Podcast #730: Interview - Will Price CEO Simple Control

Interview - Will Price CEO Simple Control

Ara has been using Simple Control as his home remote for many years. It is the one piece of gear that he can’t live without. His setup includes three rooms, lights, thermostats, and iTunes control all in one great looking app. We produced a video demonstrating the capabilities, though a little dated they show the capabilities pretty well.

• Virtual Remotes - Simple Control provides a virtual remote control for any supported device, automatically optimizing each remote for iOS. Simple Control provides all of the commands from your original remote and often more advanced commands including “discrete” power on and off.
• Live Feedback - Simple Control provides advanced two-way feedback support for many devices via direct network control or serial connection. Unlike older universal remotes, Simple Control knows your receiver’s volume level, power status, mute, input, and mode allowing you to view and control these aspects of your system in ways impossible with infrared. Simple Control integrates with Blu-ray players to allow live scrubbing and elapsed/total time displays, integrates streaming and USB song feedback from popular receivers, provides guides for DISH, TiVo, and DirecTV DVR content, and many other examples. Once you’ve tried live feedback, you’ll wonder how you ever used home theater components without it.
• Control All Your Music - Keep things in tune. With Simple Control, you not only have all your music in your pocket. You hold the key to every speaker in your home. It’s like being the conductor of your own personal home orchestra.
• iTunes/Apple TV Integration - Simple Control controls iTunes installations on your Mac OS X or Windows sytems directly via your network. All your music, TV shows, movies, and other iTunes content can be controlled directly from Simple Control like another home theater device. Simple Control can even control Airplay through iTunes to stream your music from iTunes to an Apple TV or other Airplay compatible device on your network. Simple Control has direct network control of supported Apple TV models including gestures, media feedback and keyboard support.
• SONOS Integration - Simple Control even supports any Sonos device including speaker grouping. A Simple Service subscription provides Sonos speakers a media guide for the your entire music library including Pandora, Internet radio, Sonos Queue, Sonos Favorites, iTunes playlists, inputs, Pandora thumbs up/down, station creation and more.

• TV Guide Listings - Simple Control provides integrated cable, satellite and antenna television listings for the US, UK, Canada and 31 other countries. Your listings are personalized with favorite channels and integrated with your devices to tune channels directly. Information on each show provides episode tracking, descriptions, Next On schedules, cast and crew information and photos, and detailed talent biographies and filmographies.

• DISH, DirecTV and TiVo DVR Guides - Supported set top boxes include DISH’s Hopper/Joey, DirecTV and TiVo Roamio/Premiere with the ability to browse and play programs recorded on your DVR. Never miss a moment with the DVR recording and schedule editing capabilities for DISH and TiVo models