HomeTech.fm - Episode 497 - CEDIA 2024 Wrap Up

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

On this week's show: Interviews from CEDIA Expo 2024 show floor, featuring conversations with OneVision, XSCACE, Specifi, Innovo, and more. Plus the big news about ONVIF coming to UniFi Protect as well as a few other items that were not announced, Snap One's updates to the Control4 platform and the new X4 platform that will be available in Q1 2025. Also a quick note about NiceOS 8.9's new voice assistant for home control and Crestron Home OS's new features that will leave you scratching your head. All this, plus a special thanks to our 2024 sponsor Chowmain, on this information-packed wrap-up of CEDIA Expo 2024!

Hey everyone, welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation and Cedia. I'm Seth Johnson. I'm coming live from the Denver airport as I exit the state of Colorado and head back to Florida. On the way out of the show yesterday, I did run around like a crazy person, gathering a couple of interviews from some interesting products and things that I saw on the show yesterday. I did run around like a crazy person, gathering a couple of interviews from some interesting products and things that I saw on the show floor. I didn't

have much time this week to collect a bunch of interviews, but I got a few, and I figured I'd just drop them in here and edit them down and send them on out as a special kind of episode, I guess, on my way out of town. So I'm going to just drop each interview in and play them one at a time, and that'll be it. So everyone, enjoy, and

we'll talk to you next week. Hey, Jason Griffin. How's it going, Seth? It's going great. Yeah. Have you been busy this show? We've been really busy. Yeah. It's been a steady flow of traffic through the booth, obviously today being Saturday, a little slower and we're enjoying the break,

catch up with guys like you and other friends in the industry. But overall, yeah, it's been a really, really successful show for us. Yeah. Awesome. Hey, we've been the first two days. Well, first day was just slammed. Yeah. Second day was, I would say, steady, but like rolling steady, right?

You're just getting in one way. And today, of course, is the day everybody leaves and goes out and does fun things. Yeah, exactly. It's meeting day for all the vendors. Yeah. You got it. Yeah. Good show.

What's One Vision been up to? Yeah. Yeah. What have you been up to? Yeah. You got it. Yeah. Good show. What's OneVision been up to? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. So, just as a recap for people who may not know, you know, OneVision's a provider of service and recurring revenue solutions for integrators. So, we're most known for our kind of tier one support offering, which allows integrators to route all those inbound client support requests through our team. US-based, all of that support is provided white label. So in the integrator's brand name. We also do a bunch of recurring revenue solutions. So helping integrators market and sell and manage those premium support plans. So this year, kind of the big thing for us has been just a continuation of last year, we announced our Flex support packages. So we really kind of revamped our overall product and pricing structure. And I think it's like over time, you guys have learned what,

you know, different, what works, what doesn't. What works for integrators. We've really doubled down on like understanding that the integrator is our customer. And we need to be the most integrator centric support platform out there.

So we've, we've, we've over doubled. You're not doing like the same thing over years, over years. So we've, we've, we've over, over doubled like the same thing over years, over years. Like you change, you adapt. Yeah. Yeah. We're adapting. So, so yeah, we've, we've really grown a lot over the last year.

We're continuing to focus on that. And then also we're providing more customizability into, into the platform. So giving integrators more options to customize how they're, yes, how they engage with us, as well as how the memberships that are being sold to their clients could be customized in ways that we didn't previously support. So that's been our big focus is on, you know, flexibility and empowering integrators. Awesome, man. Thanks for your time.

Appreciate it. Appreciate you stopping by. I'm here with Akarsh Tora. Tora. Tora. That's right. With Escape. Yeah.

X Case. X Case. X Case. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X.O-R-A. That's right. With escape. Yeah. X-Case. X-Case. X-Case. C-A-C-E. Yeah, X-Case. Perfect. This is one of the coolest products I've seen here. And you've got some really small, tiny speakers with big sound.

Yeah. And there's a whole lot more with that. So tell me about your product here. So I'll start with a bit about the story, how we started with this. So this was actually a market research project at University of Toronto. And we sort of figured out the market gap

that how architects and interior designers are the people that are making decisions for homeowners now. Yeah. That what will go in the house and what will not. Absolutely. Along with having contacts with the vendors and you know, who to choose.

So now they started picking out the smallest speakers they could find, the most beautiful speakers they could find. But then could never find small plus beautiful together most of the time. So you know what? We thought we'll create something. Two years down.

Well, you did. Yeah. So two years, me and a couple of other of my friends at University of Toronto, we actually came up with a speaker. We created our our own driver we were able to put a passive crossover and a port inside a tiny speaker which is just like you know half an inch thick and just 3.6 inches tall right i mean you could put a coin next to it and it's like it's palm size i know it's a podcast nobody's gonna see this but one of the websites yeah yeah so yeah this is it's tiny and it sounds great i mean a 15 feet by 15 feet room it can handle easily all

right yeah so just a couple of these with a subwoofer with a very tiny subwoofer as well so yeah and that sub is tiny it's out of the way like all this stuff hides i think like this is one of those things like you always have problems with in a house like hooking up a tv and the tv speakers are horrible but then you have to add a soundbar or something like that on yeah and in most houses you can get away with that some you can't and and but this is kind of one of those things it's like put this in and you get away with it in all of them right definitely and it way better sound we do custom colors as well yeah so and custom finishes as well so you know someone comes to us and says, we have, you know, the most weirdest wall,

it's a pink color wall or something. We'll get you, probably tell you to go for a rose gold. It'll look amazing. And using the tech behind this,

we were able to create, you know, bigger versions of these which are way louder. Right, they are. Way, way louder for their size. They can compete

with much bigger speakers even in terms of frequency response. And, yeah, that's pretty much it. Also, they're waterproof. I was about to mention that. I see we're attributable to waterproof. Yeah, so you can use these outdoor, online.

