As we spend time with family and friends this holiday season, one of our favorite rituals is gathering to enjoy our favorite holiday films. Watching together is a shared experience and with Control Center our goal is to make it easy for the whole family to get the most out of the biggest shared screen in the home.

Today, we’re excited to introduce another way to get even more value from your TV: We’ve integrated IFTTT into Control Center, our home theater hub and universal remote, so you can receive alerts on your TV screen for upcoming appointments, important emails, security alerts and more. Using IFTTT, you can create a connected ecosystem for smart home products on your TV using Control Center as a hub.

IFTTT is a free service that allows you to turn on countless connections between digital devices and services with simple conditional statements, called Applets. You can create customized Applets for services and devices you use and own including: August Smart Locks, Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, Nest, and Ring among others.

To get you started we’ve published a few example Applets, including:

• Pizza Cam: Set a trigger with your Ring or Nest door camera so when the pizza arrives your TV notifies you.
• Boss Alert: Set a push notification to your TV screen to get notified when someone with a particular email address sends you a message.
• Event Reminder:  Send a reminder to your TV for whatever your next upcoming Google calendar event is.
• What’s the Score?: Set your TV to tune to ESPN the minute August unlocks your door so you don’t miss a minute of the game,
• Security Alerts: If the movie your watching isn’t scary enough...get a trigger whenever your Arlo security camera detects activity.
• Dim the Lights:  Ready to watch your favorite movie? Simply tell Control Center to “dim the lights,” and your Philips Hue lighting will respond.
• TV Time: Receive a notification on your mobile device when the TV is turned on, ideal for monitoring TV time for younger children.

We look forward to seeing all the creative ways you use Control Center to bring your TV into your smart home setup!