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CEDIA Expo: Crestron Sticking With High-End Luxury Market

Crestron will keep its foot firmly planted in the luxury high end of the custom-install market even though competitors are moving into the mass market and launching products for over-the-counter sales, marketing director Jeff Singer said at the CEDIA Expo.

To underscore the point, the company launched multiple new products for the luxury market, and it stressed that new setup tools such as Pyng, launched last year, and the Home Elements tool kit, due in about a month, speed the set-up time of luxury installs and make jobs more profitable. The tools aren’t designed to broaden the company’s distribution.

 “We are reaffirming our position at the luxury high end of the market,” Singer said.

Pyng’s hub and app were launched last year to let installers use tablets to set up products equipped with the company’s proprietary infiNET EX wireless mesh-network. Pyng makes unnecessary the sophisticated programming expertise required by home-automation systems that must be programmed via laptop, the company said.

About 40 Pyng-compatible products were available at launch last year, but that the selection has grown to more than 300 Crestron products, including wired multiroom-audio systems and wired centralized lighting systems. The company intends to expand Pyng compatibility to all of the company’s thousands of home-automation products, and at the show, Pyng compatibility was announced for ONVIF cameras, RGB lighting controls, and wireless fan controls.

To accelerate set-up of non-Pyng-compatible products, the company unveiled its Home Elements toolkit, which “takes the intelligence of Pyng” to the company’s Simpl Windows Windows-based set-up program, said technical director Jonathan Garcia. The toolkit provides drag-and-drop templates, making it unnecessary for installers to write lines of code, he explained. Home Elements also lets installers integrate third-party devices into a Crestron system.

With Pyng, installers can set up systems in a couple hours that would have taken a couple days, Garcia said. And Home Elements brings setup time from a couple weeks to a couple days for supported products. That frees up resources to focus on the more sophisticated, one-of-a-kind Crestron controls and IoT integration that require custom programming, the company said.

Also for the luxury market, the company added:

— HDCP 2.2 copy protection to Ultra HD 4K matrix switches with HDMI and HDBaseT;

— wireless control of color-mixing RGB LED lighting strips;

–wireless ceiling-fan control;

— its first series of motorized shades intended for narrow window openings and shallow window jambs to simplify installation;

— and a new 15-inch capacitive touchscreen.

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