Will they offer refunds ?

I smell a sue ball inward.

It should be illegal to do something like that. At very least they should be required by law to release all product specification so a 3rd party could resume support of the devices.

Net zero in home automation should mean it keeps working with zero packets transmitted on the internet.

I tried to buy a camera for viewing my front door a few years ago. It was just for letting me see who was at the door making a delivery, when I was at home, in the garden out the back. Would be going on a closed circuit wifi or wired network. I had suffered from deliveries not being dropped off, not ringing the doorbell and just dumping a sorry we missed you card

Went into my local electrical retailer named after a pop Indian culinary delight as I happened to be passing. Gave the sales bloke my requirements, told him there obviously couldn't be any cloud element and I didn't really need recording. If he'd got nothing that fit the bill please would he tell me now and save me some valuable time.

He then proceeded to show me a Ring doorbell which when queried if they'd released an update to allow offline working admitted they hadn't. I then saw Nest, Hive and I think something else possibly Hive, all of which needed an internet/cloud connection.

When I said no to all of them he informed me that I was obviously going to need the internet or how could I view the camera when away from home? I asked if he'd listened to my requirements when I first spoke to him and he rather bizarrely said yes.

I asked what use the camera would be if the cloud service went down or bust? He didn't have an answer to that. I said what if it’s going somewhere without an internet connection? He just told me everywhere had the internet now. I asked what happened if the internet connection went down or the company went bust which earned me a shrug of the shoulders. I said I’d try elsewhere and got a Foscam on Amazon.

Well, with all the devices about to be powered off and useless.... net zero (but not net zero pollution) .

Hive feeds landfills a million Kg by going greener. To compensate, Hive will.give free installation for upstairs in the basement.

Some years ago I bought a Roberts internet radio, that used the Reciva service to provide information on available radio stations. It's a jolly handy bit of kit, lives by the bed, and tunes in to radio stations all over the world. It was not cheap.

Last year the new owners of Reciva announced they were shutting the service down. What does that mean? Expensive radios (almost) bricked. Mine still works to listen to stations on my 5 presets, but that's it.

I'm sure someone could have afforded to set up a new minimalist server that would have enabled the radios to keep working, even if it wasn't updated daily - Roberts weren't the only people using the service.

Oh yes, Roberts I believe offered a 20% discount on a new radio.

Stopped using mine when I found it was using 20W in standby, and startup time after powering off at the wall was a couple of minutes.

Sonos and the devices that would not work without an upgrade.

wasn't there also another heating control system that went the same way a few years ago ?

My TV's processor (Thanks Sony) is so shite, that I can no longer get iplayer, ITVHub, My5, etc on it. Not my decision, the software suppliers decision and the software has removed itself from my TV (maybe due to a TV OS upgrade). Same on an Uncles TV a year or two ago so been waiting for mine to do the same

Me, I still like my Squeezebox, Logitech killed it, but the sever is open source and the devices still go strong.

As for the TV's, a good old Roku to the rescue, though downright annoying we have to work around it

Well, what a surprise... NOT.

Simple solution - NEVER buy so called "home automation" or "security" products which rely on a subscription/or account on the manufacturer's (or anyone else's) systems just to bloody work.

They WILL dump you in the shit and not give a damn about the now useless hardware you are left with.

There are open source home automation systems out there. I use Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/). Sometimes things break, but they usually get fixed quickly. My Hive thermostat stopped working with HA recently, but was fixed in a couple of weeks (and I could have rolled back to a working version if I could be bothered)

The open source home automation systems are a good source of information that can be used to choose which products to buy.

Yeah, the phrase "video playback subscriptions" in the article left me spluttering a bit. I wonder whether "smart" door locks are subject to the same level of WTFery, and which state they'd fall back to in the event of a payment lapse or the "service" being withdrawn.

Apparently they are not very nice and can affect up to 20% of people.

HIVEs = a bad rash.

Quite appropriate.

Now I wonder how many hackers (black hat or state organised) are wondering how many homes they can do a "Steel Works" on:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62072480

Which is why I haven't.

... whether that is a TV, radio, security camera, or whatever, then that device will only work for as long as the manufacturer can be bothered to continue support for it. Since most manufacturers have the attention span of a toddler, that is not going to be long.

But at least they will give you an offer to purchase the next iteration of the same crap.

So their vision of net zero is to force their customers to dump equipment they bought and installed and then buy new equipment that has similar functionality?

Is this the famed net zero?

It's not like you buy these sensors on a whim. Like, you know what? *bites a pear loudly* Imma slap a Hive camera rite there. They'll film me and imma feel like I am on telly! It's almost like a gawd will be watching me!

Diffusion PVR - Remember them? Killed off when their EPG service went TITSUP*

*Terminated Instance To Supply User Programmes.

It was quite a nice lite.box too.