Christspeak, Rx

• Home Theater, Lighting Controls, Security, HVAC Controls, Structured Cabling.

Its popular and one of the fastest growing sub-sectors of residential building. Despite the problems that I will list below, the systems mentioned above are guaranteed to enhance the lifestyle of homeowners.

The problem is engineering- and like all broad subjects there is Good News/Bad News.

Let's pick on my favorite automated system, home theater.

It starts with the receiver.

• The Good. Today a $400 surround sound receiver is an engineering marvel because it incorporates 6-7 speperate digital amplifiers, state of the art processing, video switching, smart remote controls and more.
• The Bad. You have to be an engineer to utilize it. Perhaps the most important function of good engineering is making the product easy to use. We have hundreds of extremely smart clients- doctors, lawyers, authors- who cannot work audio-video equipment. They often describe themselves as stupid or electronically challenged- and that is exactly how engineers must think of them.

Just consider remote controls.

• The Good. There are 2 companies, AMX and Creston who make one touch remotes that anyone can use without training. They will control lighting, theater, security, heating- anything. Alot of univeral remotes under $300 , like receivers, are engineering marvels- they will do it all.
• The Really Bad. Those remotes from AMX- they are mainly designed for Hotels, or Casinos, Board rooms... they start at around $4000 bucks. They also require professional integration and programming. The <$300 univerals? There are no user friendly remotes (that can be programmed by most any user) on the market today. We do not sell remotes unless we program them ourselves. We can't. They come back everytime. Think about it this way- a cheap Apple or PC costs less than $600 and can far surpass any univeral remote- IF SOMEONE WOULD PROGRAM IT FOR ALL OF US!

How about High Definition TV?

• A great improvement, no doubt. Did you know the first 60 or so channels on digital cable (here in Greensboro) are not digital? Did you know digital is not the same as high definition? Did you know there are various new connections needed to acquire HD? Or that Circuit City charges $700 for the best available connection? Or that you can get HD over the air...if you have a good antenna, a TV with an HD tuner and a good installer?

The list goes on and on. There are truly great, inexpensive systems available in all fields of home automation, but no one has taken the time to make them user friendly.

Here's a great example- IBM's Home Director. We were one the first small companies to sign on... around 1999. IBM chief Lou Gershner called Home Director "the final frontier." Their goal was to put this product in every new home built in America. Minimum, stripped down cost was well over $1000 (up to $15000) installed. When we went to IBM for training, there was a huge pirate flag flying (indoors) over the Home Director unit, symbolizing a new way of thinking within the Big Blue.

The internet was coming, but I was bothered that there was no market demand within existing homes. During class I asked one question that nobody before me had thought to ask. "When cable TV was introduced to the market, how did they deliver their product?" The answer is (and still is) they drilled holes through walls and floors in the rooms you wanted to watch TV.

Within 18 months, IBM spun off the "last frontier."

(One of the main benefits of Home Director was structured cabling- an organized process of bringing in signals ( Cable TV, Phone, High speed Internet) and distributing the highest quality signals throughout the home with cabling. The automation was driven by x10 technology.)

// posted by Christspeak Rx @ 12:13 PM