The Great Home Control Collision of 2009

We need a t-shirt that says, “I will survive the Great Home Collision of 2009”. It’s coming and it’s not clear what’s going to happen after the dust settles.

The pursuit of telecommunications, entertainment and broadband services into (and within) the home has been marked by any numbers of battles for “ownership” of the market. The next big battle has been looming and is now taking shape – the battle to dominate the entire home – entertainment, computing, home networking, automation and control systems and services, and their intersection with the IP services we all know and love. In other words, the system the users use to control their whole home experience.

You’ve got the telco/cable camp trying to come at this from the TV set and video services roots; the CE camp trying to come at this largely from networking origins (the PC approaches go here since you are largely using CE extensions or set top boxes to get to the TVs); and the home control camp coming at this from whole home control. All want to put a single interface on the screen that the users will singlehandedly (or no handedly) use to control what they see, feel, hear, etc. – one screen interface to control it all.

It’s finally time for the smart home / home control players to move to their rightful place in this battle.

• The underlying technologies are more mature (and actually work): If you are thinking X10/powerline control, forgetaboutit. They don’t work. We’re talking mesh wireless technologies (like ZigBee and Z-Wave) that work, work well, and work throughout the house.
• The applications are in front of mind: Not everyone bought into the “turn off the lights on the back porch from the bedroom” story that the smart home story often told in the past. But today, a lot of people can get behind the “green” message of energy management, and even more can understand (and desire) the ability of a well-sorted home control system to make content easy to access and distribute throughout the home. There’s so much stuff you need something to manage it all.
• We’re on the cusp of a major downward trend on pricing: all of the pieces and parts that make this work – from the PHY layer network chips up to the fancy touchscreen controllers are hitting that point in their life cycle when they become cheap and plentiful. In other words, home control isn’t going to just be a rich persons’ game much longer.
• The major brands are getting in on the action: Companies like Control4 are teaming with people like Best Buy/Magnolia to bring this to the masses. They will handle installations (including such niceties as whole-home audio and video distribution), perform complex programming, and then offer ongoing support. They’ll even (gasp) set up your HDTV correctly.

Take Control4. On their touchscreen/iPhone/TV/remote control/PC interface, you can control all your live and streaming audio and video, collections like DVDs, CDs, and digitized content, photos, camera feeds, AppleTV and set top boxes galore, security, HVAC, and more. One remote controls the whole house completely. But hey, didn’t we hear FiOS talking the same talk about its future plans? And what about Cisco’s new wireless audio products and whole home plans?