Blackfire Research
Come Together, Right Now

Come Together, Right Now

The Tech
Ruben Mookerjee
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Over the past few years, consumers have started to recognize the convenience and cost-saving benefits of smart home technologies, but adoption has been slow, especially compared to the amount of investment money being poured into the industry. According to Business Insider, “the smart home market is stuck in the ‘chasm’ of the technology adoption curve, in which it is struggling to surpass the early-adopter phase and move to the mass-market phase of adoption.” But what’s the largest barrier to mass market smart home adoption? Is it high prices? Cybersecurity? Limited demand? Nope, it’s not any of those. Rather, research has found that the largest barrier to smart home adoption is…interoperability (a fancy word for how devices work together and communicate with each other).

 

At the moment, consumers view the smart home as fragmented, and many aren’t willing to invest in any smart home devices until all the kinks are worked out. In an insightful article posted to IoT Agenda, analyst Jessica Groopman sees the current state of the smart home as “just a bunch of smart endpoints” which ultimately is hurting the smart home industry:

 

The very design of connected products requires interoperability in terms of connectivity, communications and integration protocols. Products should be simple to connect. Period. Despite the reality of a painful lack of standards across devices and industries, the need to equip physical products with connectivity and communications flexibility sets both an immediate and long-term value proposition in place (IoT Agenda).

 

When smart home companies invest in interoperability, the users win. As Groopman notes: “open integration and interoperability is really about curating a customer-first relationship.” In a previous blog post, I responded to CNBC Technology Product Editor, Todd Haselton, and his irritation that smart home products don’t work together. This sentiment is being felt by consumers across the globe, causing it to be the single greatest barrier to smart home adoption:

 

Currently, there are many networks, standards, and devices being used to connect the smart home, creating interoperability problems and making it confusing for the consumer to set up and control multiple devices. Until interoperability is solved, consumers will have difficulty choosing smart home devices and systems (Business Insider).

 

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone just learned to get along? At Blackfire Research, interoperability is our game. A few years back, founder and CEO, Ravi Rajapakse, became frustrated – much like Haselton, Groopman, and countless other smart home gadget enthusiasts – when he realized that there was no seamless way to transfer and share entertainment media throughout his own home. The culmination of 10 years of research is a revolutionary new protocol, The Blackfire Realtime Entertainment Distribution (RED) framework, which can stream 5.1 audio channels and 4K video, simultaneously, across multiple devices – all over the standard WiFi you already have. As well as connecting smart home devices like light bulbs, thermostats and door locks, Blackfire also works as a bridge between your smart home and your entertainment systems – with precise synchronization, low latency for lip sync, and overall reliability. Because, as the research shows, that is exactly what smart home owners want – to be able to mix and match devices that can all work together, while having their music and movies available to them anywhere in the home.

 

At Blackfire Research, we’re ahead of the curve: we know what smart home owners want and what technological barriers need to be crossed to make smart home adoption mainstream. That’s why all Blackfire enabled products are interoperable cross brands, so you don’t have to worry about your smart devices not working together. Look for our logo on select Harman/Kardon, Onkyo, Pioneer, Integra and HTC devices.

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Apple kills the iPod Nano and Shuffle. So, what’s next?

Apple kills the iPod Nano and Shuffle. So, what’s next?

The Tech
FireCat
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With the announcement in late July that Apple is officially retiring the iPod Nano and the iPod Shuffle (the last of the pre iPhone iPods) we can safely say that “video killed the radio star” or rather, the rise of online/app-based streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music, have essentially wiped out the need for music file downloading on portable devices (and the products that were designed for that sole purpose.) When the iPod debuted in 2001, Steve Jobs promised 1,000 songs in your pocket. Today, through streaming, you can play almost any song in existence, instantaneously and fairly cheaply, without bogging down your smartphone or tablet’s storage. Thus, it’s not surprising that Apple is finally saying goodbye to the standalone MP3 player (although it does pierce a knife right into the heart of my childhood.)

 

With online/app-based streaming swiftly becoming the norm, home A/V and speaker manufacturers are adapting as well by offering products with built-in streaming services like Spotify Connect and Chromecast built-in, allowing music lovers to stream their music wirelessly from their phone or tablet to their speakers. But this shift comes at a price because they are exposing major flaws, not just in their products, but in the wireless protocols their products are built on.

