For the mid market the price expectation fell to the point that pros are no longer interested. Consider your own occupation. Would you travel an hour one way, spend two hours and be satisfied walking out with $100 -- parts and labor? If you don't work for yourself would your company be satisfied with sending you out for three to four hours and have you bring back $100?

Also, the consumer wants to use a phone or a pad for the controller because they already have the pad or phone. This drives up the unit cost for custom remotes because the economy of scale cannot happen for the custom remote. A small production run for phones would be a few tens of millions of units. Less than that has bad economics. A wildly popular custom remote might sell a few tens of thousands. This scale of production is not enough to drive the price as low as the consumer wants.