HomeTech.fm - Episode 378 - When the Matter Hits the Fan

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

On this week's HomeTech: Samsung teams up with Ruckus, Eufy launches a new combo device, bugs and pests beware of the smart home, Sonos add a lower cost Roam, streaming updates, an egg-filled pic of the week, and more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, March 4th, 2022, from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Kepp. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week we've got a couple of home tech headlines to talk about but guys there's some big news tj i think this is going to be important for you and your your new career choice but uh there there there evidently is a show on apple tv that features a smart home technician as the lead that the lead part like this is this amazing it's called the after party

and it's about it's like a little murder gone wrong murder mystery type thing as the lead. The lead part. Like, this is amazing. It's called The After Party. And it's about, it's like a little murder gone wrong, murder mystery type thing. But the lead character, guess what? It's a smart home integrator. You excited?

Is this a show about how the lead character is always wrong about things? Yeah, probably. You know, I actually haven't seen those until we started talking about it earlier. I've added it to the download list now. Um, but it, it does sound like an interesting show and probably the first one I've ever heard of where a custom installer is actually the main person of the show or even actually brought up. I don't know if I've ever even watched a show where they brought up a custom installer. Oh, we found a couple of a few years ago. It was on Portlandia and they had an excellent rendition of I'll have to link to it in the show notes.

But there's a there's a Portlandia where they're installing some speakers and then they give them this overly complicated system with all these wires and they were drilling through cabinets. I mean, it's amazing. But that's the only thing I've ever seen. This this looks this looks better because, well, I don't know. There's a review over there on residential systems, and I'm going to read from it. This is the integrator, Jasper, first of all. His name's Jasper, so you can see where this is going.

It's played by Ben Schwartz. Okay, now you can see where this is really going. He's quite likable, but working in the custom installation business is merely a placeholder until his music career takes off. Perhaps that explains why the whole home install he did for Xavier, the doomed famed alumni, left his famous climate with a remote that does not actually work. So there you go. The reviews are in. I don't know. I'm still interested in checking this out. What about you, Gavin? Is this on your list of things to watch, too?

I'm curious if he left. He got the printer working in the show. That's the cliffhanger right there. He said it, he said it. I'm going to give you a printer bell. There you go. I had to change it to that. There you go. Well, the haunted printer will not stop working now

that we've done our incantations. But yeah, this looks pretty good. This looks pretty good. I'm going to have to check it out. A murder mystery and a comedy. It's a comedy murder mystery a comedy murder mystery thing got some big stars in it too so you know i actually i'm gonna check it out as well not because it's a custom integrator but for the other start reasons if they had a do-it-yourself guy in there that would have been a little more entertaining what i want to know does this yasper guy run the company or is he just working at the company?

Uh, because the, the, the placeholder for his music career kind of scares me a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I don't know. We'll have to, uh, we'll have to check it out, uh, and, and, and get back to everybody next week. If you haven't, if you have seen this and tell us what you think, feedback at home tech.fm. Uh, I don't know. I'm pretty interested in seeing this, the, the, the, the, the review on residential systems is, is not, not very, very good, but, um, it was kind of just along the lines of, you know, how they were kind of trashing the character of the custom integrator, I guess a little bit, maybe, I don't know. Um, but you know, comedy is comedy. And, uh, like they say, uh, in the article, it's nice to be seen.

We just, we just want some love. You just want to be acknowledged. So our homework this week is to watch at least one episode. We'll, we'll get back and talk about it next week. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I failed on my homework last week. I did not get any patties. I did see them in Walmart. I put a picture of you picture for you guys there in the in our chat. But I did not buy the ones from Walmart. I'm really going to go tomorrow, pick them up for lunch. I don't want your first patty to be a Walmart patty. You know, I'm glad you did not buy it. Make sure you get a nice, you know, I want your first impression to be good. right well if you don't have any by the show next week though we have to publicly shame you just so you know well

i i should have them for our home tech talk tomorrow when we sit down and chat i i should be munching on some nice jamaican patties so all right hopefully i'll have them by then but all right guys what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines let's do it all right as as alarm systems thermostats air conditioners and other smart home devices become increasingly connected, the next generation of residents are seeking to drive value and convenience by creating a tailored, technology-enabled environmental experience in their homes. To address this demand, SmartThings and Ruckus have teamed up and announced a collaboration that enables landlords and building owners to offer enhanced experience to tenants and residents. So they're going to be doing this, I guess. I've been looking into this, and I wasn't really sure.

This is kind of new to me, even though I deal with Ruckus quite a bit. the little IoT chips, we've known about them. They've been going into Ruckus Wi-Fi 6 products. And that enables things like Bluetooth-enabled devices or Zigbee-enabled devices to talk over to the Ruckus access points directly. And in here, what they're doing is integrating that with the SmartThings Hub. So that gives owners the ability to turn their apartment buildings or smart homes into smart buildings. So this is actually kind of cool. Gavin, you're shaking your head on this.