You're walking around out there, you know, in the evening and the music is coming from somewhere. You're not going to see these. You're not going to see them. Not at all. And you know, what we figured out was if someone pays money for something,

so there's always this thing that has to be tangibility to it. So this is somewhat you can even show, but not actively show as well. So you can even show off with these, the look what I've got in my room, but no one will notice them otherwise as well. So you've got that good balance between those two things. Exactly. Well, where can people find out more? So on our website, it's called xcase.com or you can just type xcase on google and you figure it out okay you'll find our instagram and on our website on google as well excellent thank you so much thank you so much lovely to talk to you i'm here with james grimshaw specify james how's it going you have a good show we're having a great show it's been fantastic for us it's so busy man it's been really busy we've had another time to ourselves yeah Yeah. The first day, slammed. Second day, slammed.

Today, I'm glad to have a break. Well, of course, I say that. It's literally 2.15. People are picking up and shutting down because the show closes at 3 o'clock. And I'm like, yeah, let me go do some interviews. So I appreciate you taking the time. What's Specify?

What are you guys doing? So Specify is a proposal and business management tool. So we do stunning digital proposals that can be tracked on the read receipts but we can also follow the process through from start to finish awesome we have a customer portal which is a unique offering within the softwares which allows your customers to interact with you for the remainder of their uh their the house life life cycle of the project or just like as long as they're there as long as they're there oh that's awesome so you multiple homes they can log in and manage those homes from that one portal, launch service requests for you.

Oh, this has got like service management built into it as well. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. So yeah, we're a fairly new company and this has been a fantastic show for us. And we're looking forward to catching up with all the leads we've got after the show. Awesome. Where can people find out more? People can find out more at Specify, which is S-P-E-C-I-F-I dot I-O.

It's our website. Yeah. Come and check us out. Awesome. Thanks so much. Cheers. All right. I'm here at the IFP booth with Eric Crawford. Eric, how's it going, man? Had a good show?

Been a great show. Yeah. A great show. Lots of interest, lots of new leads, lots of people that are excited to move forward with Fiverr. Yeah. Okay. So in full disclosure, I work at BlackBerry.

We resell your product too yeah um the guys have been freaking out and talking about like how this is your cool product i didn't really get it because i just saw the little black boxes you guys make and i'm like okay that looks interesting i didn't really know what it was and you you were over the booth explaining to a dealer like we have what it is and what it does and i'm like the light bulb in my head clicked i'm like okay what is ifp whatP? What are you trying to solve for there? Yeah. So IFP is a suite of products that was created by integrators for integrators. Okay. This is not created for the consumer. This was created to make an integrator's life easier.

Good. So we've been pulling the exact same cable, basically, category cable since 1983. And our industry has relied on that. And I argue that it's time for us as integrators to do better. We need to do a better job serving our clients and a better job preparing the properties that we wire. So what IFP does, it allows, for the first time ever, an integrator to wire an entire property entirely with fiber. Okay. And as a result, instead of pulling, for example, 64 strands of copper via category cable,

they can pull four strands of fiber. And it's tiny. And it's tiny. Yeah. And not only is it tiny, but when you're using fiber, you've now eliminated interference. Yep. So now you have no EMI. You actually have a more durable product to install, which most people don't realize.

Most people that haven't actually worked with fiber don't realize you can tie it in a knot. Honestly, yeah. Yeah. I think most are scared of it. I didn't realize some of the products, like there's the guys that do the fiber for like the telco stuff and they have the fancy like things that wrap around and data centers and that kind of thing and it may be a different product like that we've we use because the stuff i use has like armor core on it and like you can tie it you can try and tie it in a knot but like like you can almost you can't even cut it with a shovel you know and like i think the technology

from whatever we first glanced at what fiber was back in the day to like what it exists today is like completely different. Yeah. Yeah. I would say it's, it's almost, I mean, I'm a car guy, so it's almost like looking at vehicles 40 years ago. Yeah. And judging cars today based on what they were 40 years ago. Yeah. Fiber is like the same thing.

If you look at today's fiber, is more durable has a higher working load it's easier to work with i mean just look at if you're looking at ifp for example with ifp we can deliver a four port rj45 wall plate okay in a total install time of about three minutes start to finish i'm laughing because like the time it takes to undo unbundle all those cat eyes and like untwist them cut the stupid little thing a little fuzzy fuzzy thing yeah what no one uses right i know what this user no one uses it to cut that out of there deal with the spline sometimes you have to deal with the spline shield all that stuff yeah and then finally get to the point where you can undo the things and crimp it all together i mean it takes forever

and i didn't realize until i used fiber a couple of years ago, how fast the little connectors get like, we use clear line and like, uh, you, you, you slip it on. It has some gel in there and like you shine a light into it and it

looks right. You crimp it down. You close the gate on it. It's crimped on. It's, it's done. You're done. You walk away.

Yeah. And it's that fast. It's literally under 30 seconds. I was doing these things and cat, cat five cats and cat five cat six is a minute for me, maybe longer because I'm horrible. Yeah. And then I'll get it wrong and have to redo it. Even the people who came by our booth, they said, best case scenario, they're at three to five minutes per category cable termination.

