Following Control4’s buy of driver developer Fresh Vegetables last...

Following Control4’s buy of driver developer Fresh Vegetables last week (CED Sept 12 p1), another Fresh Vegetable customer, Universal Remote Control (URC), told us by email that Control4’s buyout “was made without any warning or discussion with URC or most importantly, the dealers and customers.” Cat Toomey, marketing director, said URC’s business philosophy “has always been to support the custom industry and dealer community as a whole -- and that means any dealers, past, present or future. URC would never abandon our dealers and their end customers, and we never will,” she said. “To cut off dealers and end customers that have purchased software in good faith is clearly not in the best interests of the industry we all hold in very high regard.” URC will deliver its own modules “for the few that Extra Vegetables provided,” Toomey said. Some of those modules are public application programming interfaces, and for others, “we'll escalate anything necessary in the best interests of our dealers and their customers,” she said. URC has more than 75 two-way driver modules “in play now and more coming,” she said. At CEDIA Expo, the company announced URC-supported two-way modules for companies including DSC (Digital Security Control), Lutron Caseta, Nest and Vantage, Toomey said. URC will be the first company to deliver control modules for Denon’s HEOS system, and in an apparent dig aimed at Control4, Toomey said: “We do not rely on tiny third-party developers.” URC works with Sonos, she said, and the SNP-2 streaming network player URC just began shipping “amplified our launch and opportunities for our dealers on the music source front,” she said. URC’s module development program has been “in full swing for years” and will continue to be part of its offerings for dealers and their customers, Toomey said.