Parks Points

The natural progression in the smart home goes from one device providing singular value to many working in concert to deliver a host of benefits. While individual products are driving innovation and energy efficiency, the greatest value comes when multiple devices are controlled in coordination to maximize energy savings. The ideal smart home experience is one in which a broad range of smart home devices work seamlessly together, providing convenience to the user and enhanced value for all ...read more

Parks Associates estimates the U.S. will have 169 million actively connected cars, or 56% of all light vehicles, by 2022. Meanwhile, nearly one-quarter of U.S. broadband households own at least one smart home device and the average number of devices owned per household continues to increase each year.

New connected car features offer innovative safety, comfort, and entertainment experiences, including crossover opportunities for the smart home. For example, with a smart home and ...read more

During the opening day of the 2019 Google I/O event, Google’s annual developer conference, the tech giant announced that its ”Home” product line is being rebranded under its new Google Nest banner alongside its Nest product line. The Home products include smart speakers, streaming media devices, and Wifi routers. This announcement begs the question: has Google finally found a home for Nest? As the uneven relationship between Google and Nest illustrates, the answer is anything but ...read more

Twenty-eight percent of US broadband households own a home security system, which is in line with numbers reported over the past five years, when the adoption rate has stayed between 26% and 28%. The majority of these households have professional monitoring, and the share of professionally monitored households has increased by 9% since 2016.

Professional installation continues to be the dominant choice for home security systems, but self-installation experienced strong growth in 2017 and ...read more

Last weekend, the New York Times reported that Apple removed or restricted 11 of the 17 most downloaded apps that help consumers manage the time they spend on devices (screen-time tracking apps) and apps that provide parental control. The removal of these apps comes on the heels of the launch of Apple’s new Screen Time feature, which the company launched as part of iOS 12. Apple’s Screen Time feature has functions similar to the apps that the company removed or restricted from the App ...read more

Consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about the hacking of their devices and data as they hear about more data breaches and have their own experiences with issues such as ransomware, identity theft and botnet attacks.

Concerns about data security also have been shown to increase with ownership of more connected devices. Currently, U.S. broadband households own an average of 10.4 connected devices -- including entertainment, smart home, smart speaker and connected health

Self-installed security solutions have the potential to significantly lower the cost of security, create new monitoring use cases, and, in doing so, expand the market beyond the traditional 20-25% of US households that have professionally monitored security.

Parks Associates estimates, conservatively, that DIY security systems and no-contract, hybrid monitoring solutions enabled by DIY security will expand professional monitoring services to an additional 5% of US households.

DIY and ...read more

As technology moves forward, energy efficiency and “green” solutions—particularly in the residential space—continue to gain prominence. As of Q4 2018, about 25% of US broadband households own at least one smart home device, with smart thermostats leading the way and smart lighting solutions close behind. Still, overall adoption rates for individual energy management device categories remain at 10%, and product manufacturers struggle to push their products beyond high-income ...read more

While overall subscription growth of OTT services was relatively modest between 2017 and 2018, households subscribed to multiple services at higher rates. The segment of households subscribing to three or more services rose 29% between 2017 and 2018, and it increased by 267% since 2014.

This signals that more households are finding value in subscribing to multiple OTT services, even as overall adoption of OTT shows slowing growth. While there is undoubtedly a ceiling to how many services ...read more