I can see it. Yeah. And so if you're doing a four-port wall plate, that's eight terminations. Even at the low side of three minutes, you're talking almost a half an hour, 25 minutes to terminate those. You can terminate a strand of fiber in a minute, minute and a half. You do two terminations with IFP and you have the same solution. So three minutes versus 24 minutes. And so let's talk about the solutions you got. And you briefly touched on the four port wall plate. I mean, it looks exactly like that. It's

four port wall plate, but on the backside of it, it's not crimped down stuff. There's a bunch of technology here. What does that do? And then where does it go? What does it go to? Yeah, so I think it's important to touch on both sides of our transceivers because that was part of the design.

Okay. So what we didn't want to do is make the experience for the end user different because that puts burden on the integrator. Okay. Why does my wall plate look different? Why is it some weird shape? So that's why if you look at our wall plate, it looks exactly like a traditional RJ45 wall plate. It's a decor rectangle. So it matches with your Lutron or Savant or Control 4 wall plates that you want to use throughout the job. But on the backside is where we're also

different. So we recognize as an integration firm and as an integrator myself of 17 years, that we had to make it as simple as possible to allow our integrators to be as successful as possible, which is why I like, we don't use SFPs. There's no little SFP translator module that you need to click in. Fiber plugs directly into our module. Yep. Which means then technicians don't need to worry about selecting the right SFP for the white fiber, everything else. No, you put your connector on, you snap it into the back.

And then on the front side behind the customer cover, behind that cover are two little status lights. So now the technician that's installing it knows at the time of install, without any test equipment, whether that wall plate is ready to go it's going yeah it's working everything's good yep so they they test it they see on their little test lights that's ready to go they screw it into the wall they leave that room and they never go back to that wall plate during the job and since it's fiber or we're pulling four ports over one fiber and then there's a gigabit each right so that's that's going back to you had a hub.

We have a hub at our thing. Yeah. You bring it back to the hub. The hub plugs into the router switch, whatever's at the head end. Yeah. Very traditional. Very simple. Very traditional in that manner.

Our dealers typically see a reduction in labor during the pre-wire phase of about 25% because of the simplicity in pulling. And because, remember, because we're doing blinking light instead of the simplicity in pulling. And because, remember, because we're doing blinking light instead of actual data. Yeah. You can run right through the same holes as the electrical. And there's no interference. Yeah. And any inspector that says you can't do that, you can simply show them, hey, this wire is in wall rated.

Yeah. And we're sending blinking light, not data. It's not made out of copper. Which means we don't need to worry about interference yeah and every time that gets presented to an inspector they look at the low voltage coming oh yeah you're right you're good and so we see that reduction there then obviously the reduction of trims because you're putting on a 60 second fiber connector instead of one to four punchdowns yeah one of the things you said and in our booth when we were talking is that, you know, we pull a lot of this category cable and copper wire for a product like HDMI, AC-based, and we're pretty much capped at 10 gig on the copper line, right?

It's not, we're not getting any better with that. We're going to have to go to compression. Fiber kind of opens that back up. Like if you're pulling fiber, and we've always talked about pulling fiber to future proof films. We never really did it because it was like well we got category five and it seems like over the years manufacturers have solved and kind of worked their way around the weird edge cases of what category cable can do right so we've just kind of leaned on that and but if you're putting the fiber in you know in in five ten years time you take you go back to IFBE and swap out the module for the next version.

10 gig, 20 gig, 50 gig, whatever the speed is. And this isn't us saying this, just look at Bullet Train. Bullet Train HDMIs are 18 gig. The only reason they can support 18 gig is because they're fiber. Copper is maxed out at 10.2 gig no matter what. It doesn't matter which glass you use. That's the max you can go over copper. Right.

So by going over fiber, we are truly future-proofing the property. And I would actually say that our industry, and maybe to throw our own industry under the bus here, I'm saying if we as integrators, if I take off my IFP hat and go back to being an integrator, if we as integrators actually looked at our clients and told them that if we put traditional copper in their house for networking, it is already maxed out. There's already 10 gig product. Which means these customers that are saying,

this is my forever home. I'm going to be here for 20 years. Do you seriously think that networks will not be faster than 10 gigs over the next 15 or 20 years? When we're already there, when we're already getting service connections coming in that fast. Yeah. And we already have 4K. I mean, 4K video takes 18 gigs. And I know on the service provider side, from appointments I've had with actual service providers, they're building out server closets now for service to single family homes in the 800 gigabit speed range.

800 gigabit to the single family home. I know it sounds crazy, but remember there was a time when 9,600 bought internet was considered fast. Yeah, I remember those. And that was not that, that was 25 years ago. Oh God. Okay. Thanks. I digress. Yeah. Well, Eric, thanks so much for your time. This is a really cool product. You can hear that the show is shutting down. I was like, I'm going to get some of these interviews done. Let's go get it done.

But thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Where can people find out more? Well, definitely, obviously, on your website. Yeah. Go to Blackwire. Great partner. Those guys are awesome.

You guys know what you're doing. So you can definitely go there, learn more from them. If you have any technical questions, you just want to learn more about the suite, obviously visit us on YouTube or visit our website, which is just ifbconnect.com. Awesome. Eric, thanks so much.

Yeah. Take it easy, man. I'm here at the Anobo booth with Enos Asim. Have you had a good show? We've had a great show, actually. We've had a really good show. We've had a lot of good turnouts, a lot of interest in our products.

