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Smart-home specialist Control4 has launched a new smart home operating system with more than a thousand new capabilities across lighting, whole-home music and video, security, comfort, and more.

The company says Smart Home OS 3 “sets a new standard” in the way it unifies hundreds of connected devices and provides smart-home control and personalization through a single platform.

An updated user interface delivers intuitive one-touch control of multi-device “scenes” and individual devices — including those used for music and video streaming — and “at-a-glance” status of security and lighting. The system even supports high-resolution audio streaming, including MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) files pulled from a personal music collection or streamed via the Tidal music-subscription service.

Control4 says the widespread, rapid introduction of disparate smart-home products (an estimated 13 billion by 2020) is creating complexity and consumer frustration — hurdles that it hopes to overcome with OS 3.

“The Control4 Smart Home OS is designed to remove complexity,” said Control4 senior vice president Charlie Kindel. “Every home is a mix of products from a variety of companies, a Smart Home OS embraces this reality, providing broad choice rather than creating a collection of tiny walled gardens that limit homeowners.”

OS 3 scales to the needs of a household, whether it’s a single-room entertainment experience or a whole-home automation system, and supports more than 13,500 third-party devices and 7,500 products that include Control4’s Simple Device Discovery Protocol (SDDP).

The overarching goal of the system is to break down barriers to smart home adoption by encompassing all connected devices in a home.

“There is a delight — almost a sense of magic — when technology comes together and genuinely enhances our lives,” Kindel said, noting that professional installation, which takes into account the nuances of a household’s day-to-day routines, is necessary to meet the smart-home promise of seamless, intuitive control of many connected devices.

Highlights of Smart Home OS 3 include the ability to…

• Share music and video throughout the home with one-touch access to popular streaming services, an “active media” display at the top of the screen that shows key controls, and the ability to easily add or remove rooms and control volume in one or all rooms.

• Show all connected devices in the mobile app or on a touchscreen or TV and use a new Favorites mode to prioritize devices for each room and control them with a single touch; examples of prioritization might entail putting a news station at the top of the app in the living room view or having lights show up first in the kitchen view.

• Assemble whole-home dashboards for at-a-glance views of the most important devices in any room.

• Easily see lights that are on, blinds that are open, and doors and security zones that are secure.

• Tailor the system to meet a household’s needs by creating smart-home scenes, setting schedules to automate devices, and modifying how devices interact.

• Manage the home’s entire security system with unified lock control and other features.

• Coordinate blind/shade control throughout a home.

Control4’s network of professional installation companies maintain more than 200 Control4 Certified Showrooms around the country. To find a showroom near you, click here. On June 13, Control4 is hosting “C4Yourself Day” and will be demonstrating OS 3-based smart home systems at its showrooms between 4 and 8 p.m. local time.

For more information, visit control4.com.