You missing theoint of the “real” smart home what would be an automated solution based on environment and not a fancy remote controller to your lights.

Human presence sensors combo with light sensors, and you never have to think about turning lights on or off, and leave the voice assistant for overrides. Temperature sensor aligned with your callendar and weather data make your home warm or cool before you arrive and save on your heating without adjusting.

I suspect the average smart home is not based on home assistant, but on an ikea hub with their app, or similar.

If you are willing to selfhost a home assistant, then it is not a barrier to add various antennas to it.

So this step to standardization might help mixing different manufacturer products easier. We will see how standard their implementations will be. We had zigbee as shared standard in theory what only worked properly with the manufacturers hub.

I agree, streaming on local network should be free, what is.

I had other reasons too, so a while back I tried other self hosted solutions and I got back to Plex, it is more polished and a cleaner user experience. I’m happy to pay for a well written software as long as it is reasonable and not too greedy.

I was curious, whats the purpose of it? The vps host should have some redundancy in case of hardware failure. Is it for user error if I accidentally delete my server?