They provide a solution that was not easily attainable in the industry before. Our Magic Cube leverages the power of open source home automation software like Home Assistant

and with a couple of other plugins on top. And that then allows us to provide all the drivers that are available on Home Assistant to home control systems like Nice and Control 4 and RTI. It is huge. It is, you know, something that, you know, we're riding on the shoulders of giants. Literally. Literally, you know, and we're bringing it to the pro market for people to use on a regular basis.

I traditionally have a background in the pro market. I've been doing stuff in the pro market for about 20 years now. Home Assistant was on my radar. I've seen Paul is here at the show, right? So like, as far as an integrator, as the integrators I talked to, it's not really, I mean, they may have heard of it. They may have seen a picture of it or some of this E-Pro story randomly of it. And most of them really have never heard of it. Now it is.

What are you, what were you finding here at the show today? Because it's a different world than I, you know. Same thing that you just said. Most people don't know what it is. Most people, once they know what it is and they've, some of them who have heard of it are scared of it because it's a do it yourself. You know, it's a, it's used to be a tinker's platform. But now, quite honestly, they connect things better than a lot of professionals do.

It's bigger. It's bigger. It's open source. You've got thousands of developers working on it. I mean, why not leverage that uh and you know in the process help everybody out i was talking to agnes over at zoos oh yeah yes yesterday at a meeting yeah and uh one thing that she said that stood out to me was like yeah nobody in here not control for equestrian anyone not you not me no one can afford to hire 40 000 developers

to work on their platform no so it's just it's just a big wave that's coming oh absolutely and then you know so we basically have taken it and the dealers were looking for so you know home assistant it's it's a learning curve right oh yeah it's a learning curve it's a scary world i mean you know we've i've been playing with it for years and i still feel like i'm i'm not really competent enough and but what all i can do, is update it. That's a joke on our podcast. Every week when we're talking about it, I'm like, oh yeah, I need to update it.

Four updates a month. So what we do is we have bridged that gap. We provide home assist that we provide training on how to use it. We provide any troubleshooting, any issues. So the dealers rely on us for support and that's what they want. Yeah. These professional home automation dealers,

they want to go in, they want to finish the job. They want to use the tools that they need to connect and make the homeowner happy without spending any extra time that they don't have to. And when it breaks,

they need to know that they can call somebody to fix it. And that's what we do. Yeah. We provide that bridge. We give them the comfort of knowing that there is somebody behind this product. And we have a good reputation in the industry. So then people say, okay, you know what? If you believe in it, we'll try it. And so far, the trial has been amazing. What's your background? Science, math. Have you been in the integration background? Or in computers and IT? I've been doing this Innovo IT stuff since 1997.

I got into integration about 18 years ago, and that's what I've been doing. Now you're here. Now you're spending money. Absolutely. I'm spending a lot of money. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Where can people find out more about Innovo? Innovo.net. I-N-N-O-V-O.net. All right. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Have a good one, Sam. I'm here at the Network Thermostat booth with Jerry Drew. Jerry, how's it going? Man, it's been a fantastic show. That's going to be my question.

Yeah, it's been like trying to, as they say, trying to take a drink of water through a fire. You guys have a really good spot. You're right on the main aisle. Yeah. Next to Vanco. What is this, Barco next to us? Barco, yeah.

Oh, my gosh, yeah. So, I mean, traffic by you guys had to have been crazy. Not bad for a thermostat company in the middle of an AV show that's busier than the AV guys. There you go. I mean, the thing is, you have it stuck out on the front. You've got a beautiful thermostat here. I'm sure people were like, hey, what's this about? Well, we've been in business 30 years. Okay. We invented the communicating thermostat. We actually started

in the city marketplace in 1995. Oh, wow. And at that time it was, hey, next year is a year for home automation. Right, right. Yeah. 1996, same thing. Next year is a year for home automation. It's going to happen, guys. And at that point, we said, we're going commercial. In 96, we decided, you know what? We need to go commercial. So we went commercial, and we've stayed commercial. And over the years, we've done private label deals

and custom deals for everybody on the planet. We do everything from the smallest buildings on the planet, which are telco bunkers at the bottom of cell towers, to the Burj Khalifa. Honeywell actually came to us for that design because they couldn't figure out how to network 3,600 devices in that building on a single network. Wow. That was a fun gig. It was. We do all Chick-fil-A and all kinds of commercial stuff in every vertical you can imagine.

So we're in hospitality, manufacturing, worship facilities, school systems, and on and on and on. And so you're bringing all that knowledge and technology back into the home market, it seems, with this new looking, cool looking thermostat. I like it because we're right up top. You've got API written all over it. So I know it integrates with everything. I mean, RTI, Elan, AMX, Crestron. Everything's on here. Everything you can think of is on here.

You've also got connections into the business stuff, like back net. You've got Modbus on there. Everything is on here. What doesn't this connect to? Like, really? Have you found anything that doesn't connect to it? Well, we're continuing to add stuff

because we listen to our customers a lot. So as an example, our remote sensor bus, everybody else kind of has a remote sensor for temperature. Well, ours is a bus with temperature and humidity, and you can automatically average up to six of those on a thermostat, plus auxiliary temp sensors for doing things like walk-in freezers, refrigerators, wine rooms. So you can hit six devices off of this one? More than that, just six, four indoor remote sensors. Plus you can put six water leak sensors with 12 water leak probes. So here's cool.

