LiftMaster has spent more than 50 years making the garage door opener harder to fool
Founded in 1967 and sold through professional dealers, LiftMaster kept adding protections to the garage door opener, from rolling remote codes to a camera that watches the garage.
Oak Brook, IL
In the 1986 film, Ferris Bueller plays hooky from high school and steals his friend Cameron Frye’s father’s prized Ferrari. In a 2020 commercial, LiftMaster brought back Alan Ruck, the actor who played Cameron, and reworked the scene. In the new version, Adweek reported, a garage door opener with a built-in surveillance camera keeps the teenagers from borrowing the car in the first place.
The original movie came from another era of home technology. Back in the 1980s, Kathryn Lundstrom wrote in Adweek, the idea of “smart” homes, phones and garages “might’ve sounded a little far fetched.”
By the time Ruck stepped back into the role, LiftMaster had been reworking the garage door opener for more than 50 years. The brand was established in 1967. It sells through dealers and calls itself the number one brand of professionally installed garage door openers. Its history reads as a series of engineering answers to questions homeowners have about a door they use every day: who else can open it, what happens when the power goes out, whether it got closed, and what is going on inside while they are away.
LiftMaster belongs to Chamberlain Group, which in 2017 described itself as the corporate parent of four brands: LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin and Grifco. The group designs and engineers residential garage door openers, commercial door operators and gate entry systems. LiftMaster’s own products cover homes and commercial properties, gates as well as doors.
When the brand turned 50 in 2017, its anniversary announcement credited it with more than 30 key industry breakthroughs over those five decades. Bob Markwart, the chief operating officer at the time, used the occasion to thank the dealers.
“We’re excited to celebrate 50 years of LiftMaster,” Markwart said in remarks published by the Door Industry Journal in 2017. “We’re proud of our innovations and the leadership we’ve provided to the industry, and we are indebted to our dealers.”
The dealers run through the company’s account of itself. In that same anniversary history, LiftMaster presented its new features partly as a way to give dealers distinctive products that set them apart from competitors. The openers are built to be sold and installed by professionals, and the brand’s milestones are described with that relationship in mind.
One of the oldest worries about any opener is the remote. An opener responds to a signal, and a thief who copies that signal can try to replay it. The industry calls this code grabbing. LiftMaster was the first manufacturer to develop rolling code technology, designed to all but eliminate it.
Another worry is the power supply. An electric opener stops working when the electricity does, and that can leave a family outside its own house. LiftMaster was also the first manufacturer to offer battery backup, so homeowners could still get in during an outage.
Neither feature drew much attention compared with what came next. LiftMaster developed myQ, a technology that connects an opener to a smartphone or another internet-connected device. With a free app, an owner can check on and operate a garage door opener or gate operator from anywhere. In 2016, the brand introduced the 8550W DC Elite Series, its first Wi-Fi residential garage door opener. By 2017, the company said, myQ had led to partnerships with Apple, Nest and other technology companies, which built garage access into their own platforms.
Once the opener was online, the garage became something a person could check from across town. Jeff Meredith, who was president and chief operating officer of Chamberlain Group in 2020, described the appeal in household terms.
“Having peace of mind that your child arrived home from school, you remembered to close the garage door when you left the home, or the package was securely delivered, helps us to move through our busy days without distractions,” Meredith told Pro Builder in 2020.
The package line pointed to a new job for the garage. LiftMaster’s smart openers worked with Key by Amazon In-Garage Delivery, which gave Amazon Prime members a secure place inside the garage for their deliveries. Owners could watch a delivery happen in real time through the Key app or the myQ app and confirm that the garage entry door stayed secure.
Adding a camera followed. In 2020, LiftMaster introduced the 85503, which the company said was the first garage door opener with a built-in wide-angle, high-definition camera. It streamed live 1080p video, could be rotated by hand through 360 degrees, and had motion detection and night vision. The unit also carried a battery backup and Wi-Fi, and it added two-way audio with an adjustable microphone, so an owner could hear what was happening in the garage and talk back.
“By expanding our myQ ecosystem with smart cameras, we enable users to see family members return home and the Amazon delivery driver drop a package in the garage,” Meredith told Pro Builder.
The company did not limit the camera to new openers. Homeowners who already had a myQ-connected opener could add a separate Smart Garage Camera, an aftermarket unit with a magnetic mounting base and Bluetooth setup. It offered a live feed of the garage, motion detection and automatic recording whenever motion was detected.
By 2022, LiftMaster was selling openers with built-in cameras and myQ under the Secure View name, the same name as the opener in the Ruck commercial. That year it added the Secure View 84505R, with the same streaming video, recorded events, motion detection and two-way communication as the earlier Secure View 87504-267, at a mid-tier price aimed at homeowners who put a high priority on the security of their homes.
The rolling code that once guarded the signal still sits behind those features, and the battery backup still keeps the door working when the lights go out. In the 1986 film, the teenagers drive off in the Ferrari. In LiftMaster’s 2020 version, the camera on the garage ceiling gets there first, and the car never leaves.