Why isn't there a common standard for remote controlling media devices on my network?

[andrewducker]

My TV has a remote control. It has to be pointed directly at the TV to work. Which is fair enough, because the TV needs to be in a prominent position where it can be easily seen anyway.

My various other devices, like the amp, the Playstation, the cable box, etc. also have remote controls. None of them need to be visible, because they don't have an actual interface I need to look at. But the amp and the cable box both have to be put somewhere visible anyway, because their remote controls are infra-red 80s tech, and so they need to be pointed directly at the receiver to work.

The PlayStation remote, at least, works over Bluetooth, pretending to be a PlayStation controller, so it can work even if there's something directly in front of the device itself. But even this is proprietary.

And this made me think - nowadays all of my major devices are attached to my network, either over WiFi or plugged in directly. Why, then, don't they have a nice simple standard interface for setting values and getting statuses from an app? Something simple and text based would allow any device to return a list of values with things like "current channel", "available channels", "volume", "brightness", etc. and also allow them to be set. Any app could then work with this to act as a remote control - and you could even script events to make devices work together. "Turn on the TV, Turn on the Amp, Change the Amp to the DVD channel, turn on the DVD player, Start DVD playing" should be a trivial thing to tell your devices to do nowadays. But clearly nobody cares enough to make it happen.

Comments

[matgb]

Our Virgin Tivo box can be controlled by an app as long as you've set it all up properly, which is useful for me as I can set it to record things while I'm somewhere else, then delete stuff. Getting it working required getting an ethernet port near enough to plug into but that was a useful thing anyway.

In theory the Tivo can also control other devices but everything's channeled through our AV box which Sony appear to have made to be completely incompatible with all standards, including their own. It will turn the TV on and change the channel, but only if plugged into the TV via the least convenient HDMI port on the TV.

[andrewducker]

You can use the app to play/pause/select what to watch next?

Last I used it the Tivo app didn't do any of that.

[matgb]

Theoretically, it gains/loses features every so often, in one case due to rights issues (you can't stream stuff you've got recorded to the phone now). You can definitely go through and tell it to play something on the TV using the app, and I think there was a pause button but didn't use it.