So why would you want to do all that stuff? Well, it's because we have an engine built into the thermostat for text message and email. And we have 21 different alerts that allows them to go out in case there's an issue. As well as take action on that. As an example, you get a water leak, we can shut down the equipment, hit another relay on the thermostat, and close the water valve. Right. It's a little bit of automation built into it.

Yeah. Basically, it's an HVAC and light automation system in a thermostat. It's very cool. And it has got a built-in web server. Yeah. We have Wi-Fi and ethernet versions. Okay. So you never have to hit the cloud with any of these, uh, network or controllers that

you're talking about. Every one of them can talk directly on the local network. And because of the, the capabilities that's built into the thermostat, even though the network goes down, the entire thermostat will continue to operate with all the schedules on and on and on. As you expect it to. As you would think, but doesn't happen in most products. No, no.

Every time you leave town, the power goes out of the house, and the air conditioner goes on the fritz and doesn't turn back on. I guess InfoComm, no air conditioner. My wife's calling me. Guess what happened two days ago? No air conditioner. My wife's calling me. We're flipping breakers And getting everything

Back on But I mean yeah So we have actually Battery backup On the real time clock That's on the unit And it lasts About four days

That would be much Better than Yeah Well Jerry Thanks so much For taking a few minutes Here to chat with us At the very end of the show

I really do appreciate it Where can people Find out more Networkthermostat.com. All right. Easy enough to remember there. There you go. Kind of says it all. All in one. Well, thanks so much, Jerry. Have a great show. Take care. Bye-bye. All right. Well, that's going to end the interviews that I was able to get done before the end of the day. I just want to say it was definitely a fun show. It was very busy for most of the week. We had quite a bit to do on the booth once we got there

because of some construction delays when it happened, I guess, the week before. And it just kind of put everybody behind. So it was a little bit of a rush to get things put together. But once we did, it was kind of nice to get everything all set up and ready for the show and ready for everybody to come see us at our booth. I will say it was great seeing everybody who for everybody to come see us at our booth. I will say like, it was great seeing everybody who was able to come by the booth and especially everyone who was able to make it out to the home tech happy hour. Definitely glad to,

and thanks so much for Chow Mein being a sponsor. Chow Mein of course has a driver marketplace with just about every module you'd absolutely have to have for, I think it was one of any number of nine automation systems that exist out there. So anything and everything they've got over there. So we'll put links to them again in the show notes. Thank you so much, Alan, Richard, everyone over there at Chowmein for contributing and actually coming out and bringing some more people into the Homes at a Happy Hour.

It was a good time. It's a little bit smaller this year because we didn't have the big jar, of course, of Gavin and TJ. But the group that was able to make it out was great. And it was exactly like the nice, low-key, relaxing event that I think I was hoping for. It was nice just to see everybody that was able to come out and just chill, have a drink, have a bit to eat, have a good conversation. And then head on into the night. I think a couple of guys went to, a good conversation and then you know uh head on into the night i think a couple of guys went to i think there's an origin party that night

uh i think we were kind of competing against the cda awards right so those were going at the same time but you know everyone who was able to come out uh i think had a great time and uh hopefully we'll be able to do more of those in the future alan is definitely interested he loves these things so uh hopefully next year we'll be able to put our, put our heads together and maybe just a little bit more marketing over the last couple of months to get more people out to the show and, and get some more sponsors locked down. But again,

thanks. Thank you, Alan. Thanks. Thank you. Chow Ming and everybody go out and check out the Chow Ming marketplace. If you need a driver, a module for your home automation system,

they probably got it. I do want to kind of touch on some news that I kind of ran across while I was at the show. Of course, my interviews are always going to be from the small booths. I don't really go, I don't even really go to the big booths. I kind of like walk by them and kind of like look over and acknowledge kind of what's going on in the craziness. But I, you know, there's a couple of them I did want to get to that I guess would be big, but are still kind of small in the industry. The Josh AI booth, I did want to pop in and say hi to the group there. It looked like they were just some really cool stuff with AI and just kind of wanted to see what they're up to. I think they released a new touchscreen too, which is kind of cool.

And the Ava booth, I was up front. I did wave and see Raphael a couple of times, but things were just so busy. He was always in a conversation with someone showing off the remote over there. I didn't have a chance to walk by and say hi, but I did go check out their booth. And I did talk to some people up at the front and they were actually nice enough to hand off some swag that I could bring to the happy hour. So there were a couple of shirts and stickers and things from Ava there too. So special thanks to them, uh, for doing that to you. Thanks. And, um, you know, um, but I do, uh, where we were, uh, Unify was right next to us. And of course I started getting like little text messages like, Hey, can you, can you check out what's going on

in Unify? Um, and I kind of already had, like, I, you know, first thing of course I did was go over to the Unify amplifier and see how exactly the little knob touchscreen thing worked. And if it actually popped off, it turns out, I guess the conspiracy is over. The knob is firmly attached to the front of the amplifier. It does not move off and you can't pull it off. And it's actually a lot smaller, I think, than the imaging on their website makes it out to look. I don't know. I mean, those are more like renderings, I think. In person, it's about the same size as a Sonos amplifier. Little knob thing does not at all look like an S-Thermostat. It looks like maybe a little miniature version of one or a cute little version of one. I guess it looks more like a cross

between their touchscreens they have on their switches and uh and this thermostat if you would like if you put a dial around it right because it makes sense when you're using it to kind of like touch it and turn up and down the volume on the front of those amplifiers i i may have a picture of the rack including the show notes where it had like a few of those, um, amplifiers stacked up on top of each other. Um, you know, on some rack shelves, again, they don't have rack ears for these things. They just have rack shelves. You stick them on. Um, so they're kind of like a little out of place, but I think what they're going for here is just kind of like a proof of concert concept for like small business who may need some background music, that kind of thing. And probably more often than

not, it's going to end up in somebody's home, put it up to their TV for better sound, which, you know, that makes sense. There are a couple of things that weren't really announced outside that amplifier. We've already talked about that last week because, you know, they announced it and they announced the ProAV stuff.

