What a turn-on!

By MARTHA McKAY
STAFF WRITER

When I watch TV with my husband, he controls the remote.

I don't always enjoy this arrangement, but marriage is nothing if not compromise. Besides, somewhere in the DNA of most American males is a remote-control gene that the poor fellas are helpless to fight against.

Still, he was unimpressed when I brought home the Miracle Remote the other day.

I, however, thought it was pretty handy.

It's rare these days for a company to use technology to create something straightforward and easy to use. More often, they pack advanced features into their gadgets, hoping to make them stand out in the overcrowded and hyper-competitive consumer electronics market.

Not so with the remote control experts at Ridgefield-based Miracle Remote LLC. With 30-plus years of experience making and selling remote controls – and listening to consumers -- the team of engineers decided the market needed something simple.

The Miracle Remote will operate your TV if you lose or break your remote control, or even if you just want another one. The point is, there are no codes to enter and no programming instructions. You just slip in two AA batteries and, as the company says on the box, "It just works."

And the Miracle Remote isn't aiming to operate all your entertainment devices -- just the TV.

It promises to operate almost every function on every set made since 1988 by seven manufacturers: Sony, Toshiba, Sharp, JVC, Mitsubishi, Hitachi and Samsung. It also has a model that works on Emerson, Symphonic and Sylvania TVs made since 1998, which have something called a game input button. By the end of this year, the company plans to have a Miracle Remote model for every major brand of TV commonly sold in the United States.

Full disclosure: In our home, we've never lost or damaged our TV remotes.

But Ken Gassman, general manager at Miracle Remote, assures me that other families are different.

"They lose the remote; they break the remote; the dog ate the remote," he said.

Because I've never lost a TV remote, I was blissfully unaware of the difficulty finding a replacement. Most consumers turn to universal remotes, designed to operate several electronic devices, which require you to enter codes with the correct frequency for the TV, DVD, etc. This isn't particularly onerous, although when some people (my older relatives come to mind) hear the sentence "You have to program in codes," their eyes widen with fear.

Even worse, Gassman said, most universal remotes can't do everything your original remote control could do. For instance, he says the Miracle Remote is the only replacement remote that can operate advanced TV features such as picture in a picture (PIP), split screen or picture size. Gassman said the idea of the Miracle Remote grew from customers who kept saying they wanted a remote that would operate just like the one that came with their TV, without having to read instructions or enter codes.

Developing the Miracle Remote was no easy task. It took more than a year, with about 40 people working full time. Much of the time involved testing. Sometimes, company engineers would do the testing in a TV lab designed for the purpose. And sometimes they'd just go to a nearby electronics store with their prototypes, stand in front of a bank of TVs and press the little buttons to put the remotes through their paces.

There was a lot of trial and error as the team figured out how to design a gadget that could operate scores of functions on hundreds of television sets.

The company -- which calls itself the largest reseller of original equipment manufacturer remotes in the U.S. market, and whose electronics business supplies remotes to the hospital and hotel industry -- introduced the Miracle Remote in January and is working to get it into stores. So far, the product is available only on Target.com and in 6th Avenue Electronics stores.

Miracle Remote is targeting a growing market. The Consumer Electronics Association estimates that over the last nine years, 700 million so-called universal remotes were sold in the United States.

If you want to buy a high-end universal remote, they are available. But if you want to save time and buy something really simple that works right out of the box, then the Miracle Remote is your gadget.

I tested the Miracle Remote Sony model on our two older Sony TVs, and it worked fine on both.

Just don't expect it to end those gender-based remote control battles.

My husband held the Miracle Remote and began to increase the TV volume.

"I call it entertainment customization," he said.

I call it hogging the controller. And I get the last word.

Spotlight on Technology appears Thursdays in The Record. E-mail: mckay@northjersey.com

Business Hopes To Click With Losers Of TV Remotes

Miracle Remote Inc. of Tampa offers replacement remotes geared to specific television brands for $29.00. The remotes require no programming or codes.
CANDACE C. MUNDY / Tribune



By B.C. MANION bmanion@tampatrib.com
Published: Apr 15, 2006

TAMPA - It used to be if you lost or broke your television's remote control, you had two choices: Replace it with the same model, or get a universal.
Now there's another option.
Miracle Remote Inc., a Tampa company, has partnered with Dynatron, a manufacturer of remote controls, to offer a simple alternative.
"You just put in the batteries, and it works," says Michael Monsky, president of Miracle Remote.
Each of the eight models is geared to specific brands so no programming or code numbers are required.
"A universal remote comes with codes and instructions. You have to find your kind of TV. And then sometimes the TV, like Sylvania, will have eight different codes, and you might have to try them all," Monsky says.
Miracle Remotes are designed to operate the key features on all of the televisions produced by each particular brand since 1988, Monsky says. The eight models cover about 85 percent of TV sets manufactured in the past 15 years, he says.
They're also designed to work the same way as the original, Monsky says. If you knew how to turn a game on or off, open the parental lock, change the picture size, program favorite channels or adjust your picture on your original remote, you'll know how to do it on these remotes, says Dan Ruback, vice president of sales for the company.
Many functions on televisions won't work if you don't have the original remote, Monsky says.
"Mitsubishi has a parental lock. If that somehow gets locked up on your TV, if you don't have the remote control, you can throw the TV in the garbage," Monsky says.
If you have an older Sony, but not its remote, you can't get past Channel 13, Ruback says.
Besides addressing those issues, Miracle Remotes are easier to use than others because they have fewer - and larger - buttons.
Monsky and Ruback, who are first cousins, are confident their remotes will do what customers want.
They began selling remotes about 20 years ago as part of an electronics repair business they ran in New Jersey.
Eventually, they got out of the repair business, moved to Florida and set up a Web site to sell remotes. They still sell thousands of original remotes, and they have developed remotes that are used in hotels.
The remotes were unveiled in January at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Monsky and Ruback say they have used the customer input given over the years to decide which functions to include on Miracle Remotes.
"Over and over and over, we hear the exact same reason they need an original remote," Monsky says. "The PIP [picture in picture] doesn't work. The input doesn't work."
The remotes, which sell for $29.99, are available at MiracleRemote.com or Target.com. They are scheduled to be in Target stores in the fall.
Negotiations with Best Buy and Circuit City are under way.