Spotify Connect | Blackfire Research

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

August 22, 2017

The Tech

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 Unfortunately, most products out today that boast wireless streaming capabilities still use these outdated protocols and therefore, can’t properly support wireless streaming.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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Re-Broadcasting Spotify Connect Throughout Your Home With The New Harman Kardon Omni+ Speakers

July 25, 2017

The Tech

FireCat

Blackfire Research partner, Harman Kardon, recently released an updated version of their Omni Wireless Speakers, which they are calling The Omni+ Series. Like the first generation, the new series features the same lightweight, portable design of the Omni 10 and Omni 20, but this time, they’re trading in the glossy exterior for a more sophisticated matte finish (in both black and white.) Additionally, Harman Kardon has added another speaker to the series: The Omni 50+, a wireless HD indoor/outdoor speaker with a rechargeable battery, perfect for your next backyard BBQ. And of course, all speakers in The Omni+ Series feature Blackfire wireless multiroom technology built-in, so your favorite song can follow you from room to room.

One of the most exciting updates in the Harman/Kardon Omni+ Series is the addition of built-in Spotify Connect which lets you play your Spotify library through the Omni+ wireless speakers directly from the internet – freeing up your phone to take calls and do other things. But what if you have one or more of the first generation Omni wireless speakers and want to play music from your Spotify account throughout your home? With the addition of one or more Omni+ wireless speakers to your home, re-broadcasting Spotify Connect to your existing Omni collection is as easy as pressing a button. Literally.

Whether you have an Omni 10, an Omni 20, or Adapt, the process will be exactly the same. After you add any speaker from the Omni+ Series to your collection, initiate normal setup (make sure you have the latest version of the Harman/Kardon App first):

Place the speaker in your desired location
Connect it to a power source
Open the Harman/Kardon app and follow the easy setup instructions
Make sure you have added the new speaker to the same Wi-Fi network as your other speaker(s) and your source device(s)

Now that you have chosen a location, a name, and the correct network for the new speaker, you can begin to re-broadcast Spotify Connect throughout your home!

With all your Omni and Omni+ wireless speakers on and connected to the same Wi-Fi network, open the Spotify App from your phone, tablet, or desktop
With the Spotify App open, click on “Devices Available” at the bottom of the page
Find the name you’ve given to your new Omni+ Wireless Speaker on the list of available devices. Since the Omni+ speakers all have Spotify Connect built-in, it will show up as an available device on the Spotify App automatically
Choose your Omni+ Speaker from the list as your playback device
Test the connection by choosing a song to play from your Spotify account – music should now be playing from your new Omni+ speaker

While music plays from your new Omni+ speaker, you have two options of how to re-broadcast Spotify Connect from you Omni+ speaker to your Omni speaker(s). You can either:

Press and hold down the “Slash Button” on the top of your Omni+ speaker until all of the Omni speakers in your collection start playing the same song

OR

Press the “Slash Button” on each individual Omni speaker so you can control which specific speaker(s) to re-broadcast to (in case you don’t want to re-broadcast Spotify Connect to all of your wireless speakers.)

These same steps apply if you want to stop re-broadcasting Spotify Connect to your Omni speakers: simply press and hold down the “Slash Button” on your Omni+ speaker, or, press the “Slash Button” on each individual Omni speaker to stop the re-broadcasting.

And that’s it! Re-broadcasting Spotify Connect from an Omni+ Wireless Speaker to your first generation Omni collection is as easy as pressing a button. Now you can enjoy music from your Spotify account played from any speaker, throughout your entire home. Did someone say “Party?”

