap snap one so i don't know very interesting let me know if anybody has any has any ideas let me know uh and last in the business news oro is going pro uh we had him on the show a couple months ago and uh this last

week they announced a new driver that's going to bring compatibility over to control four systems and a new pro dashboard and i'll talk about here in a second. The driver is really cool because it allows for like a completely programmable digital keybed switch kind of in the Control 4 ecosystem. And it enables Oro's like touchscreen interface to execute lighting scenes and other programming through the Control the control four system. So, um, really to me, the best part of all that is, is you can put one of these aureos in for up about the same price, if not a little bit less as a control four, six button keypad, uh, dimmer. And it's going to ha you don't have to ever engrave it. Like you can just change the engravings anytime you want. They don't wear off there. They're not going to get damaged. And you know, this type of device isn't going to be

great for every single place you want one of those six button keypads, but having the ability to add more buttons to an interface or have a dynamic interface, I think it's a great idea. So I'm super excited about that. They also announced a new remote management system they're calling Aural Pulse, which will help professional dealers, I guess, and installers remotely diagnose and fix issues that typically would require an on-site visit. The Oro Pulse is going to allow for kind of the basics, remote diagnostic information, remote reboot, checking wireless signal, and adjusting a couple of settings on the switch. So it's a great idea. And I really like the idea of a control four driver. So it's interesting to see Oro kind of step in. I know that they had like, I think their price was like

$299. I think it's now $399 for one of these things. And their prices have gone up a little bit. And I heard people in the DIY space were kind of like pushing back a little bit on that. But it kind of makes sense. If they're going to make moves in the pro space, they're going to have to have more margin built in for everyone else in that chain and for dealers to really bring it into what they want to sell. They're going to have a little bit more margin built into it. So that really sounds like they're making moves in the pro market space now and kind of going after like builders and that kind of thing. So it'll be interesting to see how that works out moving forward.

All right, so I've got some new products here. And kind of moving past the business news, a new Apple-certified hub from Thinqa. Hold on, hold on, hold on. There we go. New bell. There we go. It claims to support, to bring support to more than 3000 new accessories and devices, brings those in to the HomeKit ecosystem through Z-Wave. So this one's interesting to watch. Apple has traditionally not allowed like bridge type devices on the HomeKit platform unless the hub itself and the attached accessories to that hub communicated over an encrypted protocol.

At least that's what people say, claim. I've heard that a million times. I've heard every other excuse as to why Apple has never allowed bridge type devices on their system, but it's not completely true. Um, Lutron, you know, if you look at Lutron Caseta, they use their own proprietary clear connect RF protocol. It's not encrypted and it's been reverse engineered plenty of times. So I'm not sure why Apple would bother keeping device cool devices like this off the system. You know, just open the floodgates and let this stuff in and stop hiding behind mystery and intrigue. My reverse engineered Homebridge Control 4 setup is probably the best thing I've ever done with HomeKit. And it's worked

better than HomeKit certified devices, you know, that are, that are wifi, uh, and deployed the system. And the reason for that is because they're not using wifi to communicate out to my, my devices. Everything's hardwired between the device, the NAS drive that's, that's running the home bridge, uh, service on it and the home, the control for controller, which, you know, is hardwired into the network and runs the Zigbee, you know, network, it says everything up that that doesn't go down, that doesn't stop working. And when you have that reliable, reliable piece in between, you don't have to worry about, you know, radio interference, getting messing up Wi Fi and messing up some kind of broadcast,

you know, between an IoT device. It's, it's, it's where we're, it's, it's where we're going. It's what Matter is for. And the faster we move these IoT devices off of Wi-Fi and onto Thread and Matter, Zigbee, whatever you want to call it, and in this case, Z-Wave, the better off we're going to be. Wi-Fi is just simply not designed for IoT. And the rough edges have been clearly showing. I think that's why we're seeing these big companies finally get together and kind of group around Matter slash Zigbee, whatever we want to call it, over the last couple of years. And hopefully as we move into the next year, we'll start seeing a lot of those devices get released and people kind of getting more excited about home automation products, consumer-level home automation products moving forward because I think a lot of people got really excited about this stuff a couple of years back, put it all in,

