TechNewsWorld

The Sonos Sound Platform allows the company not only to better serve its installed base, but also broaden its product portfolio, making its brand more attractive to high-end customers, said Brad Russell, audio analyst at Dallas-based Parks Assocates, a market research and consulting company specializing in consumer technology products.

From the article "Sonos Welcomes Devs With Open APIs" by John P. Mello, Jr. 

"Over the past 18 months and longer we've seen a renaissance in live content, and a lot of that content is moving online with consumer habits," said Brett Sappington, senior director of research at Parks Associates.

"It isn't just traditional broadcasting but is Facebook Live and Periscope, and now Twitch is live-streaming content," he told TechNewsWorld.

"Amazon is getting rights to cover sports, which a few years ago would have been unthinkable -- so this just shows ho ...read more

However, access for consumers likely is years away, according to Brett L. Sappington, senior director of research at Parks Associates, a market research and consulting company in Addison, Texas.

"This technology is primarily focused on professional graphics use rather than the consumer market," he told TechNewsWorld.

"It could have application in VR, particularly for business use cases. However, it is not likely to be a consumer product for several years," Sappington sai ...read more

Another reason e-sports has strong growth potential is that, unlike many other sports, whose fans may only be spectators, e-sports attracts video gamers, many of whom could become e-sports competitors themselves.

"Today, 62 percent of U.S. consumers in broadband households play video games at least one hour per week, and 10 percent of consumers in broadband households watch e-sports," said Hunter Sappington, research analyst at Parks Associates.

From the article "E-Sport ...read more

The addition of multiroom functionality for the HomePod advances Apple's strategy for the product, said Dina Abdelrazik, research analyst at Parks Associates.

"Its market entry approach was to introduce the HomePod as a high-quality speaker positioned for a whole home audio experience," she told TechNewsWorld. "Multiroom audio with the ability for multiple HomePods to work off of one another to create an immersive audio experience is a natural step for Apple."

From the a ...read more

Robot vacuum cleaners represent a thin market sliver, according to Parks Associates. They can be found in just 5-6 percent of broadband households.

"It's not a breakout product, but it's far and ahead the most commonly adopted robotic assistant," Parks Research Analyst Dina Abdelrazik told TechNewsWorld.

However, at 11-12 percent, the number of broadband households that owned both a robot cleaner and a smart speaker was slightly higher than the number that owned a robot ...read more

Amazon's servers were down for a large part of the morning on the day the outage occurred, taking Alexa-powered devices out of commission. Incidents like this may occur more often as the popularity of smart home devices grows.

Overall, 75 percent of security device sales include at least one smart home device, according to Parks Associates.

Smart speaker shipments totaled 32 million units in 2017, 300 percent up year over year, Strategy Analytics found. Google and Amazon ...read more

Security has been a growing concern with the increased use of smart television and video streaming devices, observed Brett Sappington, director of research at Parks Associates.

"For many years, there was no reason to hack a television or a smart streaming media player," he told TechNewsWorld.

It was only with the advent of subscription-based video services and transactional video that you started to see financial data, like credit card numbers, get stored online, Sapping ...read more