We talked about that pretty in depth last week. But at the show, they actually had some things that they didn't announce. And one of them, as they were setting up, I looked over and they have this big, giant Unify rack sitting there. And I kind of went over and talked to someone named Jared or Jason or something like that. He was a nice guy out of Texas, works for Unify.

And I was like, hey, what's this rack about? He's like, oh, yeah, it's not out yet or not released. And it's a big branded AV rack, or really networking rack. It looks like it was made for networking centers and that kind of thing. But they have a big giant rack thing that you can get with rack rails in the front and back.

Looks like the data rack I have in my house, except it was big, giant, and Unify white with the big U on the side of it. Looked nice. Actually looked clean with all the equipment that they ended up putting into it. So they did a great job setting up that display. Um, but one thing I noticed while, while I was walking around, when I looked at the side, they had the panel off and there's, there's something in there with rack rails on it.

What in the world could that be? I walked up to it. It's, they have a new enterprise in VR, which made total sense to me. I looked on the front and it had what 16 port bays, I guess, for hard drives. I was like, okay, he's just a big version of their Unify NVR. Probably has a beefed up horsepower inside, decent power supplies or something like that. And I looked on the back, not just a couple of ports for networking and the power cord. What isn't anything unexpected. Then as I'm walking through the show, I look over and holy cow, there is a face plate that goes on the front of these things. And I can't describe how over the top, like just extra it is. There's like LEDs in the front of this thing. It's got a touchscreen on the front, a big wide touchscreen. I'll have to put a picture of it. It'll probably be the show art, honestly, for this, for the show. Because wow, if not like having an enterprise in VR

is good enough, like to put these like LED RGB LEDs on there. I mean, it just, it looked amazing. It just made it look special. And I think that's what they were going for. The bigger announcement I didn't hear about because I, you know, I was hearing about it in, from being reported on sites like Reddit and over in the Slack chat that we have, the hub. I think the big news from them is they were going to have on this port coming to the protect line within the next month. They had a third partyparty camera. It looked like a rail link. It was way, way up on top of this massive 168-panel screen they had behind their booth. Couldn't really tell what it was.

But they pointed up to it and said, yeah, that's a third-party camera. It's hooked in, and you can see the image right here on the screen. And man, that is huge news for anybody who is a fan of the Protect line, which I am, but also who is not a fan of the cameras insofar as like, they're not really the best cameras for the money. They don't have a lot of the newer features, especially when it comes to the lensing and capture, like image capture, capturing sensors. Some of the, some of like the Uniview cameras

we sell at work have these like super wide angle lenses or they have like night vision where you could see basically color in the dark. They look absolutely stunning. And if I go switch between the image I'm getting off that and look at what I'm getting off my Unify cameras, which are probably double the cost, if I'm being quite honest,

of what the basic, I wouldn't say basic, but what the Uniview cameras are doing, it's kind of like, wow, I really wish I could get a better image on the system because the app and everything are so easy to use. It works so well. So I'm looking forward to seeing what that brings

to the Protect line i i not too many details other than it's going to come in the next month there's some rumors floating around that was only going to be for axis cameras or i don't even know where that came from somebody posted on reddit i saw like when this was announced that uh they were going to be able to do on the camera and they put like a picture of axis cameras i have no idea why they did that but maybe that's the only on fifth cameras they know of maybe that's where it comes from. I don't know. I had no, I didn't even, that wasn't even a question that came up and it was not expressed in any way, shape or form that way. And I do not think, I think this is any OnVIF camera. I don't even think you could restrict

it to particular camera models. If it's OnVIF compliant, that's pretty much a standard and you're going to get an image out of it. You're going to get the stream and all that stuff out of it. So I'm hoping that we'll see some pretty tight integration with that. I'm wondering further, like if you're going to get on this events brought in where you can trigger AI features and that kind of thing. Probably not as tightly integrated as the unified cameras, but you know, it'll be something and you'll have a better picture going into the protect system. And you know what, that's, this is gonna be great. It's going to help unify, um, sell a bunch more in VRs, I am sure. Uh, especially for places that have particular cameras, like particular cameras that they've already bought into and they would like to switch over to the Protect line, but they can't do it

because it would be a massive investment to change out their entire building or whatever to Unify cameras, which may not have the features they need. So I'm curious to see how this plays out. And hopefully it's as good as news. I think it's pretty major news. Some other things that they had

that they really didn't show off, they didn't really, I didn't really hear anybody talking about, you know, it talked about the enterprise in VR. I mean, everybody showed that off. But I think one of the bigger things is with the enterprise line, at least for integrators, they're going to start offering some kind of margin with them. That's been the complaint for most integrators and resellers out there

that unified doesn't really provide you with any margin on the product to make any money. I mean, you can go and buy it and sell it or whatever, and you end up marketing it up. And you know, that's just the install price. It's a good product. But the install price is going to be more than you can buy it online. There you go, done. Most of the integrators I talked to say, Oh, yeah, well, there's not any margin in that I'm going to go something that has margin. It looks like they're trying on this on the enterprise stuff, there's actually any margin in that. I'm going to go with something that has margin. It looks like they're trying on this. On the enterprise stuff, there's actually going to be about 30 points margin from what the conversation was having.