and then it didn't really work the way it was unreliable. It didn't work all that great. They're looking for something better, and I think once we have the protocol, the foundation laid there, we're going to be a lot better for it. Anyway, super excited about this hub. It's Thinca, Thinca says, that's the name of the company, Thinca, says it will ship in Europe first for 429 euro before coming later to the US sometime next year. All right, I've got a couple of stories that this is really cool. Actually, it's all centering on input zero. And we've talked about input zero

a number of times on the show. But that's basically the idea of like, when you turn your TV on, you're watching TV, you're watching what you want to be. You're on input zero. You don't have to change back and forth between HDMI to watch something. So both Comcast and Amazon have announced that they're intent to sell their own line of smart TVs. So starting off with Amazon, they're basically going to put a Fire TV inside of these new TVs. They've got a couple of series here. Fire TV Omni series is going to feature support for HDR10, HDL, Dolby Digital Plus, and it'll start at $410 and be available in a 43, 50, 55, 65, and 75 inch model sizes. Pretty good range there. This is their higher end level tier, I guess. The 65 and 75 inch models, they're also going to get support for Dolby Vision.

So that should be pretty nice. Maybe in those TVs. They have a, this Omni series also includes smart home integrations. So you can have like picture in picture camera viewing, somebody rings your ring doorbell, it's going to pop up on your TV, kind of like what Apple's doing with HomeKit right now. Amazon says it will be rolling out an all-new smart home dashboard on these too. So you can kind of like get in and tweak device settings and that kind of thing or view devices in general around your house right on the TV screen. That's a great idea. They have a lower end line too. I think it gets those smart home features as well. Kind of mentioned that they won't have Alexa integration in it for some reason. I really wasn't too positive on that. It sounds like the Omni series offers like, you know, Alexa integration with a remote and that kind of thing. Anyway, this lower in

the lower tier line, I guess, Fire TV 4 series, it's going to start at 370 for 43 inch, 55, uh, 50 and 55 inch sizes. So, uh, there's also a new fire TV, 4k max, uh, stick that'll be coming out, uh, for $55 as well. So moving along there, uh, let's look at Comcast real fast. Uh, they have just about the same thing with just two TV models, though. A magazine called Protocol has figured this all out and is reporting that they're going to team up with Hisense to sell two TVs under the X-Class TV. And then they'll basically be powering those two TVs with the X1 operating system. So basically a cable box in your TV, essentially what that is. This is the same idea behind the, actually the Xfinity Flex system. If you've seen those, you have one of those, it's a little streaming box that you can get and watch and stream TV on.

You don't even have to be in an Xfinity or Comcast service area. I think you can get those anywhere. These TVs, that's how they're going to be set up. There's no, you know, you don't have to be in a Comcast area to get one of these. It's just basically a streaming box. The protocols also discovered the company has filed for a trademark for X-Class TV and snagged a domain up, which doesn't point to anything right now, but they actually dug a little bit deeper and found a temporary staging site that leads to a bit more details. There's going to be two 4K TV models with screen sizes of 43 and 50 inches. Apps are available on the platform, including Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Disney+, Tubi, and Pluto, as well as Comcast's own Peacock and Zumo streaming services.

New subscribers are going to get a free year of Peacock premium for activating an X-Class TV. So, okay, blah, blah, blah. I think this is all really cool, and it's actually kind of big. I think it's going to be the future of our cable TVs especially. What's wild to me is that comcast in particular is like intent on having some kind of hardware in place to support their streaming services like why not just make an app and like on every like everyone else does and make it a good app and put it out there on all the hardware they can like Apple TV or Roku. And

yeah, I know there's a beta app on Roku and I know it works really well. Like why not just make that available everywhere and stop dealing with hardware? I don't know. It just seems like, it just seems like Comcast just can't get out of that hardware bug. Um, Amazon's pretty straightforward in what they're trying to do, right? They're just trying to give you a input zero device. Um. And they want you to go directly to their services and their horrible UI and buggy ecosystem. I'm not a fan of Fire TV. I'm not a fan of Amazon Prime app. It's not very good either. But I have no doubt the quality of the TVs will kind of be what we expect them to be. And I'd be equally impressed if they're just a little bit better. You know, if we get some decent 4K Dolby Vision TVs from Amazon, you know, in that 65 and 75 inch class,

