How a Personal Challenge Became a Connected Home Invention

Kyle Cox was in a wheelchair when he tried to plug an Xbox into a wall-mounted television. His satellite service was out. The console needed to reach a screen he could not easily reach himself. The workaround took longer than the game would have. "I just thought that there has to be an easier way to do this," Cox says. "One box. Everything plugs into it. Nothing else in the house."

That moment led to Kut A Cord Entertainment and to a device Cox calls the KACE SmartHub. The SmartHub and its accessories are patent pending domestically and internationally, according to the company. The product is designed to connect the services and devices in a home and distribute them wirelessly to every screen.

Cox had been building toward this long before the wheelchair. He grew up partly in Dubai, where he taught himself about computers. In seventh grade, he took taxis to the markets where computers were sold and talked to the vendors. He sold video game accounts online as a teenager and used the money to build his own custom PCs. His father is an engineer and an inventor. Cox trained as a chemist.

The KACE SmartHub takes fiber, coax, HDMI, USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth inputs and routes them to any connected television or device in the home. A game can be paused in one room and resumed in another. Content can be recorded. Legacy remotes and controllers reach their parent devices through an infrared converter with WiFi and Bluetooth boosters, so an older controller still works.

The accessibility problem was the starting point. It was not the ceiling. Cox describes the same device serving families who want to move a game from the living room to a bedroom, remote workers who want a larger screen for meetings, students who need to watch a class on something bigger than a laptop, and patients who would rather take a telemedicine call on a television than a phone.

"The original problem was mine," Cox says. "But once you build something that removes a step, you start seeing all the other places that step exists."

Families are the audience Cox returns to most often. He points to equipment rental fees that households pay month after month. As per the company website, equipment fees are not permitted under the Federal Television Viewer Protection Act if the customer owns the equipment. The SmartHub is designed to be owned rather than rented.

Cox says the fee structure is the part of the problem most households never see. Cox estimates the savings at $420 per year for a typical household. The company frames that figure as a direct consequence of the law and of owning the device.

The business is at an early stage. The company is working through prototype development, manufacturing partners, and software. A website rebuild is in progress. An advertising campaign is planned for January, alongside a planned crowdfunding launch.

Cox says the experience of building the product has reinforced a lesson he learned long before he started it. Hard periods, he says, teach you what you are capable of if you stay calm and keep working on the problem.

The problem he is working now began with a television he could not reach. It has now become a device intended to reach every screen in a house.