I think you put this in our notes here. What do you think about this? I did not see this partnership. It just came out of the blue. I wasn't expecting it, but you know what? I'm thinking a lot of devices are sneaking in little chips now. That's just preparing them for the future. And we're going to see more and more of that.

You know, when Eero, a number of years ago, I think they threw thread in to their devices quietly and then, you know, it's enabled now, but it's just preparing us for the matter and i'm it's good to see that you know because you don't want to buy a device and have to replace it at the end of the year just for something else right i remember the nest thermostats had a zigbee radio and then at one point people were like oh this is going to be a hub you're going to use your nest thermostat it's not it never never happened ever ever ever happened with Nest. But TJ, what do you think about this? It seems kind of interesting that you'd be able to drop in an access point and maybe get some devices online with it.

Yeah, this is fascinating because it seems like Samsung has kind of gotten out of the hardware space. You can't really access a lot of their or their Samsung smart things hub anymore. And I think they even outsourced it to Aotech. Aotech actually makes the hub now. So maybe, you know, Samsung is taking SmartThings and making it more of a software product that, you know, manufacturers or builders and those kind of people can use. And this is a good start to that. Ruckus is a very good company. They know exactly what they're doing with Wi-Fi and networks. So this is a great thing for consumers. Yeah, I was actually going through some training on the

IoT stuff just to try and figure out and get an idea what it what it does. And Comscope, which is the parent company of Ruckus, is really, I mean, they own Ares, that router company, I guess, that you probably have in your house if you have cable modem. But I mean, they own Ares, that router company, I guess, that you probably have in your house if you have cable modem. But I mean, they're really big in the enterprise. And it really shows because half of the training was like, here's how to apply a license to this particular product. Like, oh my gosh, how much do I have to sit through for this? So skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. I just kind of like want to get to the point where we're setting up devices. But yeah, it seems like it'll be pretty interesting and good partners to have, I guess, because

Samsung's building smart stuff, smart home, smart things, hubs and everything into everything these days. It'll be into your refrigerator even. So it could be a possibility that you have a smart refrigerator, an access point, and you're good to go, right? Everything will be a hub before we're done with it. an access point, and you're good to go, right? Everything will be a hub before we're done with it. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I'll keep the bell warmed up here. All right, we're moving on here. Kind of keeping in the IoT world here. According to The Verge, Anchor's smart home brand, Eufy

Security, has launched its latest product over in Kickstarter. It's a $399 Eufy security video smart lock. It's a mouthful, but it gets what it's a video doorbell and a smart lock all in one. And it's expected to ship to backers starting in May, 2022, uh, with a general release sometime in, in June for everybody else, uh, somewhat unique two inin-one security device. It will be used as a fingerprint reader to unlock the door and can send alerts when specific people arrive or leave using facial recognition, according to Eufy. The device melds together Eufy's $260 Eufy SmartLock and a $200 Eufy Video Doorbell 2K.

So that kind of gives you a little bit of a bargain. Instead of buying those two devices, you just buy the all-in-one thing. TJ, I know you may have pulled this in. This is really cool. This is a nice little device. This is probably the first time I've ever seen a video doorbell and door lock in one. We had that smart door on the show a couple of weeks ago, but I've never seen a device like this that integrates two of those devices together. And this is a really genius idea to me. And I'm surprised that somebody like bigger, like ring or nest, or somebody didn't come out with this first, um, just because it would fit so well into the ring ecosystem, right? Um, like ring, for example,

you can have video doorbells and you can also integrate with like Schlage locks or quick set locks, that kind of thing. Um, so I think this think this is genius uh we'll have to see how it actually is when it comes out um but it's advertising a 10 000 milliamp battery which is pretty large for something like this um yeah i i wish i had a reason to actually purchase this and install it somewhere just so i could see how it works and personally i'm not a fan of these battery powered devices like this because they use up a lot of battery as big as the battery is. But a number of shows ago, we talked about the power door. This would be perfect for something like that because the door would power this and you never have to worry about the battery or run into problems where, say, the battery doesn't charge at negative 20 degrees in Canada.

Yeah, well, it's all going wireless anyway so we'll have wireless power soon enough and we can just charge charge the thing on the door right that's what they say that's what they say at least yeah this is this is pretty cool i didn't realize it did have that big of a battery but yeah with devices like this it's all going to come down to how well they can manage that battery with, I, you know, if you have a lot, a pretty active doorway or whatever, it's going to drain down a lot faster with all the facial recognition and everything and camera turning on and off, um, than it would if it was, you know, nobody's coming over, but then what fun would that be? The only thing I don't like the look about it so far is it looks

like it has like the, uh, the captive, uh, buttons the captive buttons instead of physical buttons. And in my experience, those usually don't work that well, especially if like your finger's wet or there's some kind of like humidity outside or something like that. So that would be my only physical complaint about it at this moment. Yeah, there's some Yale locks that have that.

