At last week’s CES 2017 in Las Vegas, Comcast further revealed its commitment to dive even deeper into services that provide smart home monitoring, control, and connectivity services to residential subscribers, which included the first Xfinity Home booth at the show. (For more about the overall smart home outlook for 2017, including several opinions from various analysts, read the CED article here.)
“In my mind, there’s a difference between a connected home and a smart home,” Daniel Herscovici, SVP and GM at Xfinity Home, writes in a blog about the CES display. “Consumers can connect all sorts of devices like door locks, light bulbs, video cameras, thermostats, and doorbells. But just because you put a bunch of cool devices in your home doesn’t make it smart; it just makes it connected.”
As the number of devices installed in the home grows, connection complexity obviously grows as well, Herscovici points out. “If I have 15, then it means I have 15 apps to manage, and often there is no obvious way to get them to all to work in a complementary way, in synchronicity. That’s not smart; that sounds like a headache,” he says.
Of course, that’s a pain point Xfinity Home is looking to address for subscribers with its platform to help all those devices “talk to one another.” The company also is looking to extend the ability for consumers to control their smart home products via a variety of devices including smart phones, tablets, TV interface, as well as advanced voice controls.
Herscovici also used the blog to highlight a recently redesigned portal for companies interested in partnering with Xfinity Home. He says it makes it easier to understand what the company’s partnership process is and how it tests and certify devices. More info on that is here.
Some of Xfinity Home’s current partners include Nest, Lutron, Chamberlain, and August Home. At CES, the operator also announced a new partnership with Zen Ecosystems, which makes a connected thermostat. That’s reportedly a key element in Xfinity Home’s relaunched green energy program that’s slated to roll out some time in the spring. The company also recently announced a new partnership with General Electric and Sengled for lighting control.
Herscovici’s full blog is here.