I'm sure they won't be that much. It's going to compete with something like a TCL. We'll have to see what they bring in. If they're successful at something like this, maybe they'll iterate. And over time, we'll get more better and better pictures out of them. And finally, tonight, we've got Nubikasa, the company behind the free and open source home assistant has launched its first ready to use hub that can run on the software right out of the box named the Home Assistant Amber. The device is basically a Raspberry Pi Compute 4 module, they call it a CM4 module. A custom board that's kind of been designed and has built-in ZigBee 3 radio

to control products like Philips Hue and IKEA shades. But it's also one of those ZigBee modules, radios that will support Matter sometime next year. So you can see where they're going with that. Z-Wave can be added in through a dongle and there's an M2 extension port. So if you want to put a small like laptop type SSD hard drive on there for more storage, you could. But unlike current methods of installing Home Assistant, there's just, there's no programming required. Everything you need to do,

you can just like plug just plug and play. And this is Home Assistant right out of the box. If I go back to our reviews of these, let's go back and find that episode. It was a long time ago where Jason and I kind of went through all of these. Home Assistant looked very promising. It had a great UI. But man, you had to set it up with all this, what they call YAML, which is kind of this markup language. I don't know why anyone uses it. It's horrible, but it's really hard to like, if you miss a space or you hit an inner

wrong, it just gets all out of whack and doesn't work. And it's, it's, it's really tough to use and read doesn't read well to me. Uh, but it, that's what you, you had to get in a text editor and edit this program this pseudo programming language down it really wasn't fun to do but they evidently that you don't have to do that anymore you just kind of use those mobile or desktop apps to get things set up hey perfect um it sounds like they have i mean it's been eight years they've been plugging away at this uh relentlessly so it's really cool to see them finally get to this point where they're actually releasing hardware hub hub. There we go. Another another hub bell to when is the

last time that we rang two hub bells on the show? I mean, it's it's kind of been years ago now. It's kind of wild. Here's my favorite part. There's no Bluetooth and no Wi-Fi on this thing. So it's just hardwired Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet. And Home Assistant founder Paul Schoutsten says, that's because they don't want people to get the idea to connect the brains of their smart home via Wi-Fi. It needs to be a reliable connection. I don't think you guys realize

how like on the same wavelength we are here. This is exactly what you should be doing. If you have a controller, it shouldn't be a wifi module or something. It needs to have a hardwired connection. Home Assistant Amber is debuting on a crowdfunding platform called CrowdSupply. This week it's $149 for the box. It's designed for beginners and experienced home automation or home assistant fans. If you want to get a little more industrious, there's also an option to build your own kit. It costs $99 for that. And there's another kit too. I noticed that it's $99 for a PoE option as well. So you don't

have to have the power supply. You can just plug it into a PoE switch and it powers up. It's a great idea. Neither of those two kits come with the Compute 4 module. So you'll have to grab that separately. And I think those are somewhere around $89. All in all, it's not a bad price because just like grabbing a case, a Compute 4, the CM4, grab a case, power supply, you know, a couple of extra things. Get all that around $120-ish, somewhere in there. Um, so really for just those parts, uh, $30 more to get like a complete together, put together a system, really not a bad deal. Um, so go check that out. Shipping is targeted for June, 2022,

if they make the $140,000 funding goal. And it looks like they're about, uh, 40% there as a sitting down recording the show tonight. So good luck to them. Hopefully we'll see more out of them here in the future. All right, gonna move on to this next part of the show here. Don't forget, you can join us live. Typically, typically, I'm saying typically because I haven't done this very well

