4 Ways Your Smart Home Will Give the Neighbors Holiday Envy

You live on a street with tough holiday competition. Beginning on Black Friday, the house down the street lights up like Times Square, and the neighbors next door throw the best ugly sweater party on the block.

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Control4 automates the entire house—from lighting to music, security and more—delivering a little more "joy to your world" this holiday season. (Photo: Business Wire)

Every year, millions of homeowners spend countless hours stringing holiday lighting and decorations. Control4 Corporation (NASDAQ: CTRL), a leading global provider of smart home solutions, gives consumers a leg up on the holidays. Control4 homeowners average 40 connected devices per home, and more than half of them are using Control4’s smart lighting to enjoy added convenience, security, and ambiance—an additional benefit during the holiday season.

Here are four ways a Control4 Smart Home will make your house the “gawk of the block”, while making life a bit more simple throughout the rest of the year.

1. Customized Holiday Lighting Inside and Out

Holiday lights are symbolic of the entire season, and who doesn’t want to have a home full of sparkling lights to show off to family and friends? Control4 lets you sync holiday lights to turn on when your music does and set smart timers, alerts and scenes to turn lights on and off at certain times of day and night. You can set exterior lighting to turn on the minute you walk into your home and off as you go to bed.

Take your seasonal entertaining up a notch and create scenes that automate every corner of your home. Impress family and friends with a single tap that turns on specific lights around the house, starts the holiday music, and even sparks the fireplace. A “Holiday Party” scene can quickly get your guests in the holiday spirit by dimming the lights to illuminate key decorative elements, piping a custom playlist through speakers, and start playing “A Christmas Story” on your living room TV.

2. Voice Control That Ups The “Wow Factor”

Let’s face it – the holiday season is busy for everyone and saving a minute here or there can add up quickly. With the addition of Control4’s Smart Home Skill for Amazon Echo, customers can control their entire home using just their voice. Use Echo to activate simple voice commands like “Alexa, turn on Holiday” or “Alexa, set thermostat to 72 degrees.” Even cooking the holiday meal or baking cookies is made simpler with scene commands from Amazon Echo. Commands like “Alexa, turn on Cooking” can drop the temperature in the kitchen, brighten lights, and turn on your favorite foodie podcast so you can get to work quickly.

3. Holiday Music That Rings Through the Whole Home

One of the best parts of the holiday season is undoubtedly the music. Listening to festive tunes is one of the best ways to get into the spirit, and with Control4 you can easily stream and schedule music to play through programs like Pandora, Napster, TIDAL, and more. Set music to play when guests arrive for holiday dinner and change the playlist from jazz to the top hits as the night wears on. If your piano has an audio source, hook it up to a multi-room audio system to let caroling ring throughout every speaker in the home – a trick that is sure to make your neighbors say, “I need that in my house.”

4. Security That Mimics Your Behavior At Home

In the holiday classic “Home Alone”, Kevin uses a myriad of tricks and traps to keep burglars at bay – but not without destroying a few of the home’s prized possessions along the way. Prevent break-ins without the destruction by programming your home with Control4’s Mockupancy security feature. Mockupancy is a type of “occupancy simulation” that makes it look like you’re home, even if you’re not. Control4 tracks your lighting, entertainment and shades usage while you’re at home and can replay those behaviors (using slightly randomized times) when you put the house in “Away” mode. To a potential burglar, it will look like you’re home, watching your favorite shows and turning lights on and off as you move throughout the house.

To learn more about how a personalized Control4 smart home can make the holidays more enjoyable—along with every other day of the year—visit www.control4.com.

About Control4
Control4 [NASDAQ: CTRL] is a leading global provider of automation and networking systems for homes and businesses, offering personalized control of lighting, music, video, comfort, security, communications, and more into a unified smart home system that enhances the daily lives of its consumers. Control4 unlocks the potential of connected devices, making networks more robust, entertainment systems easier to use, homes more comfortable and energy efficient, and families more secure. Today, every home and business needs automation horsepower and a high-performance network to manage the increasing number of connected devices. The Control4 platform interoperates with more than 9,900 third-party consumer electronics products, ensuring an ever-expanding ecosystem of devices will work together. Control4 is now available in 91 countries. Leveraging a distribution channel that includes over 3,800 custom integrators, retailers, and distributors authorized to sell the full-line of Control4 products, with over 1,100 additional dealers and distributors that are authorized to sell our Pakedge branded networking solutions only, Control4 is delivering intelligent solutions for consumers, major consumer electronics companies, hotels, and businesses around the world.

Copyright ©2016, Control4 Corporation. All rights reserved. Control4, the Control4 logo, and Pakedge are registered trademarks or trademarks of Control4 Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other names and brands may be claimed as the property of their respective owners. All specifications subject to change without notice.

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