 

Conventional Wi-Fi runs on TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) which was designed in the 1960’s for transferring files down wired Ethernet lines, not streaming real-time, wireless, audio. Unfortunately, most products out today that boast wireless streaming capabilities still use these outdated protocols and therefore, can’t properly support wireless streaming.

 

This has posed a huge problem for manufacturers who want to stay on trend, but are unwilling to invest in new, wireless infrastructures. As we’ve seen with Apple’s retirement of standalone MP3 players, products that support app-based streaming are the future. And yet, manufacturers continue to release products that are fundamentally unable to support the future of wireless home entertainment.

 

So what can be done? Well, Blackfire Research has an answer for that.

 

It’s called the Blackfire Realtime Entertainment Distribution (RED) framework, and it’s the industry’s only wireless and entertainment-centric infrastructure software framework built from the ground up to both overcome the limitations of Wi-Fi and meet the needs of wireless, entertainment-related apps and products. Top global audio brands, such as Harman Kardon, Onkyo, Pioneer, and Integra have already licensed the Blackfire RED framework, and are currently shipping products that leverage its capabilities: reliable multi-room, multi-channel, low latency, wireless audio and video over Wi-Fi. With the Blackfire RED framework in products such as home A/V systems, wireless speakers, smartphones, and TVs, home owners can finally become Smart Home owners – enjoying all of their digital streaming services wirelessly, synchronously and seamlessly throughout the home.

With the original iPod, you could carry 1,000 songs in your pocket. Today, the Spotify song collection alone boasts over 30 million. We’ve been adding more and more music into our pockets, but after all this time, we’re still trying to figure out how best to get it out.

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Making the Smart Home Smarter

Making the Smart Home Smarter

The Tech
Ruben Mookerjee
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In his entertaining recent editorial, CNBC Technology Product Editor, Todd Haselton, experienced, firsthand, the frustration that many smart home enthusiasts have endured for a long time: smart home products that don’t work with one another. Typically, manufacturers don’t want their customers to “mix and match” products, but rather, they “encourage” them to stay loyal to their brand by deliberately limiting compatibility with competitors. But what manufacturers don’t realize is that these “technology islands” are actually discouraging potential users from buying any smart home products at all. Aside from the more geeky early adopters (ok, my hand’s up), smart home gadget users don’t want to invest in a brand and have that brand become obsolete within the next few years (i.e. “choose wrong”) so many people just aren’t choosing at all. As Haselton points out: “How do you choose which one to go with? It’s almost like the VHS vs. Betamax wars.”

 

A simple solution to this problem, as Haselton notes, is “one single standard that works for everything.” At Blackfire Research, we’ve done just that. A few years back, Blackfire Research founder and CEO, Ravi Rajapakse, became frustrated – much like Haselton himself and countless other smart home gadget lovers – when he realized that there was no seamless way to transfer and share entertainment media throughout his own home. What was once a personal project to create a multi-room entertainment system soon became ten years of research into a revolutionary new protocol, which we call The Blackfire Realtime Entertainment Distribution (RED) framework. The Blackfire RED framework can stream both HD 5.1 audio and 4K video, simultaneously, across multiple devices – all over the standard WiFi you already have. As well as connecting light bulbs, thermostats and door locks, Blackfire also works as a bridge between your smart home and your entertainment systems – with precise synchronization, low latency for lip sync, and overall reliability. Because ultimately, that is what smart home owners want – to mix and match devices while having their music and movies available to them anywhere in the home.

 

Oh yeah, did we mention that Blackfire enabled products are compatible with each other, even across brands? Just look for our logo on select Harman/Kardon, Onkyo, Pioneer, Integra, and HTC devices. It’s just one of the many ways Blackfire Research is making the smart home a whole lot smarter.

