Facecam:
Well, the reason Logitech spent 29 million dollars acquiring that company and the reason I'm making this video is that this is not just a remote. It's basically a microcomputer in the shape of a remote.
To understand why this is huge, we need to talk about how remote controls work. In order to make this simple, I'm gonna talk about how TVs do this, but it works exactly the same for everything that can be controlled using infrared, like
Make some graphics for this, old VHS documentary style:
Almost every TV on the market comes with a small infrared sensor on the front.
So when you press a button on your TV remote, your remote is actually working as a very very small flashlight and it is turning this infrared light off and on very very fast with a slightly different pattern for every button on the remote.
So when you press a button your TV can see this light turning off and down super quickly and knows what every button so every light pattern means.
Essentially your TV remote is giving orders to your TV using this specific hard-coded light signals. Now that you understand this, it's very easy to understand how universal remotes work. Your TV doesn't care what remote is sending the signal.
And the way universal remotes work is simply by not only including the flashlight part, but also the sensor one.
By using that sensor, they can see what pattern your TV remote is sending for every button and just memorize it and send it back to your TV, which is just looking for light patterns and doesn't care where they come from.