Control4 whose products are sold via Convergent Technologies in Australia is about to start a major expansion drive by allowing Hi Fi, consumer electronic companies and IT companies making set top boxes and media centres to include their home control operating system.
Control4 CEO Will West said that the move made sense and that in the future recievers could well include a C4 operating system that gives users better access to home automation.
According to TWICE Magazine “TV and audio makers are not home-automation software developers,” West said. Licensing Control4’s C4iQ OS and user interface will enable them to “get into the market quickly” by leveraging a standards-based OS and adding it to products that already pack “plenty of processing power,” to run the software, he said.
Suppliers that adopt C4iQ will also be able to leverage the availability of Control4-branded products in national and specialty retailers as well as in the custom-installation channel, he said. Licensees’ products would be able to interoperate with Control4-branded products, including in-wall touchscreens, if the manufactures chose not to offer those products.
“We’re not exiting the hardware business,” said president/COO Glen Mella. The new strategy, however, will enable the company to “achieve broader penetration” through partnerships with CE companies that could each sell a million units per year.
The company’s home-automation products are based on industry standards such as Ethernet, Wi-Fi and wireless ZigBee to simplify the installation of multiroom-audio and home-control systems. The HC-1000, for example, is a home controller, music server and DVD-management system that distributes music from its embedded server and from connected legacy sources to Ethernet- or Wi-Fi-connected tabletop clients.
Different clients can be connected to existing stereo systems or to passive speakers to reproduce music from the central music sources. The HC-1000 also controls ZigBee-equipped home systems through an embedded ZigBee transceiver. An embedded database of control protocols enables it to control thousands of other-brand RS-232-based home systems, and additional protocols can be downloaded from the company’s Web site. The HC-1000 also features contacts and relays to control other home systems, West said.
The integrated systems can be controlled from tabletop and in-wall touchscreens available in ZigBee and Ethernet/Wi-Fi versions.
Although Control4 will not mandate the type of inputs and outputs needed to secure a licensing agreement, many products from CE and custom-install brands are already equipped with the inputs, outputs, and processing power needed to connect to home systems, Mella said. Many audio suppliers, he noted, offer Ethernet-equipped A/V receivers. “They just need to embed our software.” They’ll also likely want to embed ZigBee, he added.
Licensees will be able to offer “some customisation” of the Control4 user interface, but the interface will nonetheless will be consistent whether appearing on a TV screen or a touchpanel.
For more on this story see TWICE.
