Hello!
I’ll be heading to CEDIA at the beginning of September, and I’d love to meet with you if you’re in town. Let’s grab a drink or a bite and chat about payments, installations, and, barring that, the best HVAC installation solutions you’ve seen this year (I ran around on a bike when I first came to America fixing air conditioners in San Francisco, so it’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart). Email me at jim@iwallet.com if you can spare a moment!
That said, I wanted to talk a bit about why I like CEDIA. Most of our clients come from the construction and home services world, but I think home theatre, networking, and smart home integration are about to have a big moment.
When the economy slows, people tend to spend more time at home instead of travelling or going out. We saw this in 2020, when homeowners began investing heavily in making their homes more comfortable and more enjoyable. That trend hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it has matured. A dedicated home theatre, clean cable management, whole-home Wi-Fi, and integrated lighting, security, and entertainment systems have become important parts of a modern home. The supporting hardware, speakers, routers, streaming devices, cameras, and control systems now form the backbone of the connected home.
And this gear isn’t cheap. According to ListenUp, home theater now ranges from $15,000 for an install on the low end to $300,000 on the high end. That doesn’t even account for the associated construction costs. Even though people are buying less gear — fewer speakers, fewer receivers, fewer TVs — the gear they are buying requires a quality installation.
The problem is that these systems have also become much more complicated. When your Apple TV, projector, sound system, security cameras, thermostats, and door locks all need to work together, installation is no longer a simple weekend project. A poorly planned network can lead to buffering video, dropped connections, unreliable smart devices, and endless troubleshooting.
That’s where CEDIA professionals come in. Running cable through finished walls, designing a reliable home network, calibrating audio and video equipment, and making dozens of devices communicate with each other requires experience that most homeowners simply don’t have. As smart homes continue to grow more sophisticated, I think the demand for installers who can make all of this technology work seamlessly will only continue to increase.
One thing I’ve notice? That the devices we’re using are much simpler than they used to be, but simultaneously, a nightmare to get to work together. Without solid contractors with both the home repair and networking skills needed to thrive, consumers are left with a mishmash that just doesn’t work. That’s why I love going to CEDIA: I get to meet some of the smartest contractors on the planet, folks who can build a soundproof home theatre or hide a Roku box in plain sight. And that world is exploding. I’m glad we can be part of it.
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