I am a developer and programmer and set up custom Home Theaters for friends and clients. I use a PC as the heart of a Crestron like control system, and communicate with it using a ProntoPro via IR. The PC has a dedicated IR receiver setup with full decoding to device/key on a serial port, and can emit IR and or RS232 commands to the components. The PC sits on the house LAN and only wants to know which button on the Pronto was pressed. All macro work and logic is in the PC.

I would like to have the ability for the iPronto to put out on a button press a UDP command where you specify the IP address of the PC on lets say the Properties page of the device, and associate with the button some textual sequence like xx,yy where xx is a device code and yy is a key code (which is what is sent via IR/RF in binary). UDP would be at leat as good as IR, no response required, and we could use the Broadcast IP address to speak to all PC's that are listening on the LAN. I would develop a PC active-X control, and even integrate it into a plugin for use with several home automation systems (eg Homeseer). I would put that in the public domain.

How about it Philips. Be like TiVo and let your user community enhance the products capabilities with a little help from you.