UEI Focus Blends Entertainment, Smart Home in Next QuickSet Library

Universal Electronics Inc. executives pointed to LG’s UEI home dashboard as an example of its vision combining home entertainment and smart home on a Friday investor webcast. The dashboard -- viewable on smart TVs and second screens -- displayed TVs, Bluetooth surround speakers and connected appliances, as the remote control maker looks to capitalize on the growing smart home market, a $4 billion opportunity, via its Nevo Butler gateway and QuickSet software.

UEI's two-way QuickSet software, based on the company's vast library of remote control codes and a setup wizard, made its name in the MVPD world, reducing the time required for professional set-top box installations, and then for do-it-yourselfers, which became an important installation option for new accounts during COVID-19 lockdowns. Last year QuickSet helped consumers discover more than 1.4 billion devices to integrate into their home entertainment systems, said Arsham Hatambeiki, senior vice president-products and technology, and the DIY auto TV setup feature saved UEI’s pay-TV customers over 8,600 staff hours.

The company’s latest iteration, QuickSet 5.0, coming this year, marries home entertainment and smart home in a single on-screen interface. When LG announced plans to license its WebOS smart TV platform to other TV makers last month (see 2102240004), it focused on the entertainment side of the ecosystem it wanted to compete for with Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Google’s Android TV. UEI has a broader view, developing the remotes and control software for operation via a single interface.

UEI, which introduced smart thermostats and sensors this year for a smart home offering through HVAC and security dealers (see 2103040025), sees its smart home job as “to enable our OEMs,” said Ramzi Ammari, senior vice president-corporate planning and strategy. The company's OEMs get a reliable, tested platform without the investment required to develop one themselves, he said.

Some 70% of U.S. households have one or more smart devices, said Menno Koopmans, senior vice president-global sales and marketing, but they tend to be in different categories, creating a “fragmented” market. The key to the smart home succeeding is interoperability, Koopmans said, and UEI wants to be the unifier. The two looming challenges for OEMs entering the smart home space are getting all the devices to work together and to continue to ensure interoperability as consumers expand their systems.

UEI has had 170% growth in smart home devices in its QuickSet knowledge graph, said Hatambeiki. It boasts compatibility with the major smart home hubs “while eliminating requirements of having a user name and password for device onboarding, he said. QuickSet 5.0 expands beyond set-top boxes, smart TVs, game consoles and smart speakers, adding support for controllable shades, third-party voice engines and thermostats. With 5.0, consumers can control an existing installed base of smart devices in the home -- “legacy or new, connected or not,” he said.

Responding in Q&A to whether there are any smart home protocol languages UEI doesn’t speak, Hatambeiki said: “There are no fundamental connectivities the company is unable to execute. It is a question of whether the market is ready for it.” The company is typically working on a new technology “well before we talk about it.”

Smart home is the next frontier for UEI as it looks to expand from legacy pay-TV remotes. Executives turned attention away from low-margin plastic remotes from traditional pay-TV to advanced remotes for today's hybrid TV that have voice search, two-way interaction and the ability to navigate both legacy set-tops and over-the-top streaming services. Advanced remotes have had a big impact on the company’s average selling prices, said CEO Paul Arling, making remotes “almost twice as valuable.” Before, its technology provided infrared control code information: “Now, it’s a host of different product roles to be able to match those different devices with each other.”

UEI wants a piece of the smart home pie, whether it supplies customers with a full platform based on its Nevo Butler smart home gateway for operators that want a turnkey smart home solution, or just parts of the control puzzle, said Koopmans. Any of the technology in the Nevo Butler portfolio can be sold separately as part of QuickSet or other offerings, he said. The company’s job is to make it easy for customers to interact with all different services, he said.

UEI developed an Apple TV program for MVPDs built around that streaming player, and it wants to do more, said Koopmans. It sees the Apple TV remote being offered by MVPDs as an enhanced option or for others that “embrace it completely” as their only advanced TV offering.

Though UEI is putting a strong effort behind smart home, currently about 20% of revenue, its home entertainment business remains king, still a growth opportunity with 70% of the global TV market watching both linear and OTT content, said Ammari. Many players are introducing platforms and devices that require a control interface, which can be a handheld remote or the technology that goes inside the devices “that makes that experience better,” he said.

UEI has made “material progress, shifting production out of China to lower costs and improve turnaround times, moving key TV OEMs from low-margin remotes to higher-margin chips and embedded software and introducing new products to broaden its addressable market,” Colliers analyst Steven Frankel wrote investors Monday. The company is positioned to benefit from new offerings such as its AppleTV 4K remote as multisystem operators “shift focus to delivering a better experience” through platforms like AppleTV and Android streaming sticks, said the analyst.