I would very much like MC to handle home automation in the future, and it would be nice with some brainstorming and discussion about the potential future or non-future of this direction. I am pretty sure it will be quite a lot of work for JRiver but also potentially a good reward. I am not sure how big the market is though. I am going to give my thoughts on the matter, and hope to get some more thoughts from people. As far as I see, there are 3 tiers of ambition one can put into this.
Tier 1: Being able to control many aspects of the PC and other programs from MC, including a good touch interface for pads, android-devices and similar. This allows for good control of the computer, and other programs that can interface with the hardware.
Notable Competitor Girder
Why Should MC do it? Being able to control everything through MC simplifies things greatly on the computer, as you don't need a second program, and you can connect events controlled by the computer to events in MC (On video start, send command to program to dim lights for instance). Furthermore without a second program, you can use only MC as an interface on touch screens, android-devices and so on. This is a pretty valuable feature. Some of the competition is pretty solid, but seems to have a very low/non-existing future development.
Whats the downside? Quite a lot of work, I would imagine this would need quite a lot of programming, support for scripting and so on. A pretty massive undertaking (based on my non-existing knowledge about programming
). And it is targeted towards power users, due to having several other programs again controlled by MC.
Whats it worth? I would pay extra for this feature, maybe in the ballpark of 50 dollars extra.
Tier 2: Tier 1's features, and support for typical radio-based "do it yourself hardware". Like Insteoen, Rfxcom-devices, Z-wave (androids new protocol?) and so on.
Notable Competitor Homeseer
Why Should MC do it? Actually being able to control equipment is pretty important for home automation, not having to go through another program for many things is a huge gain. Competing programs are not very polished and pretty expensive.
Whats the downside? Seems to be not too much programming work in itself, but price and and amount of work to interface to hardware is unkown. (for me). The need for plugin support is pretty large.
Whats it worth? I would pay around 100 dollars extra for this feature in addition to base price and tier1. (although one could probably squeeze a bit more out of me
)
Tier 3: Tier 1+2, plus support for the biggest commercial offerings in home automation (EiB/Knx for instance in europe).
Notable Competitor Very expensive special software or servers, normally sold by installers.
Why Should MC do it? Would make it the ultimate home automation software, that would fulfill every need. No real software-competitors being close in feature-set.
Whats the downside? Big commercial standards might (do?) have expensive APIs and probably will cost money to license.
Whats it worth? I personally would easily buy the program for 500 $ If tier 1, 2 and 3 are fulfilled. I am not sure others would pay that much though? However very expensive upgrades every year is less tempting.
So are my ideas and thoughts just crazy talk, or can this be a possible future road for MC? And if so, what do people have to say about the direction and feature-set?
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Topic: MC for home automation, a pipe dream or a possibilty in the future? (Read 1457 times)