on the last couple of shows, but typically on Wednesday, starting sometime between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern, you can find out more about that at hometech.fm slash live. Really just follow the Hometech Twitter account and you'll see occasionally I'll tweet out, hey, going live. All the links and topics we discussed tonight will be found at the show notes at hometech.fm slash 364. Link is hometech.fm slash 364. Pick of the week this week. From time to time, I wonder if I have the best streaming plans

because I've got a couple of them that I have turned on right now. And I'm always wondering if there's a better one to fit needs or how can I wedge HBO or Hulu back in? Cause I, there may be something on like HBO or Hulu that I want to see. Um, and it's really kind of tough right now with the way they're structuring all of this stuff to figure out like where the good deals are. Um, and what you need is one of these comparison sites. And I ran across one the other day called suppose it's over at suppose.tv. Um, and it's, it's really, really cool. It's probably one of the best ones I've seen. Um, because it lets you kind of adjust like little small details that may make big changes in

the way you purchase a streaming TV platform or program or carrier. I don't know. I'm not sure it has so many options on this thing. But basically, you start off normal. Like you say, I am in this area. And you select some channels that you may find important. And kind of even better, you can actually rank those channels in order of importance. Like if you want to really watch HBO, put that at the top. Discovery stuff at second.

It's really neat how they lay this out. And it starts bringing in results and bringing in plans that have those channels and things. Even better, you can choose what kind of device you have. If you have an Apple TV, if you have iPhone, Android, if you have a Roku streaming stick or something, you can check all that off and it will collect and put all the best deals that can be on those devices together. So it's really, really cool. And then you have like all the other, you know, filter refinements, all that stuff that you can think of, like, you know, spin more, spin less kind of thing. This all the normal stuff that we've seen before. But really, I think what this gets down to is like trying to figure out how to get those packages pulled out maybe out of the other

services, because there's time there's there's times all the time right now where you can go to Amazon Prime and get something like HBO Max free for six months or something like that. So it's kind of one of those things. And you can set alerts up on this too. So they can email you if something comes up like that. Uh, so it's a really cool deal site. You know, uh, we've, we've seen a couple of these, um, come and go over the years and this is kind of the most like complete one I've ever seen. So if you're in the market or you're just kind of have like a question about, you know, do you have the, the best package for your streaming needs? Um, maybe check, uh, let's see, suppose.tv out and I see if there's something that's in it that better for you in your price range. And if you have any feedback, comments, questions,

picks of the week or great ideas for a show, give me a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit homet tech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. And I do want to thank, um, 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 the patron page, head on over to home tech.fm slash support and 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 on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to a private Slack to the hub. Wow, I'm saying this way too fast because it's way late. Gets you a private invite to our private Slack chat over at the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day. And we've been talking about

all sorts of stuff in there. I just saw a few minutes ago that Robert posted something about a $2 million TV or something. I've got to go check this thing out. Anyway, also, you'll get an invite and you can go into the patron feeds and get an invite over to the Home Tech Talks that we do every week. So like I said, bringing those back next week, hopefully we'll find a better time for it. If you want to help out, I can't support the show financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. And with that, wrap up another week of home technology news. A lot going on and a lot kind of like it was kind of in the background there that I've been saving up over the last couple of weeks of taking a little bit of a break of talking for five and a half hours straight. It was kind of rough. I didn't actually take a break the entire time. I took one break to grab a glass of water kind of early on, but that was about it. And yeah,

just sat there, had a great time talking, talking the entire time. Like I said, if you want to check that out, I just want to pop in and listen to it. Home tech.fm slash talk. We'll get you there. Um, I might be able to like pull the audio out of that too. So, um, if there's any interest in putting that maybe into the podcast feed, I that's a five and a half hour podcast. I would be crazy. But if there's any interest in me supplying the audio for that, let me know, uh, just drop line, humtech.fm slash feedback, or shoot an email over to me and I'll do it. I'll get it done for you. With that, everybody have a great weekend and I'll talk to you next week.