[jyl]

Well, I see why home automation hasn't gone anywhere, in a mass market sense. The systems are crap, from an ease of setup point of view.

I'm trying to setup an Insteon hub and IP camera. The hub was easy enough. The camera is a royal pain. The iPhone app that you are supposed to use to set it up can only handle a few things. For the rest you have to install and figure out a PC/Mac application that looks like it was developed in 1995. Then you need to log into your router and open ports. Who is really going to get down in the weeds with static IP, MAC, subnet, TCP UDP, and equally poorly written management software from Cisco and Comcast? Not enough people to make this a real market.

The new companies have figured out how to skip all that crap. The Nest thermostat takes five minutes to setup and all you need to know is the name and password for your wireless network. Dropcam doesn't need port forwarding. Etc. With new and smarter companies like this, I can see the market going somewhere.