Your house runs on a box you own.

There is no service to sign up for. The box is the whole thing. I flash a small computer, it joins your network, and from that moment it holds your library, runs your scenes, and serves a control app to every phone, tablet and screen in the house.

It keeps working when your internet goes down, because none of it depended on the internet in the first place. You own the hardware and you own the library, and what happens in the house stays on the box. I do not hold any of it, and neither does anyone else.

Open a browser on any device in the house and you get a poster wall of everything you own. Search it, walk it by genre, or hand it to whoever's watching — each person in the house gets their own profile.

The parental filter is a genre and rating filter, and it is enforced on the server — not in the app on the child's tablet. A blocked title never reaches a kid's device at all. There is nothing to bypass, because the device is never sent the thing in the first place.

Watch it in the browser, or cast it straight to the television. If the set is asleep, HEARTH wakes it over the network first, then pushes the movie to it. You pick the movie on your phone and the right screen comes on holding it.

The house is described as rooms, devices and scenes. A modern smart TV is controlled over its own network protocol — power, volume, input, and launching the apps on the set itself. Not a blind infrared guess at a television that is already on the network.

Sources and displays are wired together in a signal-routing patchbay you drag with your thumb on a phone. Send this input to that screen, save it, and it is a scene. Then one tap runs it.

Open HEARTH on a phone and add it to the home screen. That is the install. There is no app store, no account, and nothing to approve — it is your own server handing your own phone a remote control.

Hand it to a guest and they can run the room without being taught anything.