After years and years of chatter about the promises of supplying smart home services to broadband subscribers, interest in the technology looks like it now could be quickly expanding into the zeitgeist. Comcast is helping to lead the charge in the connected home space via its Xfinity Home options, and research continues to indicate that it’s a very viable market for monetization by other service providers as well.
Parks Associates revealed new research this week based on a Q4 2016 nationwide survey that suggests 26 percent of U.S. broadband households now own a smart home device, which is up from 19 percent at the end of 2015.
“In the last two years, smart home device ownership has more than doubled, and we estimate companies will sell almost 55 million smart home devices in 2020,” Parks Associates Stuart Sikes predicts. “With adoption now over one-fourth of all U.S. broadband households, smart home companies are focused on expanding their product footprint, offering new value propositions to consumers, and creating new opportunities to monetize their IoT platforms.”
Security is often referenced as a gateway application that tends to first catch the fancy of homeowners, but are there are there other killer apps that will bubble to the surface in 2017?
“There’s not likely to be any silver bullet for the connected consumer market driving the smart home market in the next year but rather the gradual refinement and awareness of value propositions that really matter to mass-market consumers (e.g., security, savings, convenience) along with the support, marketing, and service infrastructure to drive mainstream adoption,” Asit Goel, SVP and GM, secure monitoring and control/Internet of Things at NXP Semiconductors, observes.
And as we’ve reported widely here at CED (including in the article here), voice control is becoming a fundamental demand for subscribers interested in smart home options. Bernd Grohmann, EVP and CTO at eQ-3 AG names it as “the biggest technology innovation impacting the connected home market.” He adds: “In terms of development of the smart home industry, we see the advent of IPv6 as the dominating device protocol forming the universal standard based on a next-generation radio technology as at least equally important.”
Subs are increasingly insisting on convenience as they interact with multiple devices across the broadband network, and that’s something Comcast for one is keeping a firm eye toward as it expands voice-controlled options. You can read more about that in articles here, here, and here.
“We need to give consumers choice to control their home in the way that’s most convenient for them in the moment – whether it’s a few taps on their mobile, using their TV remote with voice commands, or via their web browser,” Daniel Herscovici, SVP and GM, Xfinity Home at Comcast, says. “At Comcast, we added voice control to our smart home platform last summer. We suspect voice will be one of the interfaces to help drive sales and innovation in 2017 as natural language and AI move more fully into the smart home market.”
Karen Kosh, VP, Broadband and Mobility Business at OnProcess Technology, points out that as sales of connected products steadily increase, consumers will require support across multiple products. “There is an opportunity to bring sense to it all through technology, IoT-enabled analytics, and targeted managed support services that focus on fulfilling the customers’ needs without creating unnecessary effort for the customer,” she says.
A technology that’s potentially poised to transform the smart home arena is data analytics, which Isaias Sudit, founder of TROVE Predictive Science says is something that is often under the radar, specifically the potentials of predictive data analytics. “Predictive data analytics doesn’t make a smart device work, but it will have an incredible impact on how vendors get the right smart devices and systems into the hands of customers that will want them, will use them, and will pay for them,” Sudit observes.
Parks Associates offered its Connections Summit on Thursday at CES 2017 in Las Vegas, which featured more than 35 industry executives in six sessions on smart home adoption and usage. More info on that is available here. Details on the research firm’s “360 View: Residential Security & Smart Home” report are here.
