This morning Curtis Silver posted an interesting article in Wired‘s GeekDad blog in which he asks the question, “Who controls the remote in your house?” Curtis makes some interesting arguments for restricting control to certain people, for example:

My children and many like them are forbidden from touching the many remotes that control the many devices centered in and around the entertainment system. God forbid they screw up a setting on the Dolby Surround or switch to a different equalizer level. Even worse, set the DVR to record SpongeBob until the end of time. Every showing. All the time. Can you imagine a DVR full of SpongeBob?

Point taken. But limiting access to the remote has it’s own problems, which Curtis acknowledges:

Fights happen over the remote between men and women more between parents and children. Is this due to the feeling of power over the main attention getting appliance in the house or is this because it’s Monday night during football season and she wants to watch a DVR episode of “Dancing With the Stars?”

Interestingly, Curtis then jumps in to mention the evolution of remote controls into universal remotes, which he then eschews completely because it causes problems on both sides of his argument — it gives his kids control he doesn’t want to allow, and it prevents him from having a few remotes for himself and leaving a few for his wife.

I propose an alternative, and it’s something we’ve been working on for a little over a year. We call it the personal remote control. We’re still beta testing and hammering out a few issues, but the basic idea is this: each person should have her own remote, and that remote should control everything (well, maybe with some restrictions for the kids).

There are a couple of enabling technologies for the personal remote. One is home networking — Wi-Fi is practically ubiquitous these days, making it possible to connect a whole host of disparate devices. The other is the smartphone. For us right now, this means the iPhone (and iPod touch, though it’s not strictly a phone), but there is no reason we can’t extend this model to other Wi-Fi enabled cell phones.

Here’s how it works: we have a device that communicates with your home theater equipment (via infrared, perhaps with some future accommodation for Bluetooth or other protocols), and your smartphone communicates with that device over Wi-Fi. Each person in your house can have her own controller (maybe you have a common one that the kids share), which means each person can have their own sets of favorite channels and so forth. In fact, the iPhone touchscreen means button layouts and other preferences are completely configurable.

Don’t like touchscreen remotes? Curtis speculates about some future world in which we control the TV with a flip of the hand to a motion sensor. In fact, the version of our iPhone app that we are preparing for iTunes submission in the next couple of days already has motion sensitive gestures built-in. We’re going to have to wait a little while before thought control is a possibility.

Now in truth I have to admit that we haven’t yet implemented child-proof controls or full individual customization into our product. But Curtis’s suggestions here make a lot of sense, and maybe that’s one of the things we should work on next. Of course one of the good things about the RedEye personal remote control is that we can deliver free software updates to your iPhone just about whenever. What other remotes can do that?