THE BIG GAME

The food, fans, fun, or the Superbowl. Hosting at your home is easier than any major holiday. It's one night. The kids don't need a sitter. It's socially acceptable to serve hot dogs. No one argues over what channel or show to watch. Most guests' expectations are a nice TV set up. And beer. A clean house is a bonus. But all sports fans appreciate the immediacy, the crisp HD vision and HD sound, and wifi that delivers at a nonstop 40-yard sprint. Have it year-round.

Range of a Sports Fan for Your Home Theater

• NFL RedZone
• March Madness
• Other college sports (if your kid chooses rugby at college, that's probably not on CBS primetime)
• Hockey
• Basketball
• Golf Simulators
• Kinetic and stationary gaming setups (think Switch)
• Gym (more on that in a minute)

WIDE (RADIO) RECEIVER: ORIGINAL SUPERBOWL FOR LIVE TV

In 1919, one of the first-ever real-time sports broadcasts took place in Dallas. A broadcast announcer read telegrammed updates of a football game over the radio! It wasn't technically live (and someone did the same thing for a Jayhawks game in 1911) but more sports were about to follow.

WATCHING THE GAME HAS CHANGED

A college baseball match between Columbia and Princeton in 1939 was the first sports tv broadcast. There were fewer than 1,000 TVs at the time. Sports is now available on a host of screens (more on that in a minute) and a host of streams.

A long-running dispute between the NFL and a Pennsylvania man over a rough home recording of Superbowl 1 may be about to end--if the Kickstarter works. That original Superbowl 1 scrum was the Green Bay Packers versus the Kansas City Chiefs. And it took place in this year's hosting city: sunny LA.

Imagine a world where you can control everything in your house with the command of your voice, a tablet, or a smartphone. That means answering the door without leaving the comfort of your couch, monitoring your entire house even when you’re at work, and locking up all entrances with just one tap before you hit the sack.

Now, what if we told you that such a world exists right now?

Welcome to the world of smart homes.

What Is a Smart Home

Smart home technology connects your appliances, thermostat, locks, and more, to one main centralized system. This system can be controlled with a device such as your mobile phone and allows you to manage your house--even when you’re far from the hustle and bustle of Dallas.

To paint you a better picture, here’s what it’s like to live in a smart home.

You’ve made the decision to build a home, now where do you start? 

The process of building a new home is exciting and often overwhelming. You may feel pressure to perfect every inch because after all, you will be the one living in it. While planning the layout, exterior and interior design are crucial factors, the overall functionality of your Texas home is just as important. Identifying your technology needs is the first step to creating a smart home that will complement your lifestyle, rather than complicate it. Once you have outlined your needs, knowing the right questions to ask will lead you to the most efficient and automated home for you and your family. Hiring a specialist like us, to explain home automation topics to guide you through technology options will ensure you have all the answers to questions you didn’t know to ask, as well as help you achieve your smart home goals. Below are our recommendations for our most requested home technology features. 

Lighting

Creating a custom lighting scene is an essential part of improving productivity, security, and relaxation in your home. While most often, people focus on the overall design and look of their lighting scheme, we focus on the control of those lights. The ability to control your lights from your phone, a touch panel, remote, or the old-fashioned switch on the wall is the first of many automation controls in your new home. In this phase of planning, we recommend beginning in the most used areas of your home: family room, kitchen, hallways, etc… These areas of your home with the most traffic will be where you will want to have the most control on a daily basis. 

Installing control switches from Lutron or Control4 will allow you to turn the connected lights on and off and in most cases dim to the desired output. Although, many clients expand to include all the lights in their homes to be connected to one control system. We often hear how much of a relief it is to our clients that with the touch of a single button on the way out the door, they know that every light is turned off, even the kid’s closet!