Who’s in Control?

Most homes I visit, I’ll head to the living room towards the TV…make my way past the coffee table…and I see too many remotes.

The coffee table is home to

• TV remote
• Amplifier remote
• DVD or Bluray remote
• AppleTV remote
• Foxtel remote and
• Hard drive remote

That’s too many remotes!

Some quick statistics off the top of my head tell me you have 6 remotes, 10 batteries, 248 buttons and a BIG headache!

I’ll then be told only 1 person in the home can actually turn on the TV and watch a movie. Only Dad knows how to work it!

Nice one Dad but your time at the helm of the AV system has come to and end…we’re watching The Bachelor tonight.

Have you tried a universal remote before with disastrous results? There’s a lot of products out there that sound promising.

The remote project can go pear shaped because

• The remote you bought is simply a bad product
• The installer didn’t program it correctly
•  You didn’t receive any after sales support
• It didn’t actually make things easier

It probably made things worse!

The purpose of a single remote is to make the system usable for everyone.

Also look at the following:

• It should take minutes to learn it
• It controls your whole system (not just some of it)
• It gets the best performance from each device
• Grandma and Grandad can use it

A good remote means you don’t need to find that scrap piece of paper with the faded instructions. It means you don’t need to call the kids to ask what input the amp needs to be on to watch Foxtel.

How many buttons do you really use on each remote? There are probably 4 or 5 on each one that you use on a day to day basis. The rest of are bells and whistles that you’ll never use. Their only purpose is to provided confusion and add to the noise in your life.

Back to the well programmed remote…it has the basic functions front and centre. The less used and more difficult operations are all happening in the background automatically. You don’t want to know what surround sound mode to select so let the remote do that for you.

All AV devices can be connected to your home network. And there are apps to control them. These apps are pretty much a novelty and can be fun for a little while but you soon realise you don’t want to be jumping betweens apps to control your system. You’re pretty much back to square one..a coffee table full of remotes or a smart phone full of apps. It’s all the same.

A universal remote treats your system as a whole, the one device communicates with everything, bringing it all under one umbrella.

There’s other options or ways to control your system, would you prefer using a tablet over a remote? It depends what you’re most comfortable with.

If you spend a lot of time on your iPad and it’s a device that brings you joy and happiness then why not use it as a remote? The traditional style remote might be more suitable if the kids hijack the iPad on a regular basis.

Remember that a remote has buttons you can feel so you won’t need to take your eyes off the screen to find the Play button after fast forwarding the ads.

Any of these are possible, even a combination of both, but the end result should always be easy to use and reliable.