If you have ever been to Cedia, you would know that there are five million different vendors all swearing that their solution is the best. The entire industry is built upon high margin home integration specialists who will–for a price–integrate all of these solutions so that you can control your home from a single device. Not long ago, folks at CEDIA would laugh at you if you said Microsoft was going to take over your living room, today, Microsoft is at the center of over 90 percent of these companies strategies. Today, if you said Apple TV will control your home, you might get laughed at, or I might actually be on to something. I believe Apple could eliminate all of these integration companies (I own one) and put together the entire ecosystem that works as smooth as an iPod in a way that even JoeBlow could set it all up.
Apple TV has a name that is stronger than perhaps the strongest brand at CEDIA, a company called Crestron. Crestron is a high end solution that will control your lights, your HVAC, and everything else in yoru home, it also is very expensive and requires the work of companies who can program in various niche languages for automation and it doesn’t have a very robust IDE.
I believe Apple TV will work with Apple iPHONE and some yet to be announced wifi, or X10 enhanced (there is a newer spec, the name is evading me) modules to control your lighting, your media, your garage door, and everything else, right from your iPhone or Apple TV. You will be able to open your garage door by pushing a button on your iPhone. Apple has no choice, the Apple TV is irrelevant unless they can do what the CEDIA crowd does. They can’t compete with their current Apple TV either because it only does a poor mans 720p, which isn’t any good on very large screens.
The patent talks about a Remote Device, a Keyboard and Mouse device (remote control) being able to control a Module controller that talks to a media player/s. These media players talk to internal events from external applications and libraries. The module-controller talks to a bunch of modules (think dimmer switch modules, camera modules, security modules, HVAC modules to control your home.
You heard it here first. Apple is going to bring to your home the first end to end complete solution for a Smarthome. It won’t come with expensive maintence plans to keep your media center updated with patches and viruses. I’ve been wrong before, but I think I got this one right. If it’s better than the Microsoft Lifeware solution, I’ll "Switch". This is going to put a lot of companies out of business. I’ve called Apple out of this a few months back, I said, Apple TV, what a joke, I can’t control my lights with that! And not a few months later look what we have here.
Update: Also, note that there have been many OSX Leopard delays. Is Apple sending engineers to work on this as well? What logic is in the iPhone that we don’t know about yet? Certainly the Remote Device they talk about below is this Remote Device. They wouldn’t tell us if they were. It all makes sense now.
Apple’s Patent Diagram (source USPTO)
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