Untapped Opportunity in Giving Consumers Smart Home Ecosystem Choices, Parks Says

Deploying open smart home solutions that give consumers a degree of control over their ecosystem choices offers a competitive opportunity for hardware, software and service players if consumers know where to find smart home devices, said Parks Associates CEO Tricia Parks in a news release Tuesday. “Consumers want a group of products that work together,” but they have few choices today beyond a service provider or home control platform, Parks said. Citing a Q2 Parks Associates survey of 10,000 broadband households, Parks said nearly two-thirds of U.S. broadband households are unfamiliar with smart home products or services. Seven in 10 of respondents didn’t know where to buy smart home products, while 20 percent expected to buy one or more smart home devices in the next 12 months, Parks Associates said. Today, consumers largely make only “only one choice -- the service provider,” which controls almost every aspect of the available offerings, said Parks. Only Google has had the market strength to build a partner network of smart home products that work together without a central controller or platform, but many different models are emerging, Parks said. Market adoption is poised to grow as sales channels expand, services are subsidized and partnerships emerge outside the traditional CE hardware and services area, she said. The survey said 13 percent of U.S. broadband households own at least one smart home device; roughly half of consumers who own a smart home device are under 35 years old; and 60 percent of smart home device owners with more than one device find interoperability “very important.” Parks Associates predicts smart home device sales will exceed 20 million units this year and approach 36 million units by 2017.