I know somebody that has one of those and I always, when I'm walking out their door, I kind of like re evidently where I touch on it to shut the door is exactly where it, where it takes to, to like, if you put your palm on the gill lock, it'll actually turn the lock tumbler over. So as it's shutting, I have to run back to the door and dive before it, the, the lock, the open lock actually nicks the door frame it's it's not a not the best but yeah it's interesting um i i did notice the the little fingerprint readers on top as well um and that that means that hopefully people know that's the fingerprint reader and

then the thing underneath it's the camera hopefully you don't get those two things mixed up because then you're just going to have a smudgy camera at that point kind of reminds me that that uh was a doorbird where it had like a motion detector thing right below the right next to the button and you just everyone would hit that and and mess the whole doorbell up not a good yeah that's a that's a good way to break a $500 doorbird we We actually installed one of those for a client, and within a week they had contacted us telling us that that little black half circle was broken. And that's when I found out that people thought it was a doorbell button, I guess, even though the illuminated button was right below it.

Yeah, well, UPS isn't going to look at that. All right, well, let's move on here. We've got one more little IoT device to talk about and, uh, you gotta build, you're going to build a bit of a mousetrap. No, thanks. We spring around the corner. A smart mosquito repellent system is out there aiming to send the bloodsuckers away using the power of IoT and, and, and a little bit of repellent device comes with us. This is a, I think I put the name of it in here. All right. This is a little device from a company called Live, L-I-V. And the device comes with a smart home hub and three to five one foot tall repellers that you place in and around

your yard. Each repeller has a cartridge that emits a repellent, metofluthrin, I should have tried to pronounce that before the show, into the air when heated. Thermacell, the parent company, claims it creates a 20-foot zone of protection around each one of those repellers. So you place the repellers a few feet away from each other, and around a yard it makes a pretty big protection dome. Three of them i think it's up to up to 950 feet uh the repellent scent free non-toxic both human and pets and each cartridge will last you about 40 hours of use outside um gavin uh sounds like you have uh as big a mosquito problem up there in canada as we do here in Florida. Yeah. Yes. We're going to get one of these. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. The only difference is you'll, you have it all year round. We only really have it in the summer. Right. And I currently have a mosquito repellent system

similar to this. We place it around our patio set. It creates a bubble and protects you. And it works pretty well. It's not smart or anything, but all i have to do is push a button on sometimes they add smarts for the sake of it into things like this um i don't know i guess you can automate it turning on and off something a smart switch could have also helped with um it it's something if you don't have one of these and you have a mosquito problem i highly um recommend getting something like this they actually do work right um and they're does yours use the meadow flutherin or is it more of a sound acoustic one because i've seen no it uses um it uses something i don't know if it's metal flutherin but uh it uses some something i have to refill it with and i buy cartridges and it heats

it up and it brings it into the air um and yeah i used to sit out there and i'd feed mosquitoes all night long where now it's like you barely notice they're there interesting i may have to get one of these because yeah we do have bugs florida florida is i mean florida is like spanish for bugs or something i'm pretty sure so uh tj uh bugs mosquitoes in ohio not as bad as when i lived down in florida um i think when we lived down in florida i'd probably have to have like an underground tank to uh supply this thing with um just so we can make sure we never run out um but i this this seems pretty cool to me mainly because you can schedule it um the app portion of it seems pretty nice um I couldn't find pricing on

the actual refills for it, though. They have an online shop that has a couple of different models and and stuff like that. But I couldn't find anything that was very obvious. But they don't seem to be that bad price either. They're like twenty dollars per cartridge. So I guess it really depends on how much you need it and how often you use it. Yeah. I mean, I will say a lot of the higher end homes here, especially from the water, will have this type of system, but a permanent permanently installed. So you'll go outside and kind of be messing around the pool cage or out by the out in the garden or whatever. And there'll be these little pipes that come out of the ground with sprayers on them.