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Re-Broadcasting Spotify Connect With The Harman Kardon Omni+ Series

July 25, 2017

The Tech

Blackfire Research

Blackfire Research partner, Harman Kardon, recently released an updated version of their Omni Wireless Speakers, which they are calling The Omni+ Series. Like the first generation, the new series features the same lightweight, portable design of the Omni 10 and Omni 20, but this time, they’re trading in the glossy exterior for a more sophisticated matte finish (in both black and white.) Additionally, Harman Kardon has added another speaker to the series: The Omni 50+, a wireless HD indoor/outdoor speaker with a rechargeable battery, perfect for your next backyard BBQ. And of course, all speakers in The Omni+ Series feature Blackfire wireless multiroom technology built-in, so your favorite song can follow you from room to room.

One of the most exciting updates in the Harman/Kardon Omni+ Series is the addition of built-in Spotify Connect which lets you play your Spotify library through the Omni+ wireless speakers directly from the internet – freeing up your phone to take calls and do other things. But what if you have one or more of the first generation Omni wireless speakers and want to play music from your Spotify account throughout your home? With the addition of one or more Omni+ wireless speakers to your home, re-broadcasting Spotify Connect to your existing Omni collection is as easy as pressing a button. Literally.

Whether you have an Omni 10, an Omni 20, or Adapt, the process will be exactly the same. After you add any speaker from the Omni+ Series to your collection, initiate normal setup (make sure you have the latest version of the Harman/Kardon App first):

Place the speaker in your desired location
Connect it to a power source
Open the Harman/Kardon app and follow the easy setup instructions
Make sure you have added the new speaker to the same Wi-Fi network as your other speaker(s) and your source device(s)

Now that you have chosen a location, a name, and the correct network for the new speaker, you can begin to re-broadcast Spotify Connect throughout your home!

With all your Omni and Omni+ wireless speakers on and connected to the same Wi-Fi network, open the Spotify App from your phone, tablet, or desktop
With the Spotify App open, click on “Devices Available” at the bottom of the page
Find the name you’ve given to your new Omni+ Wireless Speaker on the list of available devices. Since the Omni+ speakers all have Spotify Connect built-in, it will show up as an available device on the Spotify App automatically
Choose your Omni+ Speaker from the list as your playback device
Test the connection by choosing a song to play from your Spotify account – music should now be playing from your new Omni+ speaker

While music plays from your new Omni+ speaker, you have two options of how to re-broadcast Spotify Connect from you Omni+ speaker to your Omni speaker(s). You can either:

Press and hold down the “Slash Button” on the top of your Omni+ speaker until all of the Omni speakers in your collection start playing the same song

OR

Press the “Slash Button” on each individual Omni speaker so you can control which specific speaker(s) to re-broadcast to (in case you don’t want to re-broadcast Spotify Connect to all of your wireless speakers.

These same steps apply if you want to stop re-broadcasting Spotify Connect to your Omni speakers: simply press and hold down the “Slash Button” on your Omni+ speaker, or, press the “Slash Button” on each individual Omni speaker to stop the re-broadcasting.

And that’s it! Re-broadcasting Spotify Connect from an Omni+ Wireless Speaker to your first generation Omni collection is as easy as pressing a button. Now you can enjoy music from your Spotify account played from any speaker, throughout your entire home. Did someone say “Party?”

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A Clear Path for Voice Control

June 27, 2017

The Tech

Ruben Mookerjee

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you know that voice controlled Smart Home technology is taking over the tech industry and consumer electronics scene. This past January, the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was chock-full of stainless steel refrigerators and high tech washing machines, all with Amazon’s voice-activated AI software, Alexa, built in. CES 2017 was dubbed by some as “The Year of the Amazon Takeover,” however, Amazon isn’t the only tech giant to venture into the realm of voice-activation: Google launched the Google Home smart speaker in late 2016, exactly two years after the Amazon Echo speaker (featuring Alexa) made its debut. Even later to the party, Microsoft just announced partnerships with HP and Harman Kardon to support Cortana (Microsoft’s version of Siri) in their speakers. Speaking of Siri, Apple just announced a Siri-enabled smart speaker, called HomePod, which will be available this December.

