To connect our home, we gave it wires and Wi-Fi. To bring it to life, we gave it Control4

In the first two videos of this four-part Connect my Crib series, we gutted a house of its aging technology in preparation to create a state-of-the-art smart home and began to breath new life into our home theater. In this third video, we see some of the progress that’s been made on retrofitting the house with a new wired and wireless network — the backbone of the smart home, if you will — and witness the installation of the smart home’s brain, a Control4 system.

One of the challenges with today’s modern entertainment electronics and Internet of Things (IOT) devices is figuring out how to make them all work together in a simple and understandable way. Most folks don’t want to walk into their living room and have to wrangle four remotes for five minutes just to watch a movie. Beyond providing the amplification for our audio systems and the switching for our video systems, Control4 provides … well, control over the myriad black boxes, light switches, TVs, and security systems so that someone can simply walk into a room and press a single button to set off a well-orchestrated concert of electronic activity.

For example, pressing the “Watch Movie” button on a Control4 tablet or keypad could power on a TV or projector, a Blu-ray player or cable box, a soundbar or receiver, and tune to the right channel or press the “play” button.

An additional advantage to going this route is that all those little black boxes can go behind the scenes instead of remaining out in plain view, cluttering up space and harshing on an aesthetic. When everything is connected on the same network, you only have to see and hear what you want.

You also get to watch or listen to whatever you want. By replacing CD players and FM tuners with Apple TVs, Sonos speakers, soundbars, a Sonos bridge, and updating our audio closet with Control4 matrix switches and amplifiers, we can stream Spotify in one room, Pandora in another, and a podcast off in yet another area. We can also stream Netflix to one or multiple rooms at the same time, cable or satellite to any given display, or distribute different video programming to each individual TV around the house — including a Sunbrite Veranda Series TV installed out on the pool deck.

In the fourth and final video of our series, we’ll continue by showing how the home looks finished, and how Alexa works with Control4 in a unique way to make an already streamlined system even easier to use with voice commands.

Some components of this installation were provided and installed courtesy of Control4, Sony, Audio Control, and Sunbrite TV.