And, you know, I guess, you know, I've never had anybody turn them on when I was working out there, but, uh, they, they spray that repellent up into the air. And I think there is an underground tank or something that, that, uh, it all gets attached to and the bug guy comes and refills or whatever. But, uh, yeah, these exist already, um, just kind of in bigger permanently installed systems. And I guess without the smarts, so to speak, asavin was talking about but yeah i guess it would be nice to to use my yard i i didn't i didn't know i could use my yard you know when the sun goes down these things will take you away that's just the way it is here i i may have to look into this uh maybe not the smart one but maybe something that if you're gonna go and look into it get the smart one but maybe something if you're gonna go and look into it get the smart one like

like you can't be on this show and not want the smart one it's only 700 i mean that's not much but a cincinnati candle is like what five bucks five dollars it's not the same yeah but you're gonna have to leave it out it's gonna get rained Oh, man. I was hoping to buy a weather station. Come on, guys. Well, you know what? Like you want to use your yard. You know, you could look outside and see what the temperature is like anyway. It's your weather station is going to say what it's hot, it's hotter or it's the hottest, you know, down there in Florida, like, you know, mosquitoes, they're stopping you all right all right i'll have to think about this this sounds interesting i i never knew these things existed other than

the ones i've seen like permanently installed which i knew are they're not seven hundred dollars they're definitely out of my price range so um i'll have to check this out we can uh we can sign off on the paperwork for the cfo over there if you need to yeah i'll see how far that goes speaking of bug traps here uh tj you put this in here there's a uh a review from stacy uh hickenbotham over at iot uh that that talks about um a smart rodent trap smart rat trap i guess that what this electrocutes mice is that what this is yeah i thought it was just gonna be a uh just a mouse trap and it's like hey the mouse is stuck come let it out somewhere but it uh it supposedly shocks the mouse and uh kills it and uh it makes it kind of nice because the app tracks your kills uh and uh yeah i it's out you know honestly it sounds very dystopian to me

because you're just like gamifying like killing mice at this point like we need to have some kind of like blockchain rewards for it or something for it to really matter at this right right if this gets tied in with nft somehow we like it was like take a picture every time it shocks the mice a mouse but only uh only 40 i think so you know at least it's not super expensive. No, it's not terrible. I've seen those at home Depot. Um, but again, a regular mousetrap is only going to cost you a dollar and it kind of works the same. Isn't that the argument for all smart home devices though? Well, yeah, I guess it is true that the light switch only costs a dollar.

The smart light switches cost you 40 to $250. So dollars so yeah yeah i guess you're right i guess you're right the the off can cost you two dollars and 50 cents smart mosquito repellent spray system is going to be 700 all right just it just escalates that's all there all there is to it if you can put wi-fi in it we can make it more expensive exactly exactly all right well one more quick iot type thing. A new story here for the week. Why seems to be in the process of raising their prices. The home technology and warm sock company announced to customers that the price change to the wise home monitoring will begin on April 6th. There'll be new prices for that. Existing customers will have their price

locked in at $4.99 a month, but new customers will need to pony up $5 more for $9.99 a month or $100 a year, $9.99 a year, sorry, $99.99 a year for basically the same service. Weiss says the price will keep the service, sorry, Weiss says the price will cover rising costs and make sure the company doesn't become Wink. I put that in there as a joke. Well, unless they get bought out by Will.i.am, I don't think that's going to happen. Oh man. Is Wink still alive? Somebody, somebody needs to check on them while we're talking about this. What's your definition of alive? Yeah. I mean, okay, that's true. That's fair enough. Fair enough. This is, this is interesting that the company that that seemingly could do no wrong with their their low prices suddenly needs to raise prices because I mean, everybody I talked to for ninety nine a month for what they were given away was like incredibly inexpensive.

It seems like they're just throwing money out the door and stuff against the wall to see what sticks over there. And maybe it finally caught up to catch him. I don't know. And when the price seems too good to be true, it's too good to be true. It's got to go up at some point. And you know what? Wise has had a history of this where they've had the cheap cameras and then they've had to bump up the price. You know, it can only be cheap for so long. And then they got to pay off investors and stuff like that. What people were going crazy on social media about is this wasn't a price increase. They were doubling the price. Right. So people, of course, went for the click headlines and, you know, like double price,

you know, get everybody mad. And Wise was quick to point out this is just for new customers. Existing customers are fine. So, you know, if you already have it, don't give it up. Yeah, this is a smart way to do it in a company sense because they are allowing the existing customers to keep their same price. And for $100 a year, it's still cheaper than a lot of other options. Like, for example, you have Ring Pro, which comes out at $200 a year. You also have SimpliSafe and Abode, which come out to a little less than a dollar per day. Um, so still compared to all the other options, you get professional monitoring, you get camera

monitoring, all that good stuff. A hundred dollars a year is not a bad deal. No, not, not terrible compared to, compared to those other ones you listed. I was looking at the ring pro thing. I, I have evidently fallen intoly fallen into kind of the same thing. I guess Ring Pro subscription, there was a Pro subscription that I signed up with long ago that was only $100 a year.