These “smart” speakers have proven themselves to be cool technology, but, for the most part, were trading more on novelty value than utility. Until recently, Amazon’s Alexa enabled Dot and Echo speakers excelled at only three things: purchasing items off Amazon; playing music from a long list of streaming services or Internet radio stations; and pranking your roommate by setting it’s alarm for 3:00 am, 3:10 am, 3:20 am, and 3:30 am. A pretty solid list of features, sure, but it’s by no means the “Smart Home of the Future” we were promised.

That’s why CES 2017’s “Amazon Takeover” was actually a pretty significant breakthrough for Smart Home enthusiasts. Until recently, Smart Home gadgets such as smart thermostats and security systems were seen as standalone items. What Amazon is attempting to do this year (and succeeding at it, thus far) is to position its Alexa voice-activated speakers as the Smart Home’s “Central Hub,” from which, all of the individual smart devices in your home can connect, and be controlled. (Hence, the influx of gadgets and appliances with Alexa capabilities.)

And this isn’t an unwelcomed shift: according to new market data from Parks Associates, 55% of U.S. broadband households want to use their voice to control their Smart Home and entertainment devices. Moreover, they expect products to work together through “their entertainment systems, including automated voice assistant products like the Amazon Echo and Google Home.”

Additionally, at their annual “CONNECTIONS: The Premier Connected Home Conference,” Parks Associates announced a comprehensive IoT forecast that predicts 442 million connected consumer devices (entertainment, mobile, health, and smart home) will be sold in the U.S. in 2020. The fastest growing category in IoT, and the top trend of 2017, is, unsurprisingly, speakers with voice control (like the Amazon Alexa and Google Home), with a CAGR of 78.3% in 2015-2020. According to Elizabeth Parks, SVP, Parks Associates: “Parks Associates research shows U.S. consumers will buy more than 2.3 billion connected devices between 2015 and 2020, and they are showing strong preferences for voice as the interface for their devices. Companies in the smart home, entertainment, and connected car ecosystems are pursuing partnerships that can add voice control to a variety of solutions in the connected home.”

But developing Alexa or Google Home enabled smart products is only the first step. In order to achieve true, whole home connectivity, these products need to be able to work wirelessly through a reliable platform to communicate with each other. The truth is, Smart Home technology in its current form doesn’t lend itself to whole home, or even multi-room systems. Conventional WiFi uses TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) which was designed in the 1960’s for transferring files down wired Ethernet lines, not connecting Smart Home products or streaming real-time wireless audio (or video) throughout the home. (For more on why your WiFi sucks, read my last blog, titled “Why your WiFi sucks and what you can do about it”).

Here’s an interesting tidbit from Rob Conant, CEO, Cirrent: “Wi-Fi is by far the dominant technology for connected products – the vast majority of broadband homes have Wi-Fi. However, historically it has been too complex to get headless products connected to Wi-Fi. Nearly 40% of the negative reviews of smart home products are the result of connectivity and setup issues. Making it easy for end users to connect products is critical to the success of the industry.”

But the dream of a whole-home, voice-controlled, Smart Home isn’t impossible: using low-latency and high-accuracy sync, Blackfire has developed a software solution that successfully integrates voice AI into a multi-room system. We call it Blackfire Real-time Entertainment Distribution (RED), the industry’s only wireless streaming software framework built from the ground up to overcome the limitations commonly associated with conventional wireless products, truly enabling a whole-home voice-control system. Blackfire RED delivers high-performance multichannel, multipoint and multi-room 5.1 audio wireless streaming across multiple devices over standard Wi-Fi, so you can tell Alexa or your Google Home in your living room to read out a recipe to you when you are in the kitchen, or to play music from Spotify Connect in the bedroom.

As demand for voice-activated smart devices continues to grow and home audio manufacturers develop products to meet the demand, Blackfire will be the key to enhanced performance for today’s consumers and Smart Home dwellers of the future.

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Blackfire Research Introduces the Blackfire Red Framework

June 12, 2017

Highlight, News Highlights, Press Releases

Blackfire Research

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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