And there's going to be a special program that's through Unify where you go in and I guess you register for it or something like that. So it does look like they are dipping their toe into supporting the integration markets a little bit more, security markets a little bit more, in a traditional sense with some of their, maybe their higher end flagship products. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out over the next few years, because I'm sure that

program has to get some legs underneath it before they can start running it into other products. And of course, it's not going to be the same products that have general availability. It'll be some kind of special enterprise product that you can probably still buy through the unified website i mean i fully suspect that the enterprise nvr will be available on their website uh probably for like i don't know a thousand bucks or something i don't know it's gonna be ridiculous but it's gonna it does look amazing absolutely amazing i i kind of want one like i i have the nvr and it serves my needs completely i don't need another nvr but if they're gonna support these on-vive cameras i might need one

especially if the i start getting a lot of 4k cameras uh and i'm able to integrate those into an nvr i might need more space so we'll see we'll see how it works out hopefully it's not more than a thousand dollars hopefully it's just a few hundred dollars you know because that's what unify is pretty famous for doing so anyway um let um, let's move on from them. Um, I could, let's talk about control for a little bit because I think they, as we were going to the show, I didn't really think there was going to be any big news coming out of the company. Obviously snap one is integrated into ADI at this point. There were two booths there, one big giant snap one booth on the floor, which had the same, you know, I think they call it Better Together or something like that signage.

And then they had a smaller ADI, where ADI would have been. They have a little small booth. And that booth was set up in the traditional sense that ADI usually had. It just had like little meeting tables around it, no product or anything. I guess that's what ADI usually does. You look at the plans for next year, there's no ADI booth. There's no Snap One booth. There's no SnapOne booth. It's basically ADI. I think next year, I'm really curious to see what they do. If they

discontinue the use of SnapOne brand and just move everybody over to ADI and show off all the parts and pieces and everything that they have in that company, I'm curious to see how that's going to play out. Because the SnapOne booth is actually pretty impressive. How they laid out all the products that Snap-on and ADI are able to offer these days as a big giant booth. Going into the show though for Control 4 at least, I thought really the only news coming out of them was going to be that, like the merger. Here we are, merger. We've got the Better Together signage up and Apple Music. It's been a rumor for a while. They did release the Apple Music, but right right before the show they announced this new x4 i guess i guess what they're calling their new os so it's called x4 control 4 x4 and i guess you know instead of calling it control 4 os 4 it's just going to be called x4 and we'll go out

from version numbers from there um has a whole new interface, which looks very familiar. I mean, I guess very familiar. I will say it looks more updated. It's more modern and in line with what you would expect to see from a control and home automation system in the 2020s. Just leave it at that. It definitely looked good from what I was able to see some of the press images

that were sent out and C Pro and that kind of thing. One of the bigger things I think that was announced and I heard mixed feedback on this from dealers and I'm not sure why, but you're going to have

like a native home kit integration. So right now, if you use a third party driver, I think you have to have like a home HomeKit integration. So right now, if you use a third party driver, I think you have to have a like a HomeBridge server set up somewhere, you can integrate your control for system directly into HomeKit. And it works great. I mean, I've been using that for a very long time. I heard a lot of feedback from dealers like, like, why would I do that? And I'm not gonna do that. But man, got to say, it's probably the best and fastest way you can get in and control some of your lights.

And if it has first party integration and you're not relying on, you know, a third party developer to release the driver and maintain it and that kind of thing, obviously they were able to get the Apple music thing done and wrapped up. This, you know, this thing looks like it would be pretty good too.

They'll be able to integrate directly from a control board system into HomeKit. Great. I'm all for it. And you know what? The interface is super snappy for you. You just swipe over or tell Siri or whatever to do something and it does it. That's great. And if it's first party, even better. So that's nice. Hopefully we'll see that. Well, I guess it all comes with this new X4 platform. They're also going to have new widgets that they've designed for the home screen so kind of like I guess for Android and iOS there's the concept

of having widgets on your home screen so they're going to be pushing that out with their app updates just basically it's going to be basically a new interface and a new app experience that you'll have to upgrade to in the app store. People who are still on the OS 3 versions will maintain themselves on that OS 3 and need to, I guess, have a new Kinect subscription

to upgrade to OS 4. That's kind of how they're going to kind of kill off, I guess, what remains of OS 3. And if you're wondering how they're going to kill off the rest of what remains of Foresight, it looks like they're going to be discontinuing some of the Foresight services. I want to say I read 2025. I don't really know the exact date, quite honestly, offhand. It was not really in any of the press releases, but some of the dealers were showing me the press, you know, the information that was being provided to them. But anything running like way back, older systems that are running 210 and Foresight and still connected out to cloud services, those integrations are going to be discontinued, uh, and cut off basically and shut down. Uh, so there's going to be some upgrade opportunities, or you're, if you're a customer who relies on that, you're

going to need to upgrade your, uh, control for system in the future to the new X4 platform. And, uh, that that's the one where you're, you're going to pay, I guess, is a yearly subscription fee to basically use any local iPad device or any connected device outside of the control for ecosystem as well as remotely can connect in with any one of those devices as well. So will be interesting to see how all that plays out and what dealers are doing. I will say that from the conversations I had, Elon definitely has some or i guess what you call it nice uh i stopped by their booth before the show opened on the second day and talked to my contact there um they've got voice control native like native integrated voice control with the remotes looked awesome they have new touchscreens look amazing and on the new touchscreens they have a new interface and i mean just a beautiful interface kind of and it's shipping i guess um

the control for interface is coming out later in the year uh or i guess q1 i guess it's supposed to go into early access not even a beta but like early access so i'm kind of wondering i kind of feel like the uh big announcement with the explorer thing was like kind of a reaction to uh the elan actually releasing or showing off a new interface that has some legs to it because it looks gorgeous. So great job. For all we've heard for the last couple of months, years,