And I guess they have since raised the same thing to $200 a year, but offered more things with it. So there's some things that I can't get, but that aren't really applicable to the products that I have. But, but for I'm, I'm on this little, I looked at it the other day, I'm on this generation one plan or something like that, uh, for all the devices I have just, I mean, it's kind of nice. It makes sense, I guess, but $5 a month or $10 a month is, is substantially less for kind of almost the same thing that ring is offering. Yeah. And the only time that that you get like close to that pricing too is some of the DIY options

we talked about is like Connected.io. That's a DIY, you know, alarm system, but they've partnered with Noon Light for professional monitoring. And that comes in at $10 a month. So as far as I know, that's the closest thing you can get towards the new wise pricing. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's and that's that was that's a startup. I mean, connected is at least, you know, it's maybe like one or two people that that's trying to pull that that that together and and do all that work. And yeah, like look at wise. I think they've got a few hundred employees, you know, so it's kind of like you probably need to charge a little bit more to cover your bases here.

So, well, speaking of upgrade headaches and everything, it looks like Home Assistant is giving some Z-Wave users a headache with a new upgrade that's coming down the pipe here. According to some release notes for a beta upgrade that's in the pipeline now, there's a breaking change that's coming that calls all Z-Wave devices to basically be removed from the system and kind of have to start all over. You have to repair and reinstall everything from scratch. Gavin, I think you posted this in. You made a little bit more about it. What's going on over there? I thought this was the golden child. I thought Home Assistant could do no wrong. I felt that way too. I always pay attention to Home

Assistant because they have a very strong... Reddit demands that you do. Yeah. They have a very strong and very vocal following. And it's the best system. It could never do no wrong. But on this other hand, I always hear how much maintenance and babying it takes that you got to constantly be upgrading. And this was one of the things they actually, I think they implemented the Z-Wave JS last year, I think. So they kind of gave you a heads up that, hey, this is the future. But a lot of the grumblings I hear is people that have migrated over to it, you know, they've had nothing but issues with it and they've either gone back or, you know, they don't want to deal with that anymore. It's just doesn't have all the same features.

So they're trying to hold out. But it looks like as of April, based on the beta, you may not be able to hold out any longer. And you have to change over and get off the old Z wave and open Z wave implementations, which, again, like you said, will require a lot of work because it's like a migration to a new system in a way. There's no way to transfer one config over to the new setup. You got to start over.

So any ZWave devices you have, you've got to go through this new dance, you know, basically to get everything connected back up. I wonder if your programming all disappears and everything too, or they've been able to. The renaming of devices,

you'll reassociate stuff. If you spent a long time setting up the system you have now, it's just going to be a headache. No good. TJ, I see you shaking your head. I don't have anything to add. You don't want to add anything because those home assistant guys are going to kill me and Gavin. He's afraid of saying anything.

I've given a home assistant a shot several times now and it's just, it's way too complex for what I needed to do. Uh, and Gavin's actually helped me out with my hub attack set up for a while now. Um, and even that's a little too complicated for what I need to do most of the time. So I, uh, I have, I am not wanting to talk about home assistant. Yeah. It's Yeah, it's a super powerful system. And the reason, I mean, we were going to have to revisit this one of these days, but we did like a Stata DIY stuff way back in the day and got, I don't know, slammed pretty hard for bashing Home Assistant.

I basically said it was a great setup, but setting up a system with YAML is just never going to fly. They've moved away from that. Like they have, you know, in recent years, and it's taken them some time to get there, but it's a very robust system. It's just, it's still a robust system that you have to really be involved with to get set up. And once it's gone, I'm sure it's fine, but, you know, you really have to want to learn something to get involved with it. It's a great looking system. It's a very powerful system. And it's just you have to be a programmer pretty much. But they're working on getting away from that on simplifying it, whether it's just simplifying, giving you the hardware as well. So you don't have to set up a pie or

something like that. And then they're making integration a lot easier, where once you first started up, it discovers stuff on your network, and starts, you know, says, hey, I've found all this stuff. Would you like to integrate it? Right. So they're working hard and fast. That's the thing I like about them is they're going fast with their changes. Yeah, I think once they implement some of those quality of life improvements we talked about, they'll probably be worth a shot for a lot of DIYers just because it'll be a lot easier to use. And especially because it integrates with everything. I mean, I never had a problem when I use Home Assistant, tying it in with any kind of switch or any device. And you can even do crazy integrations like using Sonos speakers as

intercoms and speakers and that kind of thing. So there's a lot of potential there. It just has to be easier for the average person to use in order for it to become adopted. Yeah. Home assistant's great. So you hear that Reddit? We all said it's a perfect system. Don't don't come after us, please. Please. All right. Well, speaking of speaking of let's move on here. We've got some new products. Last year, Sonos launched the Roam. It was a portable smart speaker that not only provided quality sound you could take on the road, but also access to assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. It was initially priced at $169, but Sonos cited global chip shortages

