This has been a topic we've hashed and rehashed on this board, but it's an area of great interest to me, so I like talking about it Given this news I'd like to bring it up again.

My feeling about it is this: Logitech makes the best consumer-programmable universal remotes, but those remotes are still not great.

Now that the company is being sold, there's a great deal of uncertainty about the future of the Harmony line, and we're seeing the #1 disadvantage of investing in a niche product that depends so heavily on an online component. If there were an application for the existing remotes to use, this wouldn't be a concern. I'm still able to program my Pronto TSU1000 years after Philips ended all responsibility for that product line. But that remote was never good for the average consumer like the Harmony remotes are.

The reaction I'm seeing in a couple places is that the reason for the Harmony remotes doing so poorly is the rise of controlling your viewing experience with your phone. I completely disagree, as there's very few people actually doing that. Instead, I think the problem is just that most people just don't care about combining their remotes all that much. They live with the fact that they're going to have a few remotes on their coffee table.

Alternatively, the universal remote has become less and less necessary. From what I've seen, most people have a TV connected to two boxes. The first is usually a cable box and the second is a DVD/bluray player, media streamer (Apple TV or Roku), or game console. We've all grown up with controllers for game consoles, so we're used to those lying about. The cable box remote usually controls the TV, so I almost see that remote on people's coffee tables, and lastly they might have that media streamer with its own remote. That's three things on their coffee table, only two of which can be replace by a universal. In my experience, that's not enough to bother spending over $200.

The funny part is, just yesterday I set up a Harmony Touch remote for a client, and found it to be their best remote yet. The screen was far better quality than previous versions and you could swipe across it, and the build quality of the whole remote felt much better. I also found the online programming to be way better than used to be. The web interface was always a low point of the remote, and it was much cleaner this time.

What do you folks think? My own opinion is that we're going to see a big decline in universal remotes, but that's only going to hurt the serious home theater owners who will have to resort to much higher priced remotes that aren't really all that much better.


*edit*

ps- I forgot to mention one thing I really dislike about the Harmony Touch: they really shouldn't have moved the playback controls to the top of the device. That end of the remote is very thin, and not a suitable place for controls that any DVR user is going to be using often.