Unfortunately, the CEC spec leaves many features optional, leading to inconsistent and thus unreliable operation. The user interface is also horrendous as most device manufacturers treat it as an afterthought bolted onto an already poor user interface.

This has implications for the smart grid, whether inside the house or across the grid. The limitation is not in device capabilities or standards – all HDMI 1.3 devices include CEC, which means all AV devices currently sold. This is better than any smart grid standardization we can expect to get in the short to medium term.

AV devices also fall in a limited number of types that have mostly standardized functionality. That said, most TVs don’t know what an AppleTV is and you have to pretend it’s a cable box when labelling the input. That’s simply because of a failure of imagination on the TV manufacturer’s part – the only devices you could hook up to a TV are a cable box, satellite box, VCR or DVD player, right? If they paid attention to the fact new devices like the Wii, AppleTV, camcorder or what not could appear, they would have made the label programmable with arbitrary text labels.

The input labels on my Toshiba are not just an aesthetic problem, but a usability one – I constantly have to explain to my wife she has to select “Cable/Satellite” as the input for the AppleTV (when I remember myself). And this is just for labels, imagine how much worse it gets for more complex control and coordination problems.

To provide anything like the vision you describe, you need smart software to make up for the shortcomings of the devices, self-describing devices and scriptable interfaces. It’s unrealistic to expect the user to script his or her home entertainment network, we need an entirely new UI paradigm, e.g programming by example. I also had a Harmony and returned it because of the state synchronization problem you described. Logitech has put in much effort in dealing with the mess, but the problem is intractable in its current form. There is little hope that simply mandating smart grid management standards will achieve the desired results without other breakthroughs.