for a reason for bumping the price up to $179 last fall. This week, Sonos is introducing a new lower-priced Roam SL. It's a mic-less version that costs only $159 and mimics the similar mic-less 1SL it released two years ago. So yeah, the Sonos 1 was out, and then they released a mic-less 1SL for the privacy-conscious people, I guess. According to the FAQ on Sonos' website, losing the microphone doesn't just cut out support for the voice assistants. It also means no automated Trueplay sound tuning and living without the sound swap feature that lets you pass off audio

from the Roam to nearby Sonos speakers by holding down the play button. Now that, I don't know. Gavin, what do you think that, I could do without the home assistance, but like what about like missing these, I don't know, true play, I don't really care about that, but like what about these little sound swap features? That sounds actually pretty compelling

and I may want to pay, what, the extra $20 to get that added in. What do you think? You know, for the price difference, just get the one with the mic and everything, all the features, the true play, you actually can hear a difference when you do true play on Sonos. I've done tests on my home system, and it was significant difference before and after. With the Roam, because you're constantly moving it to various areas you might

not see it as much um it's automatic um so sometimes it takes a little time for it to kick in but um for the price like i said 30 extra just get the newer one with all the feature all the bells and whistles so that you don't have that fear of missing out if they release a new feature down the road and they say oh oh, you can't have it. I'm going to jump on the same ship that Gavin's on. I don't even use these microphones that are built into any of my Sonos speakers, but I just got it just because. And you never know if you do want to use it in the future. And I've always thought the price difference wasn't that great to not buy the microphone, even though I don't use the microphone and like my Sonos arc, for example, it was still worth the $50 additional just to have it,

um, just in case something does get released in the future. Um, so I don't understand the point of the non-microphone port. Um, obviously it's very popular cause they keep bringing out new products that have it or that don't have the microphone um but not for me not not at like 20 like it was it was a 50 off this thing like if this thing cost what 129 or even 119 i'd say yeah this is probably one of you know the better if not the best like portable thing it's got sonos built in yeah go ahead and get it but i don't know like you're saying 179 159 go ahead and get the upgrade and and you know what for that price difference if you're looking at it for price and you don't care about the sonos piece of it you

just want bluetooth speaker you can get even much cheaper bluetooth speakers out there that actually are a lot more powerful a little better um for price you know at that point so you know just get the mic and you know be happy i agree i I agree. I agree. Well, let's move on to some quick streaming news here. Before we wrap things up, Amazon and Apple are said to be the two front runners in the NFL Sunday ticket streaming rights for when DirecTV current deal expires in 2023, according to Fierce Video. Let's see, rights for NFL Sunday ticket, the league's out-of-market game service is said to cost, wow, $2 billion per year for the exclusive rights. Disney's also said to be a contender, but reportedly not willing to pay as much as Apple or Amazon.

I don't know. Guys, what do you think about this? Well, I'm not even going to ask TJ. But, Gavin, since you do like sports that may be adjacent to football, what do you think about this? Getting streaming through Apple or Amazon instead of DirecTV, that seems kind of weird, right? It is kind of weird. And I guess my question is, is it going to be included with, say, your Amazon Prime package, or is it going to be now an add-on because amazon does offer a lot of stuff that is add-on so you need a prime membership but then you also have to pay an extra five dollars a month to get

their prime music for example or something like that right um if it's included in the prime that's great but i have a feeling it won't because especially if they're spending that much money and it is also weird just you know like we're moving away from the cable box but we're moving into a time where it's like if i want to watch nfl i have to go here if i want to watch nba i have to go here if i want to watch golf i have to go here you know if i want to watch my curling well that's still on cable you know um but uh we're starting to see that market split up into various things. And it's hard for the average person just to keep track of where it is. This year, it may be on Amazon.

But what happens in two years if now it moves to something else? And a person that's a big NFL fan bought all their Amazon devices for the NFL. Now they're going to have to buy all the Apple devices to follow their NFL. Who knows? You can't rely on anything these days. Right. Right. I mean, I am encouraged that like I think at least with I know with Apple and Amazon Prime to like in Prime Video, I guess what they call it. You can get those app installed on any smart TV or Apple TV or Roku or anything like that. Like they're, they're pretty ubiquitous and where they put their, their app. So you're not like, it's not like old school Apple where your, your vendor lock locked into having to buy an Apple TV to watch football. So I think when we were looking at this a couple of years back and saying, Oh,

