Coming to iPhone, iPad and Android
Most remote apps stop at buttons, while MediaPond turns the tablet on your coffee table into the hub for the house: it finds the televisions, streamers, speakers and lights it supports on your Wi-Fi, sorts them into rooms, and then works to put the thing you just picked on the right screen*, awake, on the right input and in the right app.
The gap
Universal remote apps solve the coffee table, so six remotes become one screen, and then you are still the one walking the chain: wake the television, hunt for the input, open the app, search for the thing and hope it is the right season.
MediaPond treats that chain as one decision, because the app that knows what you want to watch is also the app holding a connection to each of your currently supported devices, so discovery, the choice, and playback in the room you asked for can happen in a single motion.
The remote is table stakes; what you do with the connection is the product.
The content browser knows which services carry a title and which of them you would rather use.
That room already knows its television, its streamer, its speakers and its lights.
Screen awake, then the input, then the app, then your title, in the order those devices usually need.
What the app does
Devices belong to the room they physically live in, so one tap powers that room on, the volume buttons go to whatever is making the sound, and the remote follows what is on screen. In a house with four televisions, that is the difference between control and inventory.
Each device gets the buttons it actually supports and none of the ones it does not, so an Apple TV gets a touch trackpad with continuous swipes rather than four arrows, and there is a 3D remote deck for when you want the whole thing in your hands.
Browse shows and films with the services that carry them, tell MediaPond which service you would rather use, and tap. On supported devices it opens the title inside apps such as Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Max, Disney+, Crunchyroll or YouTube, and how far the link goes depends on what that device platform allows.
Power and input are handled in the order those devices typically need, so the television wakes, the input moves to the device that will play the title, that device comes up, and only then is the app asked to open what you picked. You watch one progress readout instead of holding three remotes.
A persistent dock carries playback state, artwork and transport controls for what is running in each room, with play, pause, seek and volume available from wherever you happen to be in the app.
LG and Sony sets tend to disappear from the network in deep standby, which is why so many remote apps fail on the first press of the evening. On supported models MediaPond wakes them with a packet aimed at the network interface the television is using.
If the soundbar is carrying the film, the room’s volume buttons should move the soundbar rather than a television panel that is muted anyway. On supported Sonos setups MediaPond aims a room’s volume at the speakers it sees playing, and shows the audio format they report receiving.
Govee lights over Matter need no Govee account, and whatever you already run in Google Home or Home Assistant can come across too. The lamp sits beside the play button, so dimming the room becomes part of starting something rather than a second app in the dark.
Best on a tablet
MediaPond runs on iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets, and it is designed for the tablet, the one that lives on the coffee table or clips to the wall and never goes back in a drawer.
On that screen the whole room fits at once, with the devices down one side, what is playing along the bottom, and what you are choosing in the middle, so there is very little to drill into. It behaves like the panel in a good hotel suite: everything the room can do, on one surface, legible in the dark.
On a phone the same controls stack into a single column and come with you to the kitchen.
Supported today
Each one is driven over your local network in its own language, which is why supported models can switch a named input, open a specific episode, and report what is playing rather than only pushing arrow keys.
The things that put a picture on the wall, driven over your own Wi-Fi.
The rest of the room, controlled from the same screen as the film.
Where the media, and the rest of your house, come from.
Pricing
There is no trial countdown and no feature that quietly stops working after two weeks, because the free tier is meant to be a real product paid for by advertising. Premium is for houses with more than one screen in them, and it removes the ads.
$0 forever
$3.99 a month or $34.99 a year
No account is required either way. The free tier carries advertising because free accounts still use server bandwidth for content discovery and metadata, and a subscription is how you switch that off. This website itself sets no cookies and runs no trackers. What that means in practice.
Not every device or streaming app supports direct launching. MediaPond makes a good-faith, best-effort attempt to open content in the right app, and falls back to opening the app itself where a direct link is not available. Availability varies by device, app, region, and your subscriptions.
Not in the stores yet
One email on the day MediaPond arrives on the App Store and Google Play, and nothing else after it: no list, no drip sequence, no product newsletter.