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The Problem (Still) With Whole Home Integration

remote-0915We are better — thanks to companies like Sonos and Apple, to be frank — but not there, yet. Hey, at least one of those companies does exhibit at CEDIA Expo.

Let’s be honest, the custom home integration market is still, way, way too complicated.

But, is it a people problem or a product problem.

Well, according to this video, it’s a people problem:


Look familiar?

Terms like HDMI, HDCP 2.2, H.264 and UDTV may sound cool to us, but, to our clients, we either:

1. Sound Arrogant: Many people perceive smarty-pants-people as arrogant. And, interestingly enough, most smarty-pants-people aren’t doing this intentionally. They are, well, smart. And, they talk to other people as if we should all understand what they are talking about. So, when we sound smart, technical or knowledgeable, it’s possible we could be perceived as arrogant — especially to like 95 percent of our customers who want simplicity. They want everything in their house to work as easily as an iPhone. (Did you ever notice that something as complicated as an iPhone doesn’t even come with a user’s manual? People can simply pick it up and, eventually, figure it out.)

2. People Tune Us Out: The other half of the population (the one’s that don’t perceive smarty-pants-people as arrogant) simply tune us out. In fact, you can see this in real-time at a Best Buy — seriously, check it out yourself. Take your spouse with you — of course, I am assuming that, since you’re in the AV market, they aren’t (and don’t care that much about AV). Now, ask the salesperson a tricky technical question about HDMI. Watch what they do. Their body will twist ever so slightly towards you (and away from your spouse) and talk at you while not even noticing that he or she is tuning out your spouse and, thus, cutting them out of the conversation. The result, the ignored potential customer tunes them out. The important nugget of information is gone. So, the technical remains too technical for the average person to understand.

So, while the gear (or at least MOST of the AV gear in our industry) gets simpler, we need to simplify too. We need to not over-educate, over-sell and over-technify this stuff. People don’t care about the processor in an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone, don’t even know the RAM in it (it’s not even on the spec sheets) and certainly don’t care how to program an app, so why would they care how all this whole-home AV stuff works.They just want it to work. Every time.

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Oh, and a hint, putting in this remote, isn’t simplifying anything…

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