2023 is coming up pretty quick. Is football going to basically disappear off direct tv for everyone yeah it might but at the same time um it it's it's not going to disappear completely off your television because you'll have access to it through some other manner at this point and the one place i would like to see at land if it could like it only makes sense that if it showed up on what was it the zone um and they're like a dedicated sports streaming service you know they have football they have not football but you know like soccer um and some other sports on there that that's i would have thought it would end up there and it would just make more sense you know if i want to watch sports that's my app of choice um we'll see yeah it's worth noting that amazon already has exclusive rights to the thursday night football stuff which i guess they play thursday friday no maybe thursday

saturday so i don't know how many games they play but they pick what oh monday they play monday as well so yeah there's there's always games going on. But that's that's for Prime video subscribers already. It's funny here. The article. Great. A two hundred and twenty dollar per year. Amazon Prime subscriptions is coming. It's like, yeah, it's going to start. It's going to start costing money if they start adding these things on. I don't think that they're they're going to be free. DirecTV charges seventy four dollars per month for the NFL Sunday ticket. So I wonder if Amazon is, there's a comment here.

There's no way that Amazon is going to absorb the cost, the $2 billion cost and say, oh yeah, it's free with your prime membership. No, they're going to attack on a few extra dollars. TJ, what do you think? Uh, you're going to pay a little bit extra to get some football into the house. You know, I'm not, but it would be nice if I could have like one streaming service that I could recommend to clients whenever they asked me like streaming services for sports. Um, because at this point

there's like 12 that you'd need altogether to get everything. Um, and most people only watch, you know, they might only watch college basketball or professional football, that kind of thing. Um, but you have a lot of households that watch, you know, every sport. Um, so having something like, like a direct TV package like that would be available. Oh, that's a great point. That's a great point. I, I, um, I didn't even think about that, but yeah, I do remember. I was kind of, as I was exiting the business the business that people were asking, well, which one should I get? I've got Netflix. But they didn't even know that they could get Netflix on their TV, even though they were paying for it. They would just have the little red discs there. And I'd log them into the Netflix online on their TV

and their mind-blown situation. But it was always like, what do I need to get to do this, this, and this? And it's like, well, there's a fair amount of research that needs to happen here, and I'm probably not the right person to talk to. So yeah, that's a great point. I wouldn't even have thought about that. But yeah, for the sports fan out there, a bunch of apps just to watch some sports balls, that's not great um maybe maybe what they do should do is just you know like have one you know service and and just kind of like bundle it all together with some you know other channels and call it cable or something or getting well once uh once one of the companies buys up all the other streaming services we'll definitely have that and they'll sell you channel packages

and you know yeah two that you want with 12 that you don't want yeah exactly exactly and we'll speak in a streaming here um and channels that you may or may not want uh disney announced on tuesday that daredevil jessica jones luke cage the pernischer iron fist the defenders and abc's agents of shield will land on the streaming service after leaving their original Netflix home March 1st. So they're already gone. All of the shows will be available on Disney Plus starting March 16th. I thought this was pretty interesting because I kind of got a laugh out of this. We were actually in the middle of watching Daredevil, or my wife is, and she was like, I've got to hurry up and watch this because it's going to disappear. And I was like, well, they can't make it disappear, can they? So I went on and I found

this article. Of course, it says they're going to move to Disney Plus. No worries. We're just, we already have Disney Plus. We'll just start watching it over there where we pick up where we left off. But at the same time, Daredevil and The Punisher especially are TVMA. It's quite the juxtaposition next to, you, to, uh, you know, all the other Disney shows that they have on there. Uh, so in, in addition to these series, uh, Disney plus is going to have to, uh, add in a bunch of parental controls, at least here in the States. Evidently these, these are already activated over in Europe, uh, because they can handle things better than we can, I guess. yeah pretty interesting it looks like we've got pin

pin codes coming to lock our profiles down so the kids don't see uh the punisher gavin gavin what do you think about this this is this is interesting that tvma on the disney you know right there next to mickey mouse oh yeah and you know what like that that was coming because even with the bandalorian that was borderline i mean you had this thing eating little frogs, you know, like that was upsetting to me. Oh, it was adorable. No, no. Eating the last frog eggs, you know.

But no, it was, it's a great move, but also at the same time, again, for the end user, for us, the regular person that just wants to watch this stuff again we'll turn on our netflix one day and these shows won't be there you know and i may not keep up with the news to know that hey it's moved over to disney plus or something like that too right like it's already bad enough that you know i get those emails every month where it's like what's new to to Netflix this month and what's disappearing? And I got to keep track of that, too, just to know that, hey, I won't be able to watch the show.

I better watch it before it goes off the line. Right. It's getting tough for the average user to know where to go to watch their show. Yeah. Everybody just needs to go towards physical data, you know, data again. They're starting to take away a lot of content. And it's just, you know, data again. They're starting to take away a lot of content and it's just, you know, I don't like it. You just find some way to back things up. Wait, oh, no, no, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. Only what you have. Unlike Gavin, I can't delete things. So we need it to be accessible forever.

