Control4 Buys Driver Developer, Adds Sony SDDP Protocol Support

In a phone interview with Consumer Electronics Daily Monday, Control4 CEO Martin Plaehn told us the three-person Extra Vegetables team will join Control4, with Fresh Vegetables founder and COO Jane Scotland to head the third-party device driver and interoperability group at Control4. The U.K.-based company is integrating its assets into Control4 while “removing the licensing complexity and extra fees” associated with being an outside company, Plaehn said.

Control4 will distribute and support more than 100 Fresh Vegetables multiroom audio products “eliminating the complexity for dealers managing multiple vendors, licensing, and permission models,” a news release said. Dealers will continue to be able to integrate the same third-party products for AV gear, climate control, IP cameras, blinds, lighting, security and irrigation systems, and future drivers will now be expanded and serviced by Control4’s tech support team.

Extra Vegetables is one of several companies that writes device drivers for use between Control4 and third-party products. “We thought if they were part of us we could get a lot more leverage out of them,” Plaehn said. Extra Vegetables is particularly proficient in AV integration with products including Sonos and Roku, Plaehn said.

Control4 differentiators include its open architecture and the number of devices the platform interoperates with, Plaehn said. “We see the connected world accelerating and everything with a battery or power cord is going to be network aware,” he said. That means Control4 needs to continue to deliver tools to “the broader world” so companies can write interfaces to Control4, which also needs to shore up its own capacity to develop drivers toward that end. The company urged Scotland to join Control4 “because if you don’t we've gotta do it with somebody else, and we prefer to do it with you,” Plaehn said. On other purchase plans, Plaehn said, “We'll let this run for a year or so; maybe we'll circle back."

Fresh Vegetables was also working with two other control companies, one of which was Universal Remote Control (URC). Plaehn conceded that the purchase isn’t going to sit well with its competitors affected by the move. “One of their suppliers just disappeared,” he said. URC didn’t immediately respond to a request for for comment.

Also at CEDIA, Control4 said Sony is shipping its 2014 W and X series TVs with Control4’s Simple Device Discovery Protocol (SDDP), making Sony the first TV company to ship a full line of automation-ready HD and 4K Ultra HD TVs. More than 100 brands are delivering SDDP “automation-ready” products for the connected home, Control4 said.

We asked how Samsung’s announcement of its smart home initiative at IFA will pan out with Control4 and whether Plaehn views the Korean electronics maker as a competitor. “The whole connected world is going to have competitive and cooperative forces,” Plaehn told us. “There will be a branch of Samsung that could be viewed more competitive than cooperative or collaborative with us,” he said. But the “vast majority” of Samsung’s business “should be collaborative,” he said, citing Samsung phones that run on Android, which is compatible with Control4, and Samsung appliances that in the future will likely be part of the connected home. Samsung is the No. 1 TV maker for homes so “why wouldn’t they adopt SDDP at some time?” he said.

Control4 is banking on the industry learning that an open platform -- “with high-quality interoperability and integration -- is a good thing for consumers” and for all the parties that cooperate in that integration, Plaehn said. “The companies that have closed up … they get away with it for a year or two or three,” he said, “but they end up opening up.” Even Apple opens up in its own way, Plaehn said. “They don’t put a lot of effort into working with other people, but they open up enough so that other people can interoperate with them."

Control4 also announced Composer Express, a mobile configuration tool designed to streamline the setup process for a Control4 system. Composer Express is a dedicated companion app to its professional programming software that uses SDDP to automatically discover all SDDP-enabled devices including light switches, dimmers, keypads and sensors and cut down on the time it takes to configure a system. A setup in a large home that used to take days to complete can be completed using a tablet or smartphone “within a few hours,” the company said.