John Sciacca

To quote Janet Jackson (Ms. Jackson if you're nasty), "This is a story about control." And whether your lifestyle is Joe Schmo, Average Joe, or Joe Millionaire, control is something we can all use a little more of in our lives. Fortunately, achieving some level of control over our A/V systems is easily done.

There are so many Pow! Bang! Ka-chow! buzzwords thrown out by the consumer electronics industry's marketing war chariots that smaller, more important things often get lost or completely overwhelmed in the ground clutter.

Control4 announced that it features integration support for nearly 10,000 devices, and OS 2.9 will enhance that experience with a new feature called “Connects with Control4.” Control4 is heavily invested in helping dealers deliver customized smart home experiences for its customers, and one of the ways they do this is by Simple Device Discovery Protocol (SDDP) that identifies a product and loads the correct driver. Currently 185 companies are shipping over 1,500 devices enabled with Control’s and the new program will feature QR codes on products that can be quickly scanned in to automatically identify and add the correct integration driver. This now includes products from Amazon, Lutron, Nest, Somfy, and Sonos.