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Blackfire Research Introduces the Blackfire Red Framework

Blackfire Research Introduces the Blackfire Red Framework

Highlight, News Highlights, Press Releases
Blackfire Research
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Blackfire Research Introduces Blackfire RED, a New Wireless Real-time Entertainment Distribution Framework, Rescuing Consumers from “Entertainment Islands” in the Home

Blackfire RED Provides a Common Wi-Fi Framework for Entertainment Consumption in the Home, Enabling New Capabilities and Disrupting the $50B Smart Home Entertainment Product Landscape

 

SAN FRANCISCO – June 12, 2017 – Blackfire Research Corp, the wireless Smart Home Entertainment company, today announced the availability of Blackfire RED, a Real-time Entertainment Distribution framework. Blackfire RED is the industry’s only wireless and entertainment-centric infrastructure software framework built from the ground up to both overcome the limitations of Wi-Fi when used for media applications, and meet the needs of wireless entertainment-related consumer applications and products. It is not enough to just have Wi-Fi connectivity between consumer products. Real-time exchanges of entertainment content require a common framework that can work reliably over Wi-Fi and has a rich set of features for a broad spectrum of entertainment products. This is what Blackfire RED offers, making it an essential component to truly enable smarter Home Entertainment. Blackfire RED rescues consumers from “islands” of incompatible media devices, and finally allows Smart Home owners to enjoy all of their digital content wirelessly, synchronously and seamlessly throughout the home, including high-quality 5.1 audio and 4K video on multiple devices over standard Wi-Fi.

“The Smart Home industry is due for a shake-up,” said Adam Wright, Senior Research Analyst, Consumer IoT, IDC. “While the initial IoT concept has evolved into the Connected Home, we still see that Home Entertainment is lagging behind due to unreliable connectivity and lack of interoperability, among other issues. The Smart Home industry has been in need of a solution that has the ability to link all of these excellent, yet disparate, smart devices. Reliable, real-time connectivity between devices and the ability to work together seamlessly is essential for the Smart Home ecosystem to move past this innovation plateau.”

Top global audio brands, including Harman Kardon, Onkyo, Pioneer, and Integra have already licensed the Blackfire RED framework and are currently shipping products that leverage its capabilities. The Blackfire RED framework is comprised of:

  • A Software Engine; a small lightweight piece of software, embedded in consumer electronic products, and is network, chipset and operating system agnostic, making integration easy.
  • A Communication Protocol, that allows Blackfire RED enabled products to talk to each other, over a standard network stack. This was designed and tailored specifically to overcome the limitations of traditional Wi-Fi by working around the effects of interference and ensuring a reliable, high-speed connection.
  • A Programming Interface that allows easy real time distribution and handling of entertainment content from and to the products.

 

“Today’s Smart Homes, while certainly more intelligent than a decade ago, have left consumers stranded,” said Ravi Rajapakse, founder and CEO, Blackfire Research Corp. “Smart technology has created entertainment islands, but I wanted my entertainment to be accessible anywhere in my home without compromising on performance or quality, which is what led me to create Blackfire RED. I wanted to see the Smart Home Entertainment promise through to fruition and for people to finally have the wireless entertainment experience for both audio and video that they have long deserved.”

 

Blackfire RED features and capabilities include:

  • Reliable multi-room, multi-channel, low latency wireless audio and video over Wi-Fi;
  • Advanced multi-source media pipeline handling for services such as Google Chromecast Audio and Spotify Connect;
  • Native integration into Smart TVs, enabling the TV itself to decode and send multi-channel audio to wireless speakers;
  • Wireless 4K video for transmitting audio and video from a Smart Set Top Box simultaneously to multiple TVs and speakers throughout the home;
  • Voice AI integration into multi-room, enabling a whole-home voice-control system.
  • Easy integration into all smart devices.

 

Blackfire Research

Blackfire Research is making the Smart Home smarter, bridging the islands of entertainment in the home and disrupting the $50B Smart Home Entertainment market with its Blackfire RED, wireless real-time entertainment distribution framework. Based in in San Francisco, California, Blackfire has perfected the industry’s only high-performance wireless software framework that is reliable, fast, and flexible, enabling Smart Homeowners to play all of their audio and video content synchronously and seamlessly throughout the home. Today, leading global audio brands rely on the company’s solutions for real-time wireless media distribution and consumers have now come to recognize the Blackfire logo as a symbol of quality. For more information, please visit: www.bfrx.com.

 

Media Contact

Allyson Scott

McGrath/Power Public Relations and Communications

+1 (408) 727-0351

AllysonScott@mcgrathpower.com

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