I guess that Nice is just all in. They're throwing all this tons and tons of money into the Elan ecosystem and it's starting to show. We're starting to see it pay off. So that's exciting. I saw that Chris Runm got a major update, includes some new features that I kind of needed to check what year it was.

I feel like the announcement, I was getting trolled by some of those announcements because, well, let's just go over it. This is the big headlining features. There's now if-then logic for dealers to program custom routines for their clients. I didn't even know that was missing. Honestly, that feels like table stakes. And I just don't get it.

They announced full Catra lighting support. That's good. That's good. Lutron Catra is a big platform. And it's very popular, especially in high-end homes, that I would expect to see Crestron or Crestron Home installed into. So that's great. They have new door lock features and management. I guess you can manage pin codes from their touchscreens now, which is, again, something I would consider to table stakes.

But okay. Just in time for 2024, there is a new driver module for Myq which okay just in time good job um adjustable lighting fade rates it's not i can't even believe this is a feature but it was fixed at three seconds not anymore and you can use any value no wait no nope nope i'm being corrected here you can use any value between one and ten seconds okay uh integration with sonos soundbars again 2024 i thought these were table stakes and they have some reports i i honestly i read this press release i thought it was being trolled like i i've seen the crash around home stuff i've seen how popular it was like i've seen dealers kind of talk about it and say oh yeah it works great in my home that kind of thing

um i've never actually had hands-on experience with programming it. Mostly because like they really don't have any plan or program for programmers like myself who are not Crestron dealers to go in and get set up and program for the system. So I've really never able, been able to get my hands on it. I'm hoping that we see that in the future where we'll be able to do that because it's just, there's a, there's definitely politics involved in that. And hopefully one day they'll get over it and open up the integrations and everything. I was talking to some developers at the Home Tech Cafe Hour, and it definitely does sound like the

Crestron world is still a little bit behind in some of the ways that I guess the development works and how things go. And I guess that's good. That's only going to be good for so much longer. You know, that Innovo interview I had earlier in the show really stood out to me as something that I think most dealers should pay attention to. Because if we have these companies that are sticking their head in the sand and pretending like it's the 1980s and 90s, which, you know, don't get me wrong, having highly highly trained very specialized programmers for these systems really did work in the 80s and 90s and probably the early 2000s that is no longer the case anymore anyone can go out grab home assistant integrate integrate i mean every one of these features they probably have on home assistant it's it's laughable and it probably where

it's been working for i don't know years i'm sure it's laughable to think that uh that this is something i i just i can't i i again i read this press release i read the features i'm like am i am i being trolled like this cannot be the flagship features of a brand new os that they're rolling out in 2024 i man how embarrassing um so i. So I'm hoping they're able to move out of whatever political or what's keeping them stuck in the 90s. Honestly, this platform looks amazing. It's definitely being developed correctly. It looks like it's a very forward-thinking development. But if they are still locking themselves out of third-party development, if they're still locking, which I can attest to, if they are still locking themselves out of third-party development, if they're still locking, which I can attest to,

if they are still locking themselves out of features, like if then and, you know, Sono soundbar integration until the year 2024, I just, wow, I don't know. I can see why there's so much headwind behind platforms like Elan. You know, like I just, wow, there's, there's going to be some wind in that sails if that's where things are going. So anyway, not, not to end on a negative note, but that's about all I have for the show. It was a good show. I really had a great time, especially sitting on the booth, meeting everyone. I was constantly

talking to people for two days straight. There really wasn't any downtime to go around and see very much. I was able to kind of scoot around the very, you know, maybe the last hour or two of the show on Saturday after I got out of some meetings and chat with people and see some of the new stuff. So the big CC screen set up and I took a few pictures. I'll put those in the show notes as well, kind of put it in a gallery or something like that. So you can go check them out. But I didn't, I wasn't able to really escape too much from the booth just because we were so busy for two days straight. And you know, again, on Saturday, that's when vendors and everything, other partners come in and we sit down and have good meetings because it's nice and quiet and

everybody can take a breath and, and, and, and set those meetings up for Saturday and just kind of like go around and chat with each other. So anyway, um, that's it from CD. I'm actually in Charlotte, North Carolina, waiting on a connecting flight. And so I should have this wrapped up and published hopefully before I land. I don't know. We'll see what the wifi on the plane is like, but, um, you know, fun show. And again, uh, Chow Mein, for supporting the Home Tech Happy Hour. Definitely appreciate that. And with that, that's going to wrap up everything for Cedia 2024. Everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week. We're going commercial. The show is now closed. As a reminder for exhibitors, please keep the aisles clear.

Here we go. Cheering. Once that happens, we'll start working on your next piece. We'll see you next year.