That's funny, yeah. It turns out TJ and I do not delete anything, ever. It's just not a button we find on our keyboard. So yeah. Interesting stuff there. All right. Well, that wraps up everything today. All the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash three seven eight. All right guys, no mailbag this week, but I do have a wonderful pick of the week courtesy,

a friend of the show, Greg Runyard, over there in the Slack chat. And TJ, you put this in here, so I'm going to let you describe this nightmare fuel. Yeah, as if printers couldn't get any worse, Greg over in the hub linked this picture of eggs inside of a printer and come to find out they are lizard eggs. I'm not really afraid of lizards. I like lizards. But the last thing I want are lizard eggs. I'm not really afraid of lizards. I like lizards. But the last thing I want is lizard eggs inside my printer. And maybe that's why Gavin's been having problems with his printers. Maybe he has eggs in there and he hasn't checked yet.

So thanks for sharing this picture over there, Greg. You know what? The only thing is with this printer, you know why it wasn't working. I still don't know why mine wasn't working. You know, I checked for eggs. And the other scary part about this is they're hatched eggs you gotta wonder where the lizards are now oh they're there yeah they're out yeah there's so many eggs guys i mean i don't know like there's just so many eggs this is very promiscuous and and rather fertile lizard that had been doing this. And yeah, there's many of them that are hatched. And yeah, they're definitely lizard eggs.

I see those here in Florida all the time, generally outside, not in my printer. At least you don't have to wonder why there's smudges on the paper anymore. Lizard state, lizard shaped squash. Yeah, the printer rollers are dirty. You need to clean those off somehow. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. That's too good. Thanks, Greg, for sharing that with us, I guess. But if you have any problems with your printer, be sure to check for eggs. It turns out. If you do have any feedback, comments, question, pics of eggs in a printer, 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. Well, guys, that wraps up another week of Hometech Headlines. Nice, a little bit more news going on. As of recently, like we've seen some actual products get released.

We've seen that actual news happen. It's not like completely silent. So that's good. That's good. Let's pick it up. I think going into the second half of the year we're probably gonna see a lot of things start to pick up too especially once matter is officially announced we're gonna hear that's all we're gonna be talking about yeah i'm interested to see how the the chip shortage is gonna affect the rollout of matter uh overall and only time will tell that obviously yeah it's well we know that's coming up uh later, later this year sometime, I think in the area of June or July that we'll, they're going to have a huge matter rollout with all the products and everybody, um, getting behind,

you know, the big tech companies announcing this Amazon, Apple, and Google. I'm, I'm, you know, it's one of those like waves that what company in their right mind is going to try and launch, you know, their matter products now into a bunch of headwind and everybody's going to go like, Oh, that's nice, but does it work? And you know, no, it's not going to work for another six months. But, uh, yeah, when, when we see matter, matter hit the fan. Yeah, that's what it is. Um, then we'll know if it's, it's any good and we'll see how these products get released on schedule. So I will say, I was kind of looking over at the calendar real fast.

There is an Apple event next week on the 8th. So like a day before we record. It's supposed to be a hardware event. So we're probably not going to get, you know, anything special out of it for home technology, but you never know. Sometimes we get a HomePod, we get another color or special out of it for home technology, but you never know. Sometimes, sometimes we get a, a home pod, we get another color or something out of it. So we'll see what they have to offer this, this, uh, this year other than iPads. And I think it's iPad event.

Maybe an Apple watch or something like that. New computers. I think we'll see a new, um, Apple computer or something else too. Maybe. Yeah. Some new colors as well. Yeah, it could be new colors. Yeah, new colors. That's a big thing for Apple. I mean, everything's gray, but I'm welcoming the new colors. I like them.

I'm waiting for a glow-in-the-dark version. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like a little glow worm. You can make one of those. Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful. All right. Well, I want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports

the show but every especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patreon page if you don't know about our patreon page head on over to hometech.fm support where you can learn how to support the show 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 to hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and look at eggs on there. But I do, I mentioned Greg earlier. I do want to give Greg Brunier a big shout out. He actually has gone from a $5 pledge to a $10 pledge. Holy cow. Thank you, Greg. So much. We really do appreciate that.

That keeps the lights on, I guess. It keeps us. Insert a cheer here. There we go. Sound effects thanks greg so much we really really do appreciate it uh if you want to help out the show but can't support financially totally understand just appreciate a five-star review on itunes for a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice that wraps up another week in home tech from everyone here have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Take care.

Cheerio. Cheerio. Oh, he remembered. Oh, man. I wasn't going to do it, but then I backed back in last second I was like I might as well I